The Race for the 1st Supervisorial District

Three of the five seats on the Ventura County Board of Supervisors will be on the March 7 ballot. The Times Ventura County Edition editorial board has interviewed all of the candidates and is publishing excerpts from those interviews.

In the 1st District, three candidates are competing for the seat to be vacated by retiring Supervisor Susan Lacey.

They are former Ventura City Council members Steve Bennett and Rosa Lee Measures and current City Councilman Jim Monahan.

The 1st District includes Ventura, Montalvo, Saticoy, Oxnard Shores, Mandalay Bay, northwest Oxnard, Meiners Oaks, Mira Monte, Oak View, Casitas Springs, Foster Park, North Ventura Avenue, Eastern Ojai Valley and Upper Ojai.

Steve Bennett

Steve Bennett was co-founder of the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) anti-sprawl movement, which has won wide support for growth control measures in six cities and the county’s unincorporated areas.

As a one-term Ventura city councilman he was the author of a campaign finance reform initiative that was approved by 81% of Ventura’s voters.

Bennett, 49, lives in Ventura and is an assistant principal and economics teacher at Nordhoff High School in Ojai.

He is endorsed by the largest union of county employees and by groups representing the county’s prosecutors, sheriff’s deputies and firefighters.

Question: Why are you running and why should voters choose you over your two opponents?

Answer: I think there’s a significant difference between myself and my two opponents. Knowing that they were likely candidates was probably a major motivation. There are three things that I’d really like to do that I got passionate about when I was on the City Council:

I would like to provide better government services. That’s not the flashy thing that some of these other issues are. It’s the nuts and bolts of trying to make sure that county government provides good services.

That really takes two things: You have to do a good job with the budget so you have resources, but you also have to be able to work with employees who aren’t working in a for-profit system and find ways to motivate those people and keep morale high and have those people take real professional pride in what they’re doing. My experience working in a school system, where you’re working with a lot of people who are not-for-profit, actually was a real helpful insight for me when working at City Hall. I sort of knew what buttons motivate those people.

The second area is the whole issue of the quality of life, certainly my commitment to environmental issues, SOAR, etc. I think people are passionate about trying to keep Ventura County this very unique, precious place that we have here. I think you could have a Board of Supervisors that could do things that would make Ventura County’s quality of life much worse.

And then the third thing is just to try to decrease the influence of money in politics--money along with the whole special-interest, old way of doing business. I think I had good success with that in the city of Ventura when I wrote the campaign contribution limit law. There is no campaign finance that’s perfect, but the overall impact on the city has been fairly dramatic. In 1995, before the law was passed, the three winning candidates raised an average of $35,000 each. After the law was passed, in 1997 the four winning candidates raised an average of $15,000.

Q: What steps would you take to tighten up the county’s financial ship and to respond to the critique offered by David Baker?

A: I’d break it into two categories. One, try to bring some common sense to the policies. There are a number of things that I think don’t make a lot of common sense. Baker actually gives us an opportunity to address issues that were festering that, had he not left, would have festered for even longer and been even tougher nuts to crack.

One example: We would not be funding [staffing of the proposed juvenile justice complex] through Proposition 172 funds if Baker hadn’t left. Now that’s a policy that doesn’t make common sense to me. If you asked a thousand citizens of Ventura County, “When you voted for 172, did you think those funds could be used for a new juvenile hall?” I think they would have said clearly yes, that’s public safety.

Giving raises and then saying, “Absorb it out of your budget,” and the only choice you have is to not fill all of your positions so you can pay for the raise--that’s not a common-sense budgeting tactic.

The other half is, you have to find votes to support those kinds of policies, and you find those votes by working professionally with people and being able to have dialogue and not put people on the defensive right away. I’ll be strong on the issues but I’ll try to be professional. I think that’s why a guy like Jim Friedman, who is a Republican and certainly was painted as [being] on the other side, endorses my candidacy. He said, “You know, we didn’t always agree, but you were somebody I could sit down [with], and we could talk about the issues, and you’d listen to what I had to say and we could look for some common ground.” That’s the other way I would go about trying to solve the problems.

Q: Do you favor a stronger chief administrative officer or chief executive officer for the county?

A: I’m definitely for a stronger CAO, CEO--the title means less to me than the authority. I think everybody is in favor of that right now. If you talk to somebody like [Ventura City Manager] Donna Landeros, I think she would clearly say that I was the strongest advocate for having our department heads stop dealing with council members and start dealing through the city manager’s office. When I got there I thought, “This is a mess. This department head was really friendly with this council member so they had all the inside scoop on that.” The message was, to be successful, you have to make your alliances with these different department heads--and the department heads were constantly saying, “Who’s got four votes here?” That’s a crazy way to have managers work. No corporation would have you report to four or five separate bosses.

Q: Should the auditor-controller and other county department heads be elected or appointed?

A: It is not a major part of my platform or campaign to change that, but I’m willing to consider streamlining county government. I think overall we have a 19th-century structure for a 21st-century challenge. The power is just too diffuse, and so nobody is responsible.

Q: If you were on the board would you do your best to kill Ahmanson Ranch?

A: I don’t believe that Ahmanson was supported by the citizens, but I also believe it’s entitled. I haven’t made it a habit to go out and fight projects that already have won entitlement, so that’s not where I would be putting my energy. I’ve been very proactive in terms of things like SOAR. But battles that have already been fought have been fought; that’s just where you are.

Q: Is Health Care Director Pierre Durand an asset to the county or a problem?

A: Particularly since District 1 deals with the two hospitals and an awful lot of the agencies that are involved are headquartered here, I think what we really need is for a statesman to come in and try to take people who are at war, which is where things are in the mental health department right now, and try to find some win-wins and try to patch it together. It would be inappropriate for me to say I side with this guy or I side with that guy. Somebody has to come in and appeal to the professional pride of the people on both sides and say, “Where is that common ground that we can start to work together again?”

Q: Is there a role for the Board of Supervisors in trying to get cities to work together on sales-tax sharing agreements?

A: Sure. That’s a classic example of the kind of policy thing that the board ought to show leadership on--and trying to put pressure on the state to change that problem.

Q: Do you favor taking another look at the ordinance that directs all of the income from Proposition 172 to public-safety agencies?

A: I’m the only candidate who is really willing to look at the formula that they’re using. The first thing I would look at is: What are we using as the inflation factor? Right now the definition is whatever the public safety budget grows by--that’s the inflation factor. If you can’t address that, then there’s no sense even looking anyplace else. I’m not uncomfortable with 172, because it actually does generate additional revenues. If it weren’t there, then we’d really be in a world of hurt. So 172 funds going there and even a rational [annual inflation adjustment] is something that very much makes sense. The question is, do we have a common-sense policy for [computing that adjustment]?