SOAR and the Status Quo

Your editorial “SOAR Is Not The Way,” Oct. 25, states:

“A crucial point is that although Measure B would become binding law if passed on Nov. 3, Measure A is merely advisory. By placing it on the ballot in that form, the members of the Ventura County Board of Supervisors asked voters to trust them to follow through and implement the measure’s provisions if it is approved.”

Remember the desalination plant advisory vote in the early 1990s? Trust them again? No way.

P.H. SCHERTZINGER, Ventura

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Your editorial asks the citizens to trust that the Ventura County Board of Supervisors will implement the nonbinding proposals in Measure A.

According to the California Department of Conservation, this same Board of Supervisors rezoned 8,259 acres of farm and grazing land for urban use in the two-year period from 1994 to 1996. Yet you expect the voters of Ventura County to continue with the status quo.

Your editorial goes on to suggest that all residents make full use of the power of the vote. This is exactly what Measure B will do. When we pass Measure B, voters will then have the opportunity to decide for themselves whether we want to lose agricultural and open-space land at the breakneck speed with which the supervisors have been converting it.

MARK BURLEY, Camarillo

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Your editorial arguments against SOAR based on the reasoning that media oversight and increased citizen participation in the planning process are enough to stop urban sprawl seem extremely naive.

As an example, we and nearby farmers and residents are fighting a proposed project to be built near our farm. Your paper wrote an editorial against this project. Yet we have faced the bureaucrats’ and developers’ usual defensive tactics that have long frustrated any citizen attempting to stop a bad development:

* Repeatedly take the item off the agenda on the night of the hearing.

* After doing that several times, put it at the end of the calendar and force the opposition to wait for hours.

Another common tactic: The public officials who said this project was “urgently” needed are now waiting until after the election when the project can be pressed through, and no matter how much criticism it may face from your paper, they all know it will be forgotten by the next election.

If, however, public officials and developers knew that projects outside the urban boundary would ultimately need the approval of the public, this would force them to pursue only worthwhile projects and to involve the public. The current process totally favors developers by excluding the public.

GAIL ROSENMUND, Oxnard

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In explaining your choice of Measure A over Measure B you cited the need for flexibility as though flexibility were an absolute virtue. We know, of course, that it’s not. Its value is relative to the circumstance.

It is precisely the excessive “flexibility” over many years of the Board of Supervisors in responding to the wishes of developers that has brought us to the present circumstance: perpetual threat to the integrity of the county General Plan, its frequent degradation and consequent urban sprawl and loss of farmland and open space.

For this reason, I favor direct voter control and the measure that provides it: Measure B.

JIM WHITNEY, Ventura