Fillmore, County Push Greenbelt

Taking a first step to implement voter-approved growth control, Ventura County and the city of Fillmore are pushing to create a large new greenbelt of protected farmland stretching 13 miles from the city limit to the Los Angeles County line.

Officials said Wednesday they hope to form this year a new 40,000-acre zone where agriculture can flourish apart from urban development.

County Supervisor Kathy Long, whose district includes the fertile Santa Clara Valley, said she came away from recent meetings with city officials convinced that the new greenbelt will be backed by an array of interests.

“There is solid support from the City Council, and I think the agricultural community sees the value of this,” Long said. “So my goal is to get it done by the end of the year.”

Creation of the zone will send a strong message to Newhall Land & Farming Co., which plans a 70,000-resident community nearby in Los Angeles County and owns more than 10,000 acres of adjacent farmland on this side of the county line, Long said.

“It fits the bill of what voters wanted,” she said. “And it will send a clear message to Newhall that we are serious about protecting our remaining farmland.”

The push in Fillmore is part of a countywide effort to strengthen six existing greenbelt agreements that cover 83,000 acres and to create five new greenbelts of about the same cumulative acreage.

As called for by voters in a ballot measure last November, all 11 greenbelt agreements would become legally binding contracts implemented by city and county ordinance instead of the current informal handshake arrangements.

Fillmore appears to be the test case.

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City Manager Roy Payne said his staff has worked for months with county planners and lawyers to craft a greenbelt plan that allows the city to grow from 13,000 residents to 20,000 by the year 2020, but exempts the riverside citrus belt east of Fillmore from new residential and industrial construction.

The proposed agreement could be presented to the City Council by next month, Payne said, depending on its reception next Wednesday evening before the Santa Clara Valley Advisory Committee, a group made up mostly of farmers and ranchers.

“We want to meet with the ranchers and get their input,” Payne said. “We don’t really know how they feel right now. It’s been quite awhile since we addressed this issue in a formal setting.”

Rex Laird, executive director of the county Farm Bureau, said his organization first proposed the new Fillmore-Piru greenbelt in 1997, and stands strongly behind it now.

“If there was a groundswell of opposition out there I would like to think I would have heard of it, and I have not,” Laird said. “The one loud objection has been from Newhall.”

Four more greenbelts are proposed for the hillside area north of Simi Valley and Moorpark and for the Las Posas, Upper Ojai and Hidden valleys. The boundaries are imprecise, so far, county planner Gene Kjellberg said.

“It looks like Fillmore stands the biggest chance of being the first,” Kjellberg said. “It would be in excess of 40,000 acres, and all together the potential is for equal the amount of acres we have in greenbelts now.”

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The six existing greenbelts were established from 1967 to 1993. The largest is the 34,200-acre greenbelt between Fillmore and Santa Paula, followed by the 27,300-acre zone between Oxnard and Camarillo. The others are made up of 8,300 acres between Ventura and Santa Paula, 6,200 acres in the Santa Rosa Valley, 4,600 acres between Ventura and Oxnard and 2,700 acres in the Tierra Rejada Valley.

Supervisor Frank Schillo said he is working with the three east county cities that encircle the Tierra Rejada greenbelt to form a committee so officials can decide whether they want to strengthen its protections. As things stand, much of that greenbelt can be split into 10-acre parcels, he said.

Schillo said he and Supervisor John Flynn are also working with the city of Oxnard to form committees to strengthen existing greenbelts.

“I’m hoping we can have these meetings in October so we can start understanding if there are any philosophical differences, so we can get going on writing some sort of legal agreements,” Schillo said.

Schillo said he hopes that a series of stronger greenbelt ordinances will be in place around the county within a year.

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Protections provided by the greenbelt agreements are separate from those in six Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources initiatives passed since 1995 by voters in the county unincorporated area and the cities of Camarillo, Moopark, Oxnard, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Ventura.

Those new laws require that a majority of voters--not elected officials--approve urban development in farm and open-space areas.

Steve Bennett, coauthor of the initiatives, said he thinks the strengthened greenbelt agreements will complement SOAR.

“I think they’re great, particularly in the Santa Clara Valley, which is the most vulnerable place in the county right now,” he said.

Neither Fillmore nor Santa Paula, the second Santa Clara Valley city, passed a SOAR measure.

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Greenbelts

Efforts are underway to put teeth into the nonbinding city-county agreements that have created six greenbelts spanning 83,000 acres since 1967. Those tougher agreements would prohibit urban development in these farm and open-space areas. Local officials are also discussing creation of five new greenbelts, which would nearly double greenbelt acreage in the county.