Troubles and Triumphs

Ventura County’s last year of the 20th century was eventful for its doomsday preparations and its broad prosperity, for the air in its smogless skies and the missteps of its county government.

Like a knight on a white horse, a squeaky-clean county boss galloped into town to expose behind-the-scenes shenanigans at the County Government Center. Then he sneaked out the back door.

Like a spy behind battle lines, a psychiatrist blew the whistle on questionable county billing practices. Then the supervisors agreed to pay $15.3 million to make the feds go away. And the psychiatrist kept $2 million.

Like a deed already done, students moved into Cal State’s new campus at the old Camarillo hospital even though it is not yet a full-fledged university. Then a pioneer farmer decided the best way to spend 5 million bucks was to build a university library with the help of a world-class architect.

Like a powerful Santa Ana wind, the full force of a blustery economy pushed bulldozers into gear, put laborers back to work, boosted housing prices to record highs and filled city budgets with sales tax dollars. Then a big auto dealer folded and a shopping mall staggered, sending shudders through Oxnard City Hall.

Like the Justice Department invading Alabama, U.S. lawyers descended on Santa Paula to force its white-majority town council to slice the little city into five easy pieces where Latino candidates could campaign successfully. Then the council told federal lawyers they had no case, and should go away.

Like an obvious lesson learned again, a sex scandal at the coed Ventura School juvenile prison showed that when you lock kids away you had better pay attention to who is taking care of them. Then it showed how quickly reform can come when the powerful care.

Inevitably, 1999 demonstrated how cruelly or crazily people sometimes act whether rich or poor: A prosperous mother in a big house is suspected of killing three of her sons while they slept, and a long-suffering wife on welfare shot her husband, then cut him into pieces with a big red saw.

But this climactic year also showed how brilliantly youngsters can perform when they are challenged to do their best. It showed that a full year of grueling preparation could yield a brief shining moment of recognition for eight Moorpark teenagers as the nation’s brightest team of high school scholars.

Our Top 10 Stories for 1999:

1. Mr. Baker’s Wild Ride

Wresting Ventura County government from its intellectual slumber, new chief administrator David Baker rendered a drive-by analysis in a drive-through style that left bureaucrats gasping and griping about his audacity and accuracy.

Despite lasting just four days on the job Thanksgiving week, Baker, 50, rattled the cages of county supervisors and forced the county’s fiscal watchdog to finally bark.

Baker fled after discovering the untidy nature of the county’s organizational structure and its messy politics. He found “overwhelming problems” and the lack of political will to fix them.

Then the auditor warned that the county was so cash poor it could barely make its payroll. That scared employees and startled New York bond analysts. So the auditor decided to keep his worst fears to himself.

It turns out that the county can probably erase $5 million in red ink and balance its budget without too much pain.

But Baker’s six-page resignation letter may one day rank as a local landmark document. He told the county to strengthen its top administrator, weaken its elected auditor and take another look at divvying up the windfall tax revenue police agencies get each year from Proposition 172.

Several officials said some of Baker’s points had merit and should be considered. In fact, special budget hearings are set for this month.

And Baker? He got his old job back in Stockton as the winter fog descended over the San Joaquin Valley. His bosses even gave their prodigal son what amounted to a $5,000 raise.

2. A Whistle-Blower’s Dream

The biggest financial scandal in county government history--one sure to cost $23 million, and still counting--ground to a conclusion in November when the Board of Supervisors agreed to settle a whistle-blower lawsuit for $15.3 million to make up for improper billing in thousands of Medicare cases.

For eight years, mental health workers used doctors’ names to charge Medicare for services even if the patients never saw a doctor. That is illegal, federal investigators said, and may be criminal if those who broke the law did it on purpose.

It’s likely this never would have come to light had it not been for a sudden power play in 1998, when Supervisors Susan Lacey, Kathy Long and John Flynn rammed an ill-conceived merger of the mental health and social services agencies through a divided Board of Supervisors.

They have all apologized in a fashion, saying their biggest mistake was not checking with the feds themselves to make sure the new structure was all right. But an even bigger blunder was their failure to satisfy county psychiatrists who thought the merger would undermine their control of patients.

Five months after the merger, Dr. Jerome Lance sued the county in federal court under the whistle-blower provision of the False Claims Act.

Lance, 65, a slight and soft-spoken man nearing the end of his career, said he didn’t do it for the money, but because the county had come to view him as little more than a prescription writer.

But many of his co-workers saw Lance as a traitor willing to put the county at financial risk for his own gain, his 15% share of the lawsuit settlement.

Blowing the whistle did not harm Lance’s career. He was promoted, and is now part of a new administrative team changing the way the county treats the mentally ill.

As for the FBI’s criminal inquiry, it probably won’t end for another year.

3. Tragedy in Paradise

An orphan at age 4, Dr. Xavier Caro led a storybook life until his wife of 13 years was arrested on suspicion of pulling the household revolver and shooting their three oldest sons to death while they slept.

By outward appearances, the Caros lived an idyllic life in a million-dollar home on a hilltop overlooking the Santa Rosa Valley, a community of equestrian trails and acre-sized yards.

But on a late-November night, the quiet 52-year-old physician and his wife, Socorro, or “Cora,” 42, argued over “a trivial matter,” according to court documents. The doctor said he bolted to his Northridge office, then returned to find his wife bleeding from a gunshot wound to the head. Only after a 911 operator asked about their welfare did the father find his boys dead in their beds, and a surviving 15-month-old son, Gabriel.

Cora Caro was described as a doting mother and an elegant woman, but a harsh manager of her husband’s office who joked of taking the anti-depressant drug Prozac. Detectives found letters from the troubled woman, describing her drinking and depression and her belief that her marriage was over.

In the days after the tragedy--as parishioners, teachers and schoolmates remembered a happy, involved family--police arrested the mother on suspicion of murder, and she sued her husband for $550,000 of their estate to pay legal fees. He filed for divorce and sued her for the wrongful death of three of their sons.

So far the Caros have four lawyers--from Brentwood, Encino, Agoura Hills and Santa Monica.

The husband’s lawsuit “is a fight for Gabriel . . . so that such outrageous demands by the defense for such a huge amount of money will not leave Gabriel or [his father] out on the streets,” said the doctor’s brother, Raul Caro.

Amid all this, Xavier Caro and little Gabriel moved to a hotel. The father said he could not live in the fine house where he lost his boys and his wife. Cora Caro is recovering in the medical ward of the County Jail and faces a trial this year on murder charges.

4. CSUCI on a Plate

Culminating a 35-year campaign, Ventura County’s fledgling four-year public university welcomed its first students last fall as 1,800 future nurses, teachers, psychologists and accountants filled classes in three Spanish-style buildings at the old mental hospital in Camarillo.

It’s still not quite Cal State’s 23rd campus, but California State University Channel Islands opened for business Aug. 29 as an extension of Cal State Northridge.

If financing and enrollment goals are met, the satellite facility will evolve in two years into a free-standing, degree-granting institution.

There was little pomp or celebration on opening day except for the blue balloons flapping from the front grilles of shuttle buses arriving from Oxnard and Camarillo.

A bigger deal was made days later about the generosity of Jack Broome, an 81-year-old vegetable farmer whose family settled 119 years ago on the piece of the Oxnard Plain where the new university is tucked against the Santa Monica Mountains.

Broome wanted no credit for one of the largest charitable gifts in county history, but was persuaded to go public to encourage others to match his $5-million donation. His gift is earmarked for a state-of-the-art library and media center as large as the one at Cal State Northridge.

Then, as a topper, one of the world’s top architects, Sir Norman Foster, agreed to transform a closed research lab into a grand library.

Still, the evolution is year-by-year. The new campus needs $10 million next year to keep on track for a fall 2002 conversion to Ventura County’s own CSUCI, and not just a slender arm of that San Fernando Valley college.

5. The ‘60s Redux

About this time last year, federal civil rights lawyers were first dropping into that slice of Americana that is Santa Paula, with its quaint Main Street, its Victorian mansions and Craftsman bungalows. And its history of overt racism.

The Washington lawyers came because they were called. Activists have long maintained that Santa Paula’s system of electing all five council members from anywhere in the city made it unreasonably hard for Latinos to get elected. They wanted council members selected by only the voters in their own neighborhoods, because Latinos would hold voting majorities in two of five districts.

Finally they complained to the Justice Department.

So like the racially divided towns of the South in the 1960s, Santa Paula got a letter demanding a fix. “[Latinos] continue to suffer the effects of a history of official discrimination in voting and other areas,” it said.

City leaders scratched their heads.

It is true that this agricultural town, populated by many farm laborers, is two-thirds Latino, and that just one council member is Latino. But it wasn’t long ago that a second Latino councilman was defeated. And just look at the two local school boards, they argued. Both have Latino majorities--clear evidence that Latinos can win in citywide races.

A lawyer hired by the city found that most voting-age Santa Paula residents are Latino, as are 44% of registered voters, up from 31% just a decade ago. That is progress and puts a lie to the discrimination charge, said the lawyer, whose bill so far is $60,000.

A Times study found nine other California cities more Latino than Santa Paula that also elect their councils citywide and have just one Latino council member, or none at all. But those cities face no federal threat.

So the council voted 5 to 0 to keep things the way they are.

That was in October. Mayor Robin Sullivan says she doesn’t know what to think. But the feds often move slowly. So expect a federal lawsuit this year.

6. Party Like 1999

It made everybody nervous when the economic boom of 1998 just got better in 1999.

Higher mortgage rates were supposed to cool last year’s home-buying frenzy, but they didn’t.

Increasing consumer debt was supposed to chill the Christmas sales orgy, but it didn’t.

Now projections are for more of the same next year, just not quite so much of it.

Usually cautious Mark Schniepp, director of the UC Santa Barbara Economic Forecast Project, says nonetheless, “The overall attitudes about the economy are probably the best ever in the history of the world. I may not be able to say the things I’m saying now ever again.”

Consider this:

County jobs, already at a record high, have climbed 8,400 from a year ago, and the jobless rate is nearly the lowest ever.

Sales at shops and stores soared in every major city.

Builders erected new business parks and office buildings at the fastest pace since 1986, but demand was so strong that vacancies stayed low.

Home sales, up 26% in 1998 to the highest level since 1988, climbed even higher in 1999. And housing prices marched upward, too, reaching record highs.

Home building permits climbed 33% in 1999, thanks to large new subdivisions in Oxnard, Thousand Oaks and Ventura.

“We think that sales are going to continue to go up and that prices will too,” said real estate analyst John Karevoll.

Ventura’s plans for a revived downtown came true as trendy new shops opened and a new movie theater brought more business. The city’s expanded Pacific View shopping mall also lured two department stores from the struggling Esplanade mall in Oxnard.

Oxnard took a second hit when AutoNation USA’s local megastore, which had arrived like a Christmas gift a year ago, fizzled, laying off 90 workers and wiping $400,000 a year out of the city budget.

Then there was Y2K. Big business and local governments spent tens of millions of dollars to update computers and calm fears of a century-ending meltdown. Sheriff Bob Brooks said millennial revelers pose a greater threat.

“People have never celebrated the way they will celebrate this year,” he said.

7. Ventura School Scandal

There had been rumors for years about the razor-wired juvenile prison among the onion farms of the Las Posas Valley.

And when 2 1/2 years of investigations were finally completed last June, 15 employees of the deceptively named Ventura School had been fired or forced to resign for having sex or improper relations with youthful inmates. Sixteen more were disciplined for lesser offenses.

The prison’s three top administrators were removed. A former superintendent left the California Youth Authority rather than be questioned about his relationships with female subordinates in Ventura. The statewide director of the 15-prison CYA was given his walking papers.

It was an unparalleled scandal for the CYA’s only coed institution.

Just how things went wrong wasn’t much of a mystery.

Workers and inmates described a precarious line that employees walk in an institution occupied by streetwise criminals who are both defenseless and manipulative.

“A lot of girls agree to do this stuff, messing with the staff, because they get things they can no longer receive in here,” said a 20-year-old convicted murderer from North Hollywood.

State Sen. Cathie Wright, in whose district the prison sits, was not so understanding. She had pressed for reform for years. And she had been proved right. New Ventura School leaders have mapped out broad reform. But Wright says she is still watching how it all works out.

“Until I see them take the manual and run that place by the book, I’m going to be on their necks,” she said.

8. More on SOAR

If 1998 was the year of Ventura County’s revolution to save farmland and open space, then 1999 was the year of trying to make the revolution work.

In 1998, voters in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Camarillo and Oxnard took city expansion out of the hands of elected officials and gave it to those they trusted more--themselves.

In 1999, one more city joined the chorus as two-thirds of Moorpark voters said they wanted to halt suburbia’s sprawl.

Moorpark also provided an early test of just how SOAR will fly legally.

There, the measure, and a companion referendum, arrived just in time to stop one of the largest housing projects in recent county history. Messenger Investment Co. quickly went to court to argue that the 1999 ballot measures illegally overturned the city’s 1998 annexation of its 4,300-acre Hidden Creek Ranch, stopping a $1-billion project.

Messenger contends the city effectively took its land and is seeking $150 million in damages. SOAR lawyers fought back, arguing that the 1998 Messenger annexation to Moorpark was rushed and illegal. A judge agreed. Messenger is expected to appeal.

Compared to these maneuvers, Ventura city’s test of SOAR was simple. Fifty-five percent of voters approved a new church auditorium, classrooms and sports fields on 25 acres of farmland.

Attorney Richard Francis, co-author of the SOAR initiatives, said the Ventura vote showed that SOAR works because the church project was debated fully, not approved quietly at a City Council meeting.

The greatest threat to county farmland this year was from school districts, exempt from SOAR, seeking to build outside city boundaries.

Four districts in Oxnard, El Rio and Ventura plan such construction, and Oxnard elementary district gained City Council approval for a new school on 13 acres of cropland.

On another front, the city of Fillmore pushed a plan to create a large new greenbelt of protected farmland stretching from Fillmore 13 miles east to the Los Angeles County line. Approval is expected in the spring.

9. Clean Air, Doomed Dam

The blue skies may not last forever, but for one cool, breezy summer, Ventura County smog took a vacation.

Through the end of the smog season Oct. 31, the county had just two days of significantly dirty air, its best showing since record-keeping began in 1973. And, experts said, surely better than the leaded-fuel days of the 1950s and ‘60s.

But outside the ozone zone, in the down-to-earth habitats known to man and critter, the world ran less soothingly in 1999.

Diseased mice were found on the Channel Islands, and the last wild sheep were shipped to the mainland from the newest part of the national park, Santa Cruz Island. Now if hunters can find about 4,000 burrowing pigs, plant restoration of the denuded island can begin. Still on the radar screen for removal are about 20 majestic golden eagles that need to be removed to allow native island foxes to flourish.

Also offshore, state and federal authorities worked a two-pronged effort to protect marine life in select fishing-exclusion zones, such as those around the Channel Islands.

The purity of ocean waters was also a central issue as state and federal officials renewed an old debate about whether to end a long moratorium on oil drilling in 36 offshore leases from Port Hueneme to San Luis Obispo.

Inland near Ojai, officials took dead aim at the Matilija Dam and its silt-filled earthen reservoir built 52 years ago. They said it no longer prevents floods or provides drinking water. But it does keep needed sand from the seashore and block the migration of the endangered steelhead trout. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt said he will make removal of the dam a top federal priority.

In a rare sighting, a small school of the elusive steelhead was spotted in a shallow creek at Soule Park golf course, proving the fish still migrate up the Ventura River. But in a Darwinian twist, there were later reports that some of the 18-inch trout may have been caught by rogue fishermen.

It was also in the Ojai area that one of the most devastating of all environmental catastrophes took place late in the year, a 4,300-acre blaze ignited by fireworks. A home and a barn were destroyed, but as dry as conditions had been, it could have been far worse.

10. Good Kids Finish First

What began last year as a dream for a pack of smart, hard-working Moorpark teenagers ended amazingly in April when their high school team captured the nation’s premier scholastic contest.

They became the county’s first Academic Decathlon champions, defeating teams from 38 other states.

The price of victory was a year of long hours--500 sample tests, speeches rehearsed 100 times, 30 practice interviews and reading the required novel four times. During spring break they each studied 95 hours.

But the Moorpark team--Ari Shaw, Arturo Barragan, Alexandra Dove, John Ellis, Valerie Lake, Nick Lange, Mitul Patel and Rebecca Wershba--pulled it out, prompting a series of victory celebrations.

Rolling through their hometown in convertibles, they waved at residents dotting the streets and honked car horns in support.

“I was just walking to my friend’s house, and this guy recognized me on the street,” Patel said. “He said everybody was really proud of us. It’s like the first time ever anything like this has happened to me.”

The party finally ended in June when U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer hosted a ceremony for the team on the South Lawn of the White House.

“It’s been a dream to win,” coach Larry Jones said, “and the dream came true.”