Growing Pains

After losing a legal battle to slow-growth advocates, the local agency charged as a gatekeeper against urban sprawl has gutted many of its guidelines intended to ensure Ventura County remained one of the toughest places in California for cities to expand their boundaries.

That decision by Ventura County’s Local Agency Formation Commission comes at a crucial time.

On Wednesday, Santa Paula will go before LAFCO for the second time with a controversial proposal to expand its borders. Its first bid, in 1998, was rejected. But in a memo last month, LAFCO’s executive director, Arnold Dowdy, recommended that LAFCO commissioners support the proposal this time, saying the city has given satisfactory documentation of its plans.

The expansion is a key step in a plan that ultimately would more than triple the city’s size, mostly by the annexation of two canyon areas that now lack roads and other basic infrastructure.

Dowdy, a former Santa Paula city manager and an expansion supporter, said the timing of LAFCO’s revisions had nothing to do with the city’s appeal. He also said the deletions won’t make annexation easier, as critics argue.

It was last month that LAFCO commissioners unanimously agreed to strike numerous requirements from its policy handbook in order to shield the agency against potential lawsuits from slow-growth advocates. One deleted provision required cities to provide detailed plans proving they could extend adequate and efficient services to expanded areas.

Critics say the agency’s action undermines good planning and development practices.

“LAFCO was the gatekeeper and they kicked down the gates,” said attorney Richard Francis, co-author of the successful SOAR growth-control measures. “It’s clear they’re gutting their own authority. It’s just another example of how irrelevant LAFCO wants to make itself.”

LAFCO’s decision also has raised questions about potential conflicts of interest among two members who have close ties to Santa Paula.

Meanwhile, the potential implications of LAFCO’s policy revisions on future development in the Santa Clara Valley--home to the two remaining cities in the county that allow for expansive development without voter approval--have attracted the attention of planning experts throughout Southern California.

At a time when the disappearance of open space has become such a concern that a statewide commission was created to study ways to stiffen growth laws, some experts say LAFCO is moving in the wrong direction.

“Our LAFCO, which has always been among the strongest in the state, appears to be backpedaling,” said William Fulton, a Ventura-based urban planning expert who has monitored growth issues in the county for years.

Hidden Ranch Suit Prompts Revisions

LAFCO’s policy revisions were triggered by litigation over a massive Moorpark expansion project, brought by Francis and other critics now fighting Santa Paula’s proposal. It was the first lawsuit LAFCO had been slapped with in a quarter century.

In that case, a judge last summer overturned LAFCO’s approval of Moorpark’s annexation of the 4,300-acre Hidden Creek Ranch, a move intended to make way for one of the largest housing developments ever in Ventura County with 3,221 homes. In overturning the annexation, the judge said LAFCO failed to follow its own guidelines.

LAFCO commissioners always looked upon the guidelines as recommendations, not binding law, Dowdy said. The panel includes Santa Paula Councilwoman Robin Sullivan, Ventura Councilman Jim Monahan, county Supervisors Kathy Long and Judy Mikels, special district representatives Jim Acosta and John Rush, and public representative Jay Scott.

Dowdy said commissioners never formally adopted many of the agency’s growth policies and often disregarded many of them because enforcement would be costly, time consuming and beyond the scope of what LAFCO was intended to do. Rather than risk another lawsuit, he said, the commission decided to delete those provisions.

But Francis said the commission is skirting its responsibility as a public watchdog. He said by watering down its guidelines, the agency has made it easier for Santa Paula to expand.

“This is really sad,” Francis said. “Rather than enforcing the rules, they can dodge them by changing them.”

On Friday, Francis asked LAFCO to reconsider its policy revisions, saying it violated state law because the agency failed to notify the public of the environmental impacts the revisions could have.

At Wednesday’s hearing, Santa Paula officials will ask to expand the city’s borders to include 7,737 new acres of land, mostly in Adams and Fagan canyons to the northwest.

Ultimately, city leaders want to formally annex the land into the city, in hopes a developer will build as many as 3,600 upscale homes and a golf course. The expansion request also includes some industrial and commercial property on the east and west sides of the city’s current boundaries.

All but one Santa Paula City Council member supports expansion, saying it may be the only way to save what is now the county’s poorest and most densely developed city. A majority of the city’s 27,000 residents are Latinos employed in the agricultural industry and other low-wage jobs.

Sullivan, the city councilwoman and LAFCO commissioner, and a supporter of the city’s expansion proposal, said critics have another agenda.

She said some of the opponents are the same residents who have argued recently that Latinos lack sufficient political power, and have been pushing the U.S. Department of Justice to sue the city to force the creation of political districts that could increase Latino power.

Indeed, some backers of the ongoing federal probe have argued for years that development in the canyon areas could permanently change the face of the city, adding more barriers to Latino empowerment and creating upscale housing that is out of the price range of working-class residents. One backer of the probe is Councilwoman Laura Flores Espinosa, the city’s only Latino councilwoman and the only expansion opponent.

Sullivan said she believes the other contingent opposing the expansion, including Francis, is doing so mostly out of a political loyalty to the first group, many of whom tried to help Francis in a failed bid to enact a slow-growth measure in Santa Paula in 1998.

“None of it has anything to do with the future or quality of life in this city,” Sullivan said.

Building high-end homes could put needed money into city coffers and send an influx of consumers into the city, bolstering its struggling downtown shops and infusing cash into sales tax coffers, she said.

Sullivan said most Santa Paula residents support the expansion, noting voters’ 2-to-1 rejection of the 1998 slow-growth ballot initiative.

“If we don’t get some land for some economic development, so we can create some jobs, we have nowhere to go but down,” she said. “If we’re stopped in our tracks in 2000, there is nowhere to go.”

Alleged Conflicts of Interest Cited

Critics argue that developing the surrounding canyon areas is economically and environmentally irresponsible. Some predict Santa Paula would lose more money building the necessary infrastructure to accommodate canyon housing than it could ever make up in property tax revenue.

Michael Miller, a Santa Paula resident who makes his living in agriculture marketing, said expanding into the canyons would flood the area with too many people and destroy the existing small-town atmosphere.

“There’s going to be vehicle trips in and out on roads that aren’t designed for the traffic,” Miller said. “I just don’t see this as orderly growth that will enhance Santa Paula. I could see some modest development in [Fagan Canyon] but they want to do the whole package.”

Moreover, Francis said approval of the expansion could affect nearby Ventura and compromise existing greenbelt agreements between cities. “It’s got larger ramifications,” he said of Santa Paula’s proposal.

Francis, Miller and other critics also question the motives of Dowdy and Sullivan.

Dowdy was Santa Paula’s city manager prior to his move to LAFCO, has long-standing friendships with many city residents who favor the projects and is friendly with one of the canyon landowners who could profit if the land is annexed, they say.

And Sullivan is a real estate attorney who could benefit from future development.

Both officials deny there is a conflict.

Dowdy said when plans for the expansion began moving forward in 1998 he sought a legal opinion from the county counsel on whether he should recuse himself from the proceeding. He was advised that as long as he would not personally profit from an expansion, there was no conflict.

Dowdy said he also asked LAFCO commissioners whether they wanted him to recuse himself. They said no.

Sullivan points out that under the law, there is no conflict with her voting. She said she is considering the region’s interests as well as the city’s and can make a balanced decision.

She dismissed the accusation that the potential for future business is clouding her judgment. “That would be like saying if I was a butcher I’d be selling more meat to people,” Sullivan said. “I think that’s really stretching.”

Strengthen Agency, Attorney Says

Even after LAFCO’s vote on Wednesday, the debate over the agency’s role in how Ventura County cities grow is likely to continue.

The Legislature created county LAFCOs in 1963 to clamp down on the sprawl that began across California in the 1940s, leaving cities with irrational boundaries and pockets of residents who lacked adequate basic services.

Today, LAFCOs are charged with ensuring orderly growth, logical boundaries and efficient services, as well as preserving agricultural land and open space. The minimum standards LAFCOs must use to make these decisions are laid out in a section of state law referred to as the Cortese-Knox Act. But LAFCOs are not limited to Cortese-Knox. They also may set out their own additional policy requirements.

Clark Alsop, counsel for LAFCOs in Orange and San Bernardino counties, said he agrees with Ventura County’s policy revisions. “Those guidelines require a level of detail that goes way beyond what you normally think of in the LAFCO context,” he said. “I would have not recommended to my two LAFCOs that they ever put those requirements in.”

Los Angeles attorney Michael Colantuono, who served on a commission convened by the Legislature to study what revisions should be made to Cortese-Knox, declined to comment specifically on the Santa Paula plan, because his law firm has done some work for the city.

But he said the commission’s recommendations to the Legislature actually point toward giving more teeth, not less, to local LAFCOs. The state and counties should be willing to increase LAFCOs’ budgets to defend against litigation, if necessary, he said.

“California is consuming its prime agricultural land and open space resources at a rate that’s never been seen before, and can never be sustained,” he said. “The way to encourage a more efficient use of land is to make the LAFCO in each of the counties a more potent agency. LAFCOs must be made more accountable and more credible.”

“I can sympathize with a LAFCO saying, ‘We don’t even have a budget. Why should a county like Ventura, which has its own financial problems, have to subsidize decisions over Moorpark and Santa Paula. Let those cities defend themselves,’ ” Colantuono said. “But somebody has to look out for the regional interest in open space. The committee’s conclusion is that LAFCO should do that.”