Environmental Impact

The developer and the conservationist stood atop South Mountain, their legs covered with canvas chaps to blunt the strikes of rattlesnakes and their minds full of possibilities--an unlikely pair planning the future of Ventura County.

Dave O. White, a powerful force behind local growth, and Peter Brand, a point man for the California Coastal Conservancy, peered back along the twisting Santa Clara River 12 miles to the ocean.

“Wouldn’t it be incredible if wildlife could start from here and go all the way down to the coast,” White said to Brand. “I know a lot of these landowners, and I can help you achieve your vision.”

With that conversation in 1997, White and Brand began a collaboration that now includes three major wetlands projects and two huge development plans that could change the face of Oxnard over the next 20 years.

“I would encourage environmentalists to get over the thought that you can’t be a developer and a conservationist too,” said Brand recently, referring to White. “He’s been a strong supporter of what we’re trying to do, without a quid pro quo.”

But if White is now a champion of environmentally sensitive development, that has not always been the case. For at least 15 years, environmentalists and anti-sprawl activists have considered him a threat to Ventura County farmland.

They ridiculed his 1997 plan to build an agriculture theme park on 90 acres of farmland outside city boundaries in the fertile Oxnard Plain. They raked his 1999 effort to sell a 13-acre farm parcel in an Oxnard “greenbelt” for a new elementary school. And they fought him for years over construction of Oxnard High School, now completed on 53 acres of former prime cropland on the city’s western flank.

To them, White is a greenbelt buster, a farmland manager with a bulldozer in his back pocket.

“He’s a gentleman,” said former Oxnard Councilwoman Dorothy Maron. “But he does crummy things with farmland.”

At age 60, after 31 years of local deals, White has a bigger piece of the development pie than any other builder, broker and manager of land in Ventura County.

A quiet, persuasive behind-the-scenes real estate developer, White and his partners control 2,400 acres in Oxnard alone: the proposed 416-home River Ridge West golf course community, the planned $750-million RiverPark mini-city along the Ventura Freeway, and the vast 1,400-acre Ormond Beach area near Point Mugu.

Those projects account for nearly two-thirds of all the land that can be developed in Oxnard, and more than one-sixth of the developable acres in Ventura County.

In another realm, White has grown wealthy coaxing crops from the Ventura County farms he manages, then selling pieces of that acreage for construction. White and his older brother, Frank, own most of Ag Land Services, which oversees 2,500 acres of cropland in Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

The Whites are also real estate brokers who made the largest property sale in county history--the 1996 deal in which legendary Oxnard developer Martin V. “Bud” Smith unloaded most of his assets to a Wall Street investor for $175 million.

White, in fact, is sometimes compared with Smith--the most prolific developer in county history.

“Bud was the visionary of the last 50 years,” said Ventura rancher and businesswoman Carolyn Leavens. “And it appears that Dave is pushing that vision right into the future.”

Steve Kinney, executive director of the Greater Oxnard Economic Development Corp., said White’s long-term impact could eventually rival that of Smith--who developed part of Channel Islands Harbor and the county’s only high-rise towers at the Oxnard Financial Plaza.

“If he succeeds with just these three projects,” Kinney said, “he and his group will have the greatest single impact on the face of Oxnard, other than Martin Smith, in the city’s history.”

He’s Made a Career of Focusing on Oxnard

That White is in such a position is testament to his perseverance, the Oxnard-centric focus of his development activity and his use of partnerships to cobble together projects that catch the eye of city officials.

He is also good at get-acquainted lunches, low-key lobbying to move projects forward and timely campaign contributions to city officials.

He is a developer who has donated money to the Nature Conservancy, and who can identify every bird he sees by name, gender and marking. He reads several books at a time: “Black Holes and Time Warps,” a text about multiple universes, is a current favorite.

The son of a San Bernardino aircraft mechanic and a homemaker, and a graduate of San Jose State College, White is unpretentious and plain-spoken.

He has been married to wife Leila for 41 years, and he lived in a 2,000-square-foot tract house in Camarillo until 1993, far longer than financially necessary. He now lives in a $1-million house on the ocean.

On any Saturday, he might roll out for a 40-mile bike ride to Ojai and back. For years, he would kayak four miles out to Gina, the offshore oil island, just for fun.

To celebrate his 60th birthday this summer, White completed a half-Ironman competition in Sonoma County--a 1.4-mile swim, a 55-mile bike ride and a 13-mile run. It took seven hours, but he finished.

“I think he’s a good guy, outstanding,” said Mayor Manuel Lopez, who has known White for 14 years and received some of his campaign donations. “He’s a good developer and a good person. He has his own interests, but I believe he also has the best interests of the city at heart. And he’s willing to use his talents here.”

But more than that, city officials say, White knows what they want accomplished in specific parts of town, and he offers that and more.

“Developers try to bring in a C proposal, and we say we want it upgraded to A,” Councilman Dean Maulhardt said. “Dave White has always brought in the better project right from the get go.”

When longtime city Community Development Director Dick Maggio retired recently, he cited four projects he thinks will dramatically improve the city. Three are White’s.

“Some developers go to many [cities], but his preference is to work in just one,” Maggio said. “That makes him more noticeable.”

White keeps alert in particular for what he can build in areas where Oxnard has had trouble attracting a reliable developer--and which offer extraordinary promise either through location or natural beauty.

The RiverPark project is a good example. At the junction of the Ventura Freeway and Pacific Coast Highway, the site is among the most prized remaining in the county. That will be particularly true after construction of a new interchange that feeds directly into the area, and the widening of the Santa Clara River Bridge--a project set to start in 2002.

White had his eyes on this site for years after collapse of the Town Center office project in the early 1990s. But he did not have enough money to pull the property out of bankruptcy. So he waited until Paul Keller, then president of one of the Los Angeles Basin’s largest construction companies, raised $8 million to buy the defaulted Town Center bonds.

In the meantime, White secured an option to buy 350 acres next door, the old Southern Pacific Milling Co. gravel mining site. He told Keller that a larger project made more sense because of the cost of roads and utilities.

So Keller and White became partners in 1999. By early this year they had city officials escorting them enthusiastically in pitches to the news media. Their plan is stunning in its ambition.

RiverPark LLC hopes to build a new upscale community with 3,000 dwellings centered on village greens, a Town Square fashioned after the city of Sonoma’s, a movie theater and restaurants, a first-class hotel and convention center, office buildings, a school, sport fields and a food-and-wine exposition.

All of that would total 2.5 million square feet of commercial space. By comparison, The Oaks mall in Thousand Oaks and the Pacific View mall in Ventura are each about 1 million square feet.

Keller secured the financial backing of Oak Tree Capital Management, a Los Angeles company that oversees billions of dollars in investments, mostly from pension funds. The company has a piece of several projects in Southern California, including the massive Playa del Rey development near Marina del Rey.

Keller said he sought out White after a number of local businessmen recommended him.

“He brings a tremendous amount of local knowledge that I don’t have,” Keller said. “And he’s very, very well regarded in the west county.”

Plans to Transform Ormond Beach

White and Keller also looked south to Oxnard’s roughest neighborhood for opportunity at Ormond Beach--an area now mostly heavy industry, salt flats and farming. Its jewel is Ventura County’s largest remaining undeveloped stretch of coastline and wetlands alive with rare birds.

But the 1,404-acre area between Point Mugu and Port Hueneme has a 20-year history of grandiose plans that failed.

So in mid-1999, city officials brought in the nonprofit Urban Land Institute to plot a strategy for restoring the wetlands, cleaning up the industry and creating a thriving new community that could elevate the city’s poorest neighborhoods by sheer proximity.

White was one of 100 local residents interviewed by institute analysts. He had an idea for what should be done. And in January, the City Council embraced his unsolicited proposal and signed an exclusive negotiating agreement that gave the White-Keller team the right to plan development on the 300 acres the city owns jointly with the Metropolitan Water District of Los Angeles, and the surrounding 1,100 acres as well.

“He’s willing to do what no one else is,” Lopez said of White. “And his [team] has the knowledge and the financial ability to deliver.”

Using concepts from the Urban Land Institute report, White has sketched a plan centered on restoration of hundreds of acres of wetlands and construction of a private, 4,000-student university. Existing heavy industry would be buffered by farmland and new light industry. The university, at Hueneme and Arnold roads, would include student housing. Up to 1,500 additional dwellings, mostly single family homes, would be built around the university and north of Hueneme Road.

White is talking with representatives of private universities--and one public university--that are interested either in moving to Ormond Beach or setting up a satellite campus that would stress marine biology. At least three of the colleges seem serious, he said.

“The main thing at Ormond Beach is changing the character and image of that area,” White said. “We need something that is very prestigious and something that will create value. When you’re doing major developments you need catalysts, and down there the catalysts are the wetlands and the [proposed] university.”

White’s toughest sell, however, may be the environmentalists who love Ormond Beach.

Jean Harris, a founder of the Ormond Beach Observers, is one. And White is wooing her unabashedly, promising that he will not proceed with any other aspect of the plan until a consensus is reached on how and where wetlands will be restored.

“The first thing we’re going to do is sit down with the environmental groups and say, ‘Where are the wetlands?’,” he said. “Until that is decided, we’re wasting our time doing urban planning.”

Harris, who for years fought White’s River Ridge West golf course project but dropped her objection when the farmland was included in Oxnard’s growth boundaries, said she is listening to White.

“It’s going to take me awhile to make up my mind, and he knows it,” Harris said. “He’s invited me to brunch, and the week before the [Democratic National] convention, he came to my house.”

With White came a strong new partner, Ira E. Yellin, who has worked with Keller in downtown Los Angeles and has preserved historic buildings there. Among his long list of credentials is a directorship of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

“He’s a quality person, and he may be able to see the big picture,” Harris said. “They emphasized that they wanted to put everything on the table so we would feel comfortable with each other. I want that too.”

It didn’t hurt that White brought Brand along to that August meeting with Harris, since the coastal conservancy hopes to close escrow this month on a $15-million purchase of 600 acres of beach, wetlands and fields at Ormond Beach.

“Right now, there are 250 or 300 acres of wetlands, and we’re talking about more than doubling that,” Brand said. “That’s why we’re so excited about the restoration of Ormond Beach.”

Not All His Ideas Have Been Accepted

Not that Oxnard has always embraced White’s proposals.

The city blocked his 90-acre agricultural theme park plan in 1997 after furious residents pointed out that the exposition would gobble up protected farmland to promote farm products. It was also part of a larger 815-acre plan to annex farmland southeast of the city and develop it.

“I think that project really triggered the passage of the SOAR [anti-sprawl] initiative in Oxnard,” attorney and farm owner Fred Rosenmund said. “That so outraged so many people, they just said ‘Stop!’ ”

White has also been trying to develop farmland along Victoria Avenue, where River Ridge West will be built, for 15 years. In 1987, he offered 80 acres free, along with $5 million, to Cal State University officials if they would build a four-year public college there. White would have recouped his investment by building homes on nearby property. But university officials were not impressed.

Then White tried to sell some of the land as an elementary school site, and finally he sold 80 acres from the same holdings to the Oxnard High School District. The district only needed 53 acres, so White agreed to refund its money if it gained approval for White to build houses on the remaining 27 acres. The gambit failed when Ventura County officials refused to rezone the farmland.

Across Gonzales Road from the new high school, White finally gained a foothold in 1990 when the City Council refused to place lemon orchards and cropland into a protected 2,700-acre greenbelt. By 1996, White and his partners were floating their 330-acre River Ridge West proposal--416 homes, two churches, an elementary school and an 18-hole golf course, which the city will build and own.

But with this project came controversy. The city’s first River Ridge was part of a debt-ridden golf course/hotel project from the 1980s that is still siphoning $2 million a year from basic city services.

City officials say none of the problems of the old River Ridge project exist with the new one and that the new course will make a healthy profit for the city.

To sweeten the pot, White and his partners agreed to pay a $10,700 special assessment for each of the 416 houses. But a final sticking point was agreeing on when developers would pay that $4.45 million. Finally last month they agreed to pay it upfront, so the city would not have to borrow so much money to build the $8-million golf course, thus slashing carrying costs.

White expects the City Council to sign the development agreement next month.

And city officials are already hailing the project as a showcase that will tell visitors Oxnard is home to executives, not just blue-collar workers.

“I guess this all shows their ability to come up with projects that make sense,” Lopez said. “At River Ridge 2, I like the types of houses. Church sites are badly needed. We can’t find enough school sites. And the golf course makes financial sense.”

That is the way White wants to be seen--as a manager of farmland who builds on it only when that makes sense--only when it is a logical extension of a city.

“I try to balance those uses,” he said. “I am a person who looks at the possibilities of a particular property. I see myself as a manager of land, and that entails farming, urban development, recreation and conservation.”

“The reality is we’re successful now with the city and with the coastal conservancy because we understand that you have to work together or nothing gets done,” he added. “I’m comfortable with myself and what I do. But I know there’s never going to be agreement on that from those who think differently.”

To Maron, who served on the Oxnard City Council from 1980 to 1992, White’s goal is simple: Make a buck by developing farmland.

“I had lunches with him as a councilperson,” she said. “He’s very charming, very intelligent and pretty persuasive. Everything was fine and nice, but in the end he wants you to agree that what he’s proposing is a great idea and that you will vote for it. Finally he would say, ‘You really won’t change your mind, will you, Dorothy?’ ”

Earning a Living, Leaving a Legacy

White, wife Leila, two sons and a daughter rolled into Ventura County from Bakersfield in 1969. They arrived in a 1958 Chevy.

White likes to explain his views on growth using that image of his young family.

“When we got here we had one car. Then my wife got a car. Then my kids grew up and got cars. So we had five cars. Then they got married and brought wives here and had children. So we went from one house to four. And we all lived here. Now that’s growth. I’m responsible, and I’ll take that responsibility.”

His point is: Where will his children live if Ventura County stops building houses? Two of his children finally moved elsewhere for greater opportunity, he said.

“I don’t believe to this day that developers cause growth,” he said. “Families do.”

So cities shouldn’t stop growing, he said. They should establish logical boundaries and build within them. That’s what he thinks he’s helped do, although critics say he’s pushed those boundaries too far.

White says he has added far more cultivated farm acres to this county than he has ever sold for development.

As marketing manager for a Kaiser Aetna land company, White planted drip-watered citrus orchards on nearly 10,000 acres in Los Posas Valley from 1969-75. Then he subdivided those plots and sold them as 20-, 40- and 60-acre ranchettes. The orchards are still producing fruit.

After selling out that project, he joined with Kaiser Aetna farm manager Craig Mason and three other partners to form Ag Land Services in 1975. They paid $150,000 for $350,000 worth of farm equipment and took over Kaiser Aetna’s farm contracts on 1,000 acres.

That company has grown and prospered, managing farms, selling farmland to farmers and in one notable deal selling Pitts Ranch in Camarillo to Pardee Homes, which built hundreds of houses. That 160 acres of orchards, bought for $27,000 an acre in 1979, sold for $100,000 an acre in 1989. That is a tidy $12-million profit.

Today the company manages 1,300 acres of farmland here and 1,200 acres in Santa Barbara County. It’s headquartered in the same old ranch house on Somis Road near Camarillo, with the offices for all four current partners--the Whites, chairman and CEO Greg L. Stenshol and chief financial officer Craig Fife.

Frank White also runs the brothers’ Realty Services brokerage business, which has sold an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 acres of land from one farmer to another since 1995.

On Dave White’s office walls are three large aerial photos of Oxnard, a River Ridge West diagram, a mock-up of the RiverPark project, Oxnard’s general plan for development and photos of his children--all three of whom work in land development--and nine grandchildren.

He pays his bills with earnings from the farmland management and brokerage firms, White says, but he concentrates on his development business.

He sees that as the difference between making a living and leaving a legacy:

“Part of the pressure you feel is that you want to come back to these places with your grandkids and say, ‘This is what your grandpa did.’ ”

White thinks his work with Brand works toward that end.

Since they hiked to the top of South Mountain three years ago, Brand has announced a coastal conservancy proposal to buy and restore 6,400 acres of stream-side habitat along the same stretch of the Santa Clara River they looked down upon. Brand has dubbed White the “godfather” of the river parkway effort for his work with landowners.

Then last month, Brand revealed that the conservancy hopes to buy 221 acres of rare coastal dunes and wetlands near McGrath State Beach at the mouth of the Santa Clara, property owned by the pioneer McGrath family, whom White represents in the sale.

The developer and environmentalist have become so friendly that Brand set White’s pace in July for the bicycle portion of the Sonoma County Ironman competition.

“I’m a fan of Dave White,” Brand said. “I haven’t been through the battles with him over development that others have. But I know him as a gentleman who follows through on his promises. And I trust my instincts on this sort of thing.”

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* OXNARD’S FUTURE

A look at several development proposals. B2