Find New School Site

Yet another delay in the Oxnard School District’s controversial campaign to build a needed school in a problematic location dramatizes one of the most important issues facing Ventura County today: How do we accommodate a growing population without eroding the farmland and open space so crucial to the county’s economy and quality of life?

The city of Oxnard last week withdrew its request to extend into a greenbelt and annex 14 acres of cropland for the proposed Juan Soria School from the agenda of the Local Agency Formation Commission. LAFCO staff had recommended denial.

Had LAFCO voted no, the city and the school board would have had to go to court to proceed. By calling time out, they can bring it back when the political climate seems more favorable--or after spending more thousands attempting to prove that the site at the eastern end of Emerson Avenue isn’t so bad.

We believe this is a losing proposition. We encourage the city and the school board to use this latest delay to redouble their efforts to find a more suitable place to build this school and get on with it.

No one denies that Oxnard needs another elementary school, and fast. None of the other available sites is perfect, either, but the problems with this one are numerous:

* It lies outside Oxnard’s city limits, even outside its sphere of influence. Building a school here would extend the urban edge into otherwise unbroken farmland, virtually guaranteeing that homes would follow. It would also ignore the will of the city and county voters who passed Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) anti-sprawl measures in 1998.

* This site is part of a greenbelt agreement among Oxnard, Camarillo and the county. LAFCO has never approved an extension of a city’s sphere of influence into a greenbelt and this is the wrong time to start. Voters in 1998 also approved Measure A, a county-backed measure that calls for strengthening Ventura County’s five greenbelts and creating six more.

* Although the loss of 14 acres of cropland would hardly doom the county’s billion-dollar agriculture industry, building a school here would hamper surrounding farms and possibly expose teachers and students to pesticide drift. The school board’s own consultant has identified the presence of the pesticides DDT and toxaphene in concentrations that “may represent a health risk for a school site.”

Too much time and money already have been wasted on this ill-advised scheme. It’s time to look elsewhere.