District Moves Forward in Bid for School Site

The elementary school district is moving forward with plans to acquire a school site on farmland, despite being told by a state agency to look elsewhere.

District officials hope to work directly with the city to provide public services to the site, a 14-acre sod field just east of the Oxnard city limit. The school board will vote on a resolution tonight that would authorize the superintendent to make an agreement with the city.

If the measure passes, Supt. Richard Duarte would ask Oxnard’s city manager to put a similar resolution before the City Council next week.

Then the two agencies could begin writing an agreement that would allow the city to extend such services as sewer, water, police and fire to the land at the east end of Emerson Avenue, where Juan Lagunas Soria school is proposed.

City Manager Ed Sotelo said such an agreement would be worth considering seriously.

“We need schools,” he said. “And it’s an issue that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later.”

The Local Agency Formation Commission, a state-mandated regulatory agency with county jurisdiction, voted last month to reject a proposal to annex the land to the city, saying the property should be preserved as agricultural land.

School district lawyer Mitchel Kahn said he is not trying to flout LAFCO’s decision.

“We’re just trying to build schools and preserve opportunities wherever they might exist,” he said. “This is one of those potential opportunities that we hate to see disappear.”

Kahn added that the district did everything it could to persuade LAFCO to annex the land for the school, but the efforts were unsuccessful.

“When you can’t do it the right way, you have to look at alternatives,” he said.

In this case, Kahn saw an alternative in a section of the state Government Code that allows two public agencies to agree on extending public services without LAFCO consent.

LAFCO Executive Officer Everett Millais said the school district has the legal right to bypass the commission.

“But it’s very frustrating to get to this point and to have gone through a lengthy hearing if this is what would result anyway,” he said.

School district officials don’t have much time to work out the agreement with the city. After Jan. 1, when the law changes, they would no longer be able to bypass LAFCO review or feedback.

Oxnard Elementary School District officials have spent more than two years seeking approval for the school site. The board, City Council and state environmental officials had already approved it, and LAFCO was the last major hurdle.

During November’s all-day LAFCO hearing, parents and school officials told the members that Oxnard needed the school desperately to ease crowding caused by a growing population and class-size reduction. But LAFCO said its responsibility was to protect agricultural land, not to relieve school crowding.

School board member Dorothie Sterling said she supports moving forward with the site because it has already been deemed safe for students.

“I don’t know where we’re going to build schools if it’s not on farmland,” she said.

If the school district successfully sidesteps LAFCO and builds a campus on agricultural land, Millais said the move “would not just be contrary to what LAFCO desires, it would be contrary to what prevailing opinion is in the county.”

Other school districts have had to take similar measures to circumvent the commission. In 1993, the Oxnard Union High School District failed to get LAFCO’s support for a new campus because the site was on agricultural land. So district officials entered into an agreement with the city to provide the services for Oxnard High School, which opened two years later.

Elementary school district officials do not intend to immediately build a campus on the Emerson site. Nor have they decided if they want to construct Soria school there or if they want to hold the land for a future campus. School officials said they simply want to keep all possibilities open because enrollment is increasing and school sites are scarce.

The district is continuing its negotiations with the property owner to buy the sod field. Before any construction could begin, the county would have to address the existing greenbelt agreement with both Oxnard and Camarillo, Kahn said.

“There is no threat that we are going to build the school there tomorrow,” Kahn said. “But if we don’t do this by Jan. 1, the opportunity to build a school there may slip by us.”