SOAR Flying High but Not Alternative

The initiative drive to curb growth on Ventura County’s farmland and open space is flying high, with volunteers spiritedly collecting John Hancocks from Thousand Oaks to Ventura.

Meanwhile, an alternative approach favored by a leading farmers’ group has yet to get off the ground.

The Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources movement officially began circulating petitions last week to place growth-control measures on the November ballot for five key cities, as well as the whole county.

In contrast, the Agriculture Policy Working Group--a broad-based committee including farmers, planners and environmentalists--will hold at least three more meetings before making its final recommendations.

And as group members acknowledge, their consensus position, which they are also hoping to place before voters this fall, is beginning to look more and more like the city SOAR initiatives.

Inspired by a measure Ventura voters approved in 1995, the initiatives would essentially turn over control of key zoning decisions to the voters, rather than politicians.

Once considered a radical grass-roots campaign by many elected leaders, SOAR has moved into the mainstream in recent months, gathering endorsements from such establishment figures as U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) and Supervisors Frank Schillo and John K. Flynn.

In perhaps the greatest example of SOAR’s growing power, the group persuaded elected leaders in Oxnard--the county’s largest city and the one with the worst history of paving over farmland--to tentatively agree to place a measure directly on the city ballot, so SOAR would not need to gather signatures there.

SOAR also persuaded the Camarillo City Council to consider giving the group a break by adopting its Camarillo measure into law when SOAR gathers enough signatures to place it on the ballot, thereby avoiding a potentially costly election campaign.

The more savvy elected officials can see which way the political winds are blowing, argued Steve Bennett, the former Ventura councilman who leads SOAR with former Ventura Mayor Richard Francis.

“Politicians don’t wait around for the final proof to come in,” Bennett said. “Ventura voters supported it overwhelmingly in spite of a costly, nasty opposition campaign that spent more than $300,000. So there is some reason to think it will pass everywhere else.”

But Rex Laird of the Ventura County Farm Bureau, which recently unveiled its own less-restrictive plan to give voters zoning power, contends the recent success of SOAR has more to do with “back-room deals” the group has had with cities.

Alternative Proposal Raised by Farm Group

Approval from the Camarillo council, Laird said, came only after SOAR leaders agreed to set the ban on rezoning agricultural land at 20 years, instead of 30. And in Oxnard, SOAR allowed council members to exempt some prime land from development restrictions.

The Farm Bureau, instead, has developed an alternative proposal that has become the backbone of the Agriculture Policy Working Group’s efforts.

“Whether they [cities] want to listen to their constituents, or make back-room deals with lobbying groups, is up to them,” Laird said. “We have been involved in a very inclusive process from the start. SOAR has been involved in a very exclusive process.”

Like the Ventura SOAR measure, which has survived legal challenges right up to the U.S. Supreme Court, the countywide SOAR initiative would require a public vote for rezoning farmland and open space.

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In other words, a landowner in an unincorporated part of the county who wanted to convert agriculturally zoned property into a housing tract would need majority approval from county voters to do so.

By contrast, the city SOAR measures being proposed for Oxnard, Camarillo, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark and Simi Valley are far less restrictive. They seek to place an urban development boundary around each city that could only be altered by that city’s voters. But farmland within city limits would have no special protection.

The so-called urban boundary lines have been used to prevent sprawl in several communities in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.

Now many in Ventura County want the boundaries adopted here.

In a dramatic about-face, the Farm Bureau, which had vigorously opposed “ballot-box zoning,” on March 20 presented the Agriculture Policy Working Group with a plan to do just that.

Urban Growth Limits Key to Bureau Plan

At the heart of the Farm Bureau’s plan--which also promotes a “new land-use ethic” of denser development within cities and includes provisions to stop placing government buildings in farmland--voters would approve a series of urban growth boundaries that only they could change.

Like SOAR, these boundaries would preferably be put in place through a vote of the people during the fall election after the parameters were set by cities, the county and the Local Agency Formation Commission, the panel that oversees the expansion of city borders.

To change the boundaries, cities would have to present the public with a “report card” on remaining vacant land within city limits, how the city has balanced affordable and upscale housing, how it has made the most of opportunities to develop within city limits, and the economic effect the amendment would have. The public would then vote based on that information.

Unlike the SOAR initiatives, which last until 2020, the boundaries would only be in place for 10 years. And unlike SOAR, all cities would have to agree to limit their own borders for the plan to become reality.

“Could it happen by November? Yes,” said Supervisor Kathy Long, the founder of the Agriculture Policy Working Group. “But it will take some work. I think it’s good to present people with options.”

Laird of the Farm Bureau believes the proposal is much more reasonable than SOAR because it still manages to preserve the current land-use process while placing the ultimate decision-making power in the hands of voters.

“I don’t think the issue is how to preserve farmland,” Laird said. “I think the real issue is, what is the best way to do that? How do you make that fair and manageable to everyone in government and the private sector, and still handle the public’s concerns?”

Ethical Concern Raised Over Excluding Public

Like Laird, Long also believes the way the Agriculture Policy Working Group has gone about formulating its plan is far more open than SOAR. He contends SOAR’s practice of sitting down with cities and making concessions on where to draw the urban boundary lines for its city initiatives is ethically questionable, since residents are not part of the process.

“The SOAR people say they are not brokering, but if a developer went in there and tried to discuss boundary lines, there would be an outrage,” Long said. “What concerns me is that this is a group promoting the argument that elected officials and the process can no longer be trusted, but they are quite willing to engage in the process when it benefits them.”

Bennett said he sees no ethical dilemma resulting from working with city officials to determine the boundaries.

“It is a compromise,” Bennett said. “We’ve been willing to try and craft with them an initiative that meets our objectives and still allows them some room to dictate the boundaries.”

Several city officials said the meetings were beneficial in ensuring the SOAR initiatives will be workable if they passed in their city, but represented nothing more than that.

“We talked with them and tweaked here and there, so if they gather the signatures and it does pass, it will not be harmful to the city,” Simi Valley Councilman Paul Miller said.

“The dialogue was extremely important, because they were able to sit down with staff and discuss the impact of this on the city,” Oxnard Councilman Tom Holden said. “But there is still the question, ‘Do we need this at all?’ And I think that’s one for the voters to decide.”

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For the initiatives to reach voters, SOAR backers still face the substantial hurdle of having to gather signatures to make the ballot.

The group needs valid signatures from 10% of the registered voters in the cities--3,432 in Camarillo, 1,580 in Moorpark, 6,014 in Simi Valley, 7,063 in Thousand Oaks and 6,145 in Oxnard--if it ends up having to collect signatures in those areas. To put the countywide initiative on the ballot, meanwhile, it needs 22,215 signatures, or 10% of county voters in the last gubernatorial election.

Moreover, time is running out to qualify for the November election, and county elections chief Bruce Bradley has told the group he needs the signatures by June 1.

Because the Agriculture Policy Working Group only needs to persuade city and county leaders to place the issue on the ballot, it has no such time constraints.

But persuading a majority of politicians in all those areas could be one hard sell.

“I can’t speak for the council, but I don’t think we would put anything on the ballot like that,” Simi Valley’s Miller said. “I don’t feel comfortable doing that.”