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.

Jim Monahan

Jim Monahan, 65, grew up in Ventura and for 40 years has run the welding company his father established on Ventura Avenue. He has been a Ventura city councilman since 1978.

He was part of a pro-business majority that oversaw rapid growth in the city during the 1980s, but then fell to minority status as a slow-growth council took over in the early 1990s.

Monahan tried unsuccessfully to unseat Lacey four years ago. He cites Oxnard Mayor Manny Lopez as his primary endorsement.

Question: You’ve run for this seat before. Why are you running this time and what would you bring to the job?

Answer: This is something I’ve been working toward for a long time. I’ve been a member of the Ventura City Council for 22 years. I feel that I have the background and the qualifications, with that experience and my business background, to do the job on the Board of Supervisors. I work with the board now on a regular basis, as a member of the Local Agency Formation Commission and other boards and commissions. I’m quite aware of their responsibilities.

I think I have the background and the ability to bring to the board what it has been lacking with Susan Lacey. I’m not running against Susan Lacey but I do know that if I had been elected last time I would have saved the county Board of Supervisors the embarrassment of the $15.3-million fiasco with the mental health merger that wouldn’t have happened if I had been elected.

Q: Would you have taken any action at all to change the county’s mental health organization?

A: I think we need to look toward merging the two mental health facilities into one basic operation here in Ventura County, so we can reduce the overhead cost that we have here and save the taxpayers dollars and still provide the indigent care that we need to provide. I think we can do it like many other counties have been doing it for years, such as Santa Barbara. I had quite a long conversation with Cathie Wright the other day, our retiring state senator, and she agrees with me and that is what she had hoped would have happened here.

Q: What should the county do with its share of the tobacco settlement money?

A: It should be used for what it was intended for: emphysema patients, smoking-related problems with health, and the education of children not to smoke. Should there be a surplus, then that could be used for mental health.

Q: Should county auditor-controller continue to be an elective position?

A: I think so.

Q: What structural changes do you think might be needed in the county government hierarchy?

A: There needs to be a chief executive officer, with powers to deal directly with the budget. Also, I think that they should not have any end runs on the chief executive officer directly to the board. You really need to have a board that backs up your management, staff, kind of like what we have at the city now. We have a very strong city manager, and on a much larger scale, I think we need to do the same with the CEO of the county.

Q: Do you favor taking another look at the ordinance that restricts money from Proposition 172 to certain public safety agencies?

A: I would only enter into that area working with the Sheriff’s Department, public safety, because that’s very high on my scale.

Q: The people also spoke loudly in their support for SOAR, which you opposed . . .

A: I don’t like [for] people to say that I opposed SOAR because I didn’t oppose SOAR. I was on the Agricultural Policy Working Group committee. We worked for more than a year. That group didn’t really oppose SOAR, they had a better plan. And so I have supported the plan that we worked on for so long. They were both on the ballot and they both won.

Q: Now that we have it, how do you foresee it shaping the county? What needs to happen next?

A: It is the law, we will work within that framework. It’s going to slow things down. We’re probably going to lose some businesses. I would hate to see Amgen leave the county because they can’t expand here--that’s the sort of thing I’m worried about. I’d like to see them build on Taylor Ranch--build a nice, big, beautiful Amgen campus up there. [He laughs.] That would replace our dreams of a university.

Q: What did David Baker get right and what did he get wrong?

A: I’d say he was 100% on target and that he provided a service for the county and the taxpayers that, if we had had to pay someone to come and do a study of our financial problems, it would have taken four months and cost us several hundred thousand dollars. He did it free in about four days.

Q: If you are elected, what steps will you take to address some of the issues that he raised?

A: I think we need to have a complete audit. In fact, we’re asking that the grand jury do an investigation of this sudden discovery that we don’t have a problem, that all of a sudden this problem went away in about a month’s time. I don’t believe it.

Q: Is there a single biggest issue in this race?

A: I think it’s the financial stability of the county. We’ve got to get our financial house in order and then continue to provide services to the people. The parks, just for an example--there are so many things that have been let go that people want back that we have to find a way to do it. [According to President Clinton’s State of the Union speech] we have a wonderful economy, this country is better than it’s ever been--why isn’t it that way in Ventura? It’s not. We need to find our place in this wonderful economy and get Ventura back on track.

Q: If we combined the two hospitals as you advocate, would you see county Health Care Agency Director Pierre Durand being in charge?

A: I wouldn’t rule that out. I think it should be privatized and on the county side there needs to be a governing body that would determine how their operations would work. I would like to see us having health care by contract with the other hospitals throughout the county, so the people don’t all have to come to Ventura.

Q: Should Ventura County have a regional airport?

A: I was on the original committee when we worked with the Navy. We tried to get joint use of Point Mugu airport and at that time the Navy just said flat no. I think that is still their position. But I would support a regional airport at Mugu.

Q: How important is it that this board have a solid three votes rather than the current 2-2 split with a swing in the middle?

A: It would be nice to have a solid pro-business board. We haven’t had that in a long time and I think that’s probably the main reason this county is really suffering in some ways.

Q: What are the major trends that are going to shape this county and how will they evolve differently if you are on the board?

A: I’m only one vote. I’d do my best to persuade the board to consider my views. But I think we have to do more to protect agriculture, I think they need to have some breaks on water. The farmers need more assistance than simply being told they can’t sell or develop their land. We need to give them more than that if we want to keep the agricultural business active in Ventura County.

I think we need to improve business and I think we can build within areas that we have already developed that could be redeveloped into higher-paying jobs. For example, Ventura Avenue is an area that we need to improve.

Oxnard and Camarillo, in their industrial tracts, are way ahead of us in providing the kind of jobs that we would like to have in Ventura. I hope that my being on the board will help bring us to that end.

I don’t think that we want to be a semirural county. I think we have people here who would like to see our county developed within the cities’ boundaries, would like to keep our greenbelts and our open space but in reason.