Council Wants a Meeting to Resolve Sales Tax Impasse

A majority of the Ventura City Council wants to ease tensions with the county by meeting with supervisors directly in hopes of avoiding a potentially devastating sales tax loss to local cities, officials said Thursday.

At least one councilman said he voted to withhold half a million dollars from the county because he never thought that the county would go ahead with its plan.

“We thought the county could never realistically consider killing the tax for themselves and all of the cities, not in an election year,” Councilman Ray Di Guilio said. “That was our gamble, and now they’ve played a card. The bottom line is I think cooler heads need to prevail.”

Council members Donna DePaola, Jim Monahan and Carl Morehouse joined Di Guilio in expressing interest in the attempt to find a truce, lest supervisors follow through on their threat to wipe out a 1% sales tax that sends $85 million to local cities each year.

The county’s move would come only if the city of Ventura actually withholds $572,000 in sales taxes that it owes the county.

“I don’t know why we can’t . . . sit down and, if it’s necessary, have a food fight first, and then get down to the issues and discuss it,” said Morehouse, who works as a planner for the county.

Ventura City Manager Donna Landeros said she thought that it was “appropriate to move to the elected level,” but said she didn’t think that it was likely the council would back down from its position to withhold the money at its meeting Monday.

Further, she said she didn’t believe that the county would follow through on its threat to repeal the sales tax ordinance.

“The price they would pay is just too high,” she said.

Until now, only members of the city and county staff have met with each other at two meetings that ended at impasse, and there has been little contact between the county and the city of Ventura since the board’s vote Tuesday to repeal the tax.

That has left some council members feeling out in the cold, Morehouse said.

“I firmly believe at this point that the elected leaders need to be sitting face to face and talking,” he said. “It’s frustrating for me to be sitting on the sidelines.”

Supervisor Kathy Long said the county tried diplomacy, and county Chief Administrative Officer Harry Hufford even attended a Ventura City Council meeting hoping that the council would hold off on a vote, which it did not.

“The city voted out of the blue for this, without a courtesy call to any of us,” she said.

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At one meeting, Hufford offered staff members from the city of Ventura a variety of compromise options, Long said.

“He brought back that those [offers] fell on deaf ears,” she said. “We’re in a hard game of ‘He said this’ and ‘She said this.’ Now, this impacts all the cities.”

Long said she is willing for both parties to “step back, take a deep breath and step back to diplomacy.”

But, she said, the county is not bluffing and would be willing to proceed with plans to repeal the sales tax.

So Long is communicating with the other cities that would be affected by repeal of the salestax.

A meeting of city managers, which Hufford will attend, is scheduled next week. Landeros, however, won’t be there. She will be at the National League of Cities conference.

The issue is also on the agenda for a regular meeting of the county Council of Governments at the end of the month.

Supervisor Frank Schillo said it was likely time that some members of both boards come together, although he doubted that any meeting involving more than a couple of negotiators would be successful.

“Normally, these things are resolved between the [chief administrative officer] and the city manager,” he said. “But apparently these talks haven’t produced results. Maybe we need policy makers to resolve this.”

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Council members would be willing to reconsider some of the options that have been set aside for the city, DePaola said, and, despite the county’s hardball tactics, said she felt that the situation could still be worked out before it’s too late.

“If the county wants to say ‘Your big thing is the streets. Maybe we can help you with the streets,’ we might consider it,” she said. “I think there are things we can certainly work out.”