500 Residents Offer Their Visions of Perfect City

There were booths for transportation and tourism, for sanitation and soccer. City Council members served chili, and there were games for the kids.

Also in attendance at Ventura College on Saturday were 500 fortunetellers--residents offering their visions of the city’s future.

“I can’t believe how much energy there is here,” said Bill Fulton, chairman of the citizens’ committee that is managing Ventura’s six-month “Seize the Future” planning process, which began with Saturday’s FutureFest fair.

Rather than leaving Ventura’s fate entirely in the hands of its elected leaders and city staffers, FutureFest was created as a way to get suggestions from residents who would not normally participate in city government and planning, Fulton said.

The hope was that by offering a Saturday activity for families, more residents would attend and bring their ideas with them.

“What we are trying to do is blast through the traditional barriers that make people not want to participate,” Fulton said. “It is the people of the community that are going to determine this vision for the future.”

More than 60 city offices and community groups--almost twice as many as organizers originally expected--spent six hours at Ventura College promoting their missions and soliciting opinions on how they should guide their efforts.

Mike Hurd of the American Youth Soccer Organization was pleased to have a forum such as FutureFest to lobby the city for a sports complex.

“I try to speak at anything where anybody wants to listen,” Hurd said. “We wanted to be out here, letting people know our needs and the opportunities for youth.”

Those attending the fair filled out hundreds of questionnaires Saturday, which Seize the Future’s volunteers, consultants and staff will review to determine the issues of greatest concern to residents.

After a series of workshops and town meetings, the group will lay out guiding principles and a course of action at the annual Fourth of July downtown street fair.

“It’s kind of a rolling process,” Fulton said.

The city is paying a Berkeley consulting firm $114,500 to assist with the planning.

Representatives from the firm, MIG, presented a slide show and video Saturday as a way of generating residents’ ideas.

MIG has put on similar events in other communities and recommended the format to Ventura.

“Planning, while it’s a technical exercise, . . . it’s really about creating nicer places for people,” consultant Jeff Loux said. “It’s about energizing groups of folks to go out and do projects.”

While Loux showed the slides of what other cities have done, his colleagues led a “chat room” where residents gathered to talk about growth and other issues.

One exercise asked the citizens to pretend they had given the city $1 million, and then asked how they would want it spent.

Several people suggested the money be used to hire more police officers.

Some wanted a better public transit system.

Another proposed a cultural endowment.

And one person advocated a system of bike trails “so as to give option to the hegemony of the almighty car culture.”

“Agree.”

“Me, too.”

“Yes,” three others chimed in.

As Mayor Jim Friedman served food alongside councilmen Sandy Smith and Brian Brennan, he said he was impressed by FutureFest’s turnout and thought it represented a “pretty good cross-section” of Ventura’s residents.

“Our arms are getting tired from giving away a lot more chili than we would have expected,” Friedman said.