SOAR Is Not the Way

It makes great bumper stickers: Save the farms. Stop sprawl. Stick it to developers.

It sounds so simple--and that’s precisely our problem with the SOAR initiatives: Balancing Ventura County residents’ unanimous desire to preserve our green vistas against the need to be fair, flexible and responsive to future needs for jobs and housing is anything but simple.

And so although The Times applauds the campaign that has put limiting urban sprawl at the top of the county’s priority list, we believe the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources initiatives are not the best way to achieve that commendable goal.

We recommend a no vote on countywide Measure B and on its related local measures C in Camarillo, K in Oxnard, M and N in Santa Paula, O in Simi Valley and P in Thousand Oaks.

Instead, The Times endorses a yes vote on countywide Measure A as a sound and responsible first step toward reaffirming and reinforcing the land-use policies that--overall--have worked well here for a century.

In our view, the fundamental issue is whether one has greater faith in the traditional American system of representative democracy or in the ballot initiative process. Without question, there is a need to strengthen our representative system through campaign-finance reform and through greater public participation and scrutiny of elected officials. Yet we believe it is far better to reinvigorate the process by actively participating as concerned and informed citizens than to take a step toward circumventing it.

SOAR proponents argue that giving “the people” authority to vote on boundary changes and rezoning requests would be even more democratic than leaving those decisions in the hands of elected representatives. In practice, and in light of recent experience with California’s initiative process, we fear that the result would be too many decisions made without concern for the regional big picture by relatively new arrivals who see no hypocrisy in nailing up a “no vacancy” sign for others who might like to move here too.

There is a better way.

The SOAR campaign has catalyzed several positive actions. These include a more enlightened land-use stance by the Ventura County Farm Bureau and a serious county-sponsored study on the future of farming directed by the broad-based Agriculture Policy Working Group.

The working group’s careful research, consensus-building and town hall forums, hosted in every corner of the county, exemplify the way public policy ought to be set. (Although SOAR leaders make much of the fact that they were not invited to be part of that group, their approach has been adversarial from the start and the working group did include several strong supporters of SOAR.)

The working group’s mission was to find a strategy that would achieve the goals of SOAR--keeping urban growth in urban areas and keeping greenbelts green--by working within the system, not by bypassing it.

The result is Measure A.

Like the SOAR measures, it too proposes to draw urban limit lines around the cities and require a public vote before they could be changed. In addition, Measure A calls for giving force of law to the informal agreements that protect the county’s six greenbelts, plus five additional greenbelts. And it calls for creation of a conservation district to permanently protect farmland by purchasing development rights or the acreage itself from willing farmers.

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.

With this endorsement, The Times vows to hold the supervisors to their word. Any who might secretly view Measure A as an easy antidote to SOAR, to be watered down or forgotten after election day, deserve to be voted out at the first opportunity--along with city officials who fail to heed the voters’ mandate.

That’s the way democracy ought to work. We, and the voters of Ventura County, must do our parts to make sure that it does.

Preserving Ventura County’s farmland and open spaces is a vitally important issue to our quality of life, to our economy, to our future. But it is not the only factor that will influence these things. Like it or not, the county’s population will continue to grow. New sources of jobs and tax revenue will be necessary. Housing in all price ranges will continue to be required, both because state law mandates it and because it is simply the right thing to do.

To balance all these concerns, we urge all residents to take greater interest in planning and to make full use of existing hearing and review procedures and the power of the vote.

We believe Ventura County has done an enviable job of developing slowly and wisely. But it will take stronger defenses to continue that record in a new millennium of growing population and development pressures.

Measure A is the right step in that direction.