Don’t Scrap Government Council
When the Ventura Council of Governments meets Thursday, there will be talk of scrapping the whole outfit. That would be a mistake.
We agree that VCOG has never managed to achieve the sort of regional thinking and planning--let alone leadership--that would enable Ventura County to build a truly cohesive and sustainable strategy for the future. But its lackluster effectiveness does not diminish the need.
Instead of abolishing this regional body, made up of representatives from Ventura County and each of its city governments, it should be strengthened and expanded to include agencies that coordinate transportation and education.
Many of the shortcomings and inefficiencies in the county are the result of counterproductive competition among cities. The costly feuds between shopping malls in Oxnard and Ventura and retail outlet centers in Oxnard and Camarillo are the most notorious examples, but there have been many. VCOG should be a forum for consensus-building and teamwork, to combat such divisive and expensive squabbling.
To date, VCOG has focused mostly on issues that neither county nor any of the cities wanted to tackle alone, most notably trying to broker equitable ways to address the shortage of housing and help the homeless. Neither issue gained VCOG much popularity, and it is understandable that some local politicians would argue to abolish it.
But that would do nothing to resolve those perennial issues. Neither would leaving county government and 10 city governments to dream up their own strategies, free from coordination.
More than two years ago, Supervisor Frank Schillo proposed merging VCOG with the Ventura County Transportation Commission, which oversees the distribution of federal and state transportation funds, as well as sets priorities for countywide transportation projects. Transportation is certainly one crucial consideration in any regional plan for Ventura County, and we support a restructuring that would bring it more fully into the mix.
But the same can be said for education--particularly as finding sites for new schools becomes ever more challenging. Simply merging VCOG and the Transportation Commission could produce a distorted sense of priorities.
If strengthened and expanded, rather than watered down or abolished, VCOG could be an ideal forum to work out the sort of regional cooperation that will become increasingly important as Ventura County adjusts to life within the strictures of the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) initiatives.
The Ventura Council of Governments is far from perfect, but it is better than nothing. In a county that has suffered from a lack of effective regional coordination, it should be improved but certainly not scrapped.