Growth Debate Reaches a Crossroad in Moorpark

If one place can embody all the hostility and raw-nerved emotion stirred up by the debate over how to control growth in Ventura County, it is this farm town turned bedroom suburb.

More than any other community, the city named for a type of apricot now growing only in residents’ backyards is at a crossroad, confronting competing visions of its future.

Merchants and politicians say the cash-strapped city of 29,000 must grow to live by building the largest single housing development in recent county history, the Hidden Creek Ranch project. Advocates say Hidden Creek would shower the city and its school district with more than $100 million in parkland and cash to provide the public services residents demand.

On the other side, slow-growth activists aligned with the countywide Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) campaign are fighting to preserve Moorpark’s connection to its fast-fading rural past. Though the 3,221-home Hidden Creek project may look good on the drawing board, it is a Trojan Horse, activists say. Over the long term, it will destroy the very characteristics that have made Moorpark attractive to people fleeing the Los Angeles metropolitan area, they contend.

While the wider political debate over the countywide SOAR measure has had its share of heated language and questionable campaign tactics, the battle over growth in Moorpark has been particularly divisive. Longtime friends have parted, petitioners gathering signatures have been harassed by paid agitators, and normally staid bureaucrats have been accused of caving in to one side or the other.

In the midst of all this are the voters, trying to figure out what is going on. Looking at the ballot doesn’t make it any easier.

Activists have placed before voters a local SOAR measure that would prevent the city from growing beyond its current borders without a vote of the people. Slow-growth advocates have also placed a referendum on the ballot that would overturn the council’s approval of Hidden Creek, which would expand the city’s size by more than 50% and increase its population by a third. Both measures are scheduled to go before voters in January.

If that’s not confusing enough, Moorpark’s City Council has placed a growth measure of its own on the November ballot that would specifically exempt Hidden Creek Ranch from growth controls.

For the slow-growth activists, the City Council’s decision to allow the project to be built north of Moorpark College despite strong community opposition is a classic example of why politicians cannot be trusted to make major land-use decisions.

“Maybe 30 years from now, when we have used up all the land in the city, we could consider this,” said Roseann Mikos, a 17-year resident who is running for City Council. “But why sprawl now? It goes against all good planning principles and common sense.”

For most council members, opposition to the project amounts to interference in their decision-making process.

“This is a defining moment for Moorpark,” said Councilman Bernardo Perez, a 28-year resident and supporter of the project. “If we turn our back on the solutions to tomorrow’s problems, we will never be able to make up for this mistake.”

Farming Roots

Once the eastern hub of Ventura County’s agricultural empire, Moorpark dates back more than a century to when it was a railroad watering station surrounded by apricot and walnut groves. What there was of the tiny community was centered on High Street, which, with its wood and brick storefronts, still resembles a western movie set.

Moorpark didn’t become a city until 1983. By then, the population had grown to 9,000 and the surrounding farmland was quickly being replaced by sprawling housing tracts. In a debate mirroring the one going on today, some residents then said it was time to become a city in order to slow the march of urbanization. Others said cityhood would simply increase growth pressures.

As the current ideological battle intensified, it has taken countless twists and turns, involving lawsuits and bureaucratic chess moves so complex that many Moorpark residents lost track of them long ago.

“People are either very angry or very confused, and once I explain it to the confused people, they get very angry,” said Moorpark Mayor Patrick Hunter, the only council member opposed to Hidden Creek Ranch. “This is exactly why there is a lack of belief in government.”

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The battle began earlier this year, when SOAR’s Ventura-based leaders teamed up with Moorpark activists who for a decade had been fighting Messenger Investment Co.’s Hidden Creek Ranch.

The effort in Moorpark was one of six city-based campaigns designed to stop elected leaders from rezoning farmland and open space without voter approval.

Acknowledging that SOAR seemed to have strong public support, elected leaders in the county and five cities--Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Santa Paula and Camarillo and Oxnard--agreed to place the measures on the ballot.

But Moorpark council members, who were in the final stages of approving Hidden Creek Ranch, refused to do so.

Instead, they placed a competing growth-control measure--nicknamed “sham SOAR” by opponents--on the fall ballot. They also placed on the ballot a measure that would tax residents for the legal fees they said the city would have to pay if forced to defend SOAR.

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A Superior Court judge eventually knocked the original Moorpark SOAR off the ballot on a legal technicality, leaving only the council’s watered-down alternative, Measure F. Moorpark city leaders then took the tax measure off the ballot.

SOAR leaders immediately vowed to try again. This time, they collected the signatures even faster. It appeared that the signatures had been turned in quickly enough for the second SOAR attempt to make the Nov. 3 election.

Ballot Deadline Missed

But city officials took their time reviewing the new petitions, and the deadline for the fall ballot passed.

“They intentionally held the signatures beyond the point the county could turn them around, and that was really bad faith,” said SOAR leader Richard Francis, the group’s attorney. “That showed how bad they didn’t want us to make it.”

Councilman Perez, a longtime friend of Francis, believes city officials were only doing their job.

“We were not being obstructionists. We were applying the process equally,” Perez said.

Things took yet another turn when Moorpark officials challenged SOAR activists in court over what they saw as an intentionally inaccurate ballot argument opposing the city’s growth-control measure.

A judge dismissed the city’s claims, ruling that the argument calling the council “pro growth” and saying the city measure is backed by out-of-town developers, is standard political fare.

In August, Moorpark council members approved the development agreement for Hidden Creek Ranch. That provoked yet another ballot drive, a referendum on Hidden Creek itself.

Once again seeking signatures on the streets of Moorpark, the activists noticed people following them, urging voters not to sign the referendum petition. These people had been hired by a group funded by Hidden Creek Ranch developers, the activists learned.

In addition, the same group, Moorpark Citizens for the Greenbelt, sent mailers to residents urging them to support the city-sponsored growth measure instead of the moratorium.

Despite the hostile atmosphere, the activists succeeded in gathering enough signatures to qualify for the ballot a referendum on Hidden Creek.

Campaign finance reports filed this month showed the developers spent $110,571 on the campaign, more than all the candidates spent in the last four City Council elections combined.

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For all that cash, the developer convinced about 30 people to take their names off the referendum petition, roughly $3,700 per signature.

Gary Austin, vice president of planning and entitlements for Costa Mesa-based Messenger Investment Co., said he thought hiring agitators was a mistake and blamed Shapell Industries, which owns the right to build some of the houses at Hidden Creek Ranch.

“They [Shapell] felt very strongly that we together should try to discourage people from signing that petition,” Austin said.

“As it turned out, it was not a wise use of money. . . . We’re very uncomfortable with the way it was handled.”

Representatives of Shapell Industries could not be reached for comment.

Earlier this month, the developers played their trump card: They filed a lawsuit against Moorpark, trying to knock the referendum off the ballot.

Legal Fight Looms

In one form or another, Hidden Creek Ranch is headed for the courtroom.

For Hunter, facing a challenge from Perez in the mayoral race, the debate over the development is really about whether elected representatives should do what they want or what the people want.

He believes that his colleagues fell under the spell of smooth-talking Messenger representatives.

“I’ll be frank: It becomes, for some, very difficult to say no to that money,” he said. “But you have to look at what other impacts that project is going to bring to your community.”

For Perez, it’s all about doing the right thing for the community, whether the people agree with him or not. He believes many people think Hidden Creek Ranch makes sense, but he is not letting that affect his decision, he said.

And he does not believe he and his colleagues were sweet-talked by the developer.

“That’s absurd,” Perez said. “What he was saying is that there was undue pressure, and that is absurd. There were hundreds of hours of public meetings, countless reports. If there was any pressure here, it was on the [developer], because he knew he had a tough sell.”

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Moorpark’s development agreement with Messenger would give Moorpark 1,700 acres of public open space and hand the city and school district tens of millions of dollars. That would include $12.8 million in fees toward construction of a California 118 bypass to get truck traffic off the streets, $1.5 million for libraries, $7.5 million for sports facilities, $26.2 million in fees to reimburse the city for the cost of processing the project and $22.5 million in development fees for the city to spend on other needs.

Like Hunter, SOAR advocates believe that although Hidden Creek Ranch would result in a short-term cash windfall for Moorpark, it would drag the city down in the long run and lead to a vicious cycle of development. More development, they say, would fuel a need for more services, which it turn would fuel a need for still more development, until the city’s quality of life suffers.

“The problem with using development as a panacea for economic woes is that it’s a pyramid scheme,” Francis said.

“It will work, initially, but eventually you end up having to approve more development to provide services to the development you approved last year. Eventually, you have to pay the piper.”