Suit Targets Church Proposal to Build on Farmland

In a move that could delay the first public vote in Ventura County under a SOAR growth-control measure, attorneys filed suit Monday to strike from the November ballot a measure seeking approval of church construction on east Ventura farmland.

The lawsuit, filed by slow-growth leader Richard Francis, seeks to block an initiative to decide whether the First Assembly of God should be allowed to build a new sanctuary, sports fields and running track on 26 acres at the northwest corner of Montgomery Avenue and North Bank Drive.

Francis said the lawsuit is not intended to kill the proposal, but is part of a larger effort to ensure that projects that surface under new rules imposed by SOAR are clearly defined and easily understood as voters exercise their power to decide when, if ever, development should be allowed to intrude into agricultural areas.

“It’s not just a vote on whether we should have agriculture or a church,” said Francis, a lawyer who was principal architect of the growth-control measures, known as SOAR, approved in several Ventura County cities, and the county, in recent years.

Those measures prevent the cities and county from expanding beyond designated borders without a vote of the people.

“The public is being promised something, the shape and form of which isn’t defined,” Francis said of the Ventura church project. “Because this is the first one, I am certainly interested in dogging it to make sure we set a precedent that makes sense for the future.”

Because the land on which the church wants to build is zoned for agriculture--and protected by a SOAR measure approved by Ventura voters in 1995--church leaders have been forced to put their project to a public vote.

Toward that end, supporters gathered more than 7,000 signatures and last month qualified an initiative for the November ballot.

But Francis argues that the issue should be stripped from the ballot. His lawsuit alleges that signature gatherers violated the state Election Code by failing to disclose vital information--including a text of the city’s General Plan and a land-use planning map--to residents who signed petitions to put the issue before voters.

Moreover, the lawsuit alleges that the ballot measure is so ill-defined that it has the potential to mislead and confuse voters.

But the Rev. Tony Cervero, senior pastor at the 600-member First Assembly of God, said he believes the petitions contained enough detail so that residents knew what they were signing.

Cervero said the church has even gone the extra mile, promising that the track and athletic fields would be available for public use and that the sanctuary would be open for concerts and other community events.

“By no stretch of the imagination did we think we would ever have to go through a ballot initiative, let alone a legal proceeding questioning our very intentions,” said Cervero, adding that the new facility is needed to accommodate a church membership that has tripled, if not quadrupled, in the past five years.

“We are prepared to go forward, whatever it takes,” he said. “Our vision is bigger than any obstacles we are going to face.”

The lawsuit, filed Monday afternoon in Ventura County Superior Court against the city of Ventura, seeks to force city officials to remove the initiative from the November ballot. The suit alleges that because the church’s petitions were flawed, city elections officials erred in putting the measure on the ballot.

Francis said he hopes to delay the project from going to a public vote, giving him enough time to meet with church leaders and city officials to fine-tune the development and state more clearly in the initiative what is being proposed.

“As it stands, the whole thing is so half-baked, the voters are being asked to make a very serious change in the General Plan for something that is ill-defined,” he said. “I truly believe that if we can get it all straightened out, it has the potential to be a beneficial project.”