Find Ways to Balance Needs

Ventura County’s anti-sprawl movement draws much of its juice from the belief that changing urban development patterns is too big a job for elected officials. What will happen now that leaders of that movement themselves are winning seats on local legislative bodies?

We’re about to find out.

Steve Bennett, the schoolteacher / environmentalist whose passion and community organizing skill helped push through Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources initiatives in the city of Ventura in 1995 and Ventura County in 1998, has been elected to the Board of Supervisors.

Conejo Valley SOAR leader Linda Parks has won a second term on the Thousand Oaks City Council, this time with a solid ally in slate-mate Ed Masry and the likely support of Councilman Dan Del Campo at least part of the time.

Roseann Mikos, leader of the SOAR organization in Moorpark, finally won a seat on the City Council she has spent years berating for its pro-development ways.

John Procter, who jumped into Santa Paula politics because of his outrage over the City Council’s plan for expensive sprawl into rustic canyons, ran for the council and supported his own city’s SOAR initiative. Both won.

Fillmore voters had two sprawl-control measures to choose from and rejected both--but they elected Patti Walker, a leading advocate of the more restrictive one, to the City Council.

Clearly, the grass-roots anti-development sentiment that begat SOAR has gone mainstream. What will this mean to Ventura County and its 10 cities?

Despite the county’s long tradition of slow growth, the population has steadily grown and will inevitably continue do so, due as much to the birth rate as to new arrivals from other areas. With SOAR boundaries increasingly limiting the expansion of cities into surrounding farmland and open space, the only place to house these additional people will be within existing city limits.

With careful decision-making and good design standards, that could work successfully. It would, however, be very different from the way California has grown over the past century and a half--and it would require a major change of attitude by the construction, real estate and finance industries as well as elected officials.

We support preservation of farmland and open space. We also recognize the need for decent, safe, affordable housing, and for commercial and industrial options to provide jobs and keep the local economy strong. We hope that the anti-sprawl advocates who are joining the Board of Supervisors and various city councils will indeed be able to find better ways to balance all these needs than have been found in the past.

There is plenty of room to improve on the development patterns that shaped such formerly idyllic places as Orange County and the San Fernando Valley into what they are today. We congratulate these newly elected (or reelected) officials, applaud them for trying to work within the system as well as without, and wish them well in their efforts to find a better way.