Monahan to Challenge Bennett for Supervisor

Declaring himself the business candidate, veteran Ventura Councilman Jim Monahan said he will take on teacher and environmentalist Steve Bennett in a run for the county Board of Supervisors next spring.

Monahan, 64, informally began his campaign to replace retiring District 1 Supervisor Susan Lacey on Friday by taking out an application to start an election committee. A formal announcement will follow soon, he said.

“We’ve been planning for this ever since I ran for supervisor [in 1996],” said Monahan, a welding shop owner and councilman since 1977. He lost to Lacey 53% to 40% three years ago.

A third potential candidate, former Ventura Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures, a businesswoman, said she will decide whether to run by the end of August.

A supervisor since 1980, Lacey said she will not endorse a successor in the 1st District, which includes portions of the Ojai Valley, Ventura and coastal portions of Oxnard.

With her out of the race, Monahan said he considers it wide open.

“I think that Lacey was by far a more formidable candidate than Bennett,” Monahan said. “I have a lot of respect for her. But I’ve worked with Bennett on the City Council, and [Lacey’s] much more professional. I’ve seen him be rude to people and put them down right there on the council floor.”

Bennett, 48, who declared for supervisor in April, was on vacation and unavailable for comment.

At the time of his announcement, Bennett, a chief architect of the successful SOAR growth-control initiatives last year, staked out positions that clearly differ from those of Monahan. And the two were philosophical opposites on the Ventura council.

Bennett said that as supervisor he would continue to work to preserve open space in Ventura County, while defending its “defenseless” constituencies: neglected children, the homeless, the mentally ill and senior citizens.

Monahan said voters would have a clear choice between them.

“I would say he’s more the liberal social type, while I’m more the conservative business type,” Monahan said. “My clientele, so to speak, are mostly the business community.”

Relying on that base, Monahan has retained a council seat as political trends shifted from slow growth to pro growth and back again over the past 22 years. He has won six terms, always raising large amounts of money and staking out pro-business positions.

Monahan said he raised $41,000 to challenge Lacey for supervisor last time. Bennett said previously that he expects his campaign will cost $100,000.

While Monahan is a Republican, and Bennett a Democrat, supervisorial races are nonpartisan.

Both are proven vote-getters. When they ran for council in 1993 in a 14-candidate race, Bennett placed second with 11,208 votes while Monahan was third with 9,427. Measures, a former bank executive, placed first with 13,077 votes.

Neither Bennett nor Measures ran for reelection in 1997.

Professionally, Monahan has worked for decades for the welding business his father founded in Ventura’s once-bustling Avenue area in 1928. He took control of American Welding in 1960, when his father died. The business has declined with the local oil industry, dropping from 100 employees to three, he said.