A Cautious Step Forward

Taking advantage of the 20-year timeout on urban sprawl imposed by SOAR, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors is moving carefully forward on a strategy to provide more permanent protection for farmland and open space.

Board members unanimously voted to ask state lawmakers to draft legislation authorizing creation of an open-space district.

Such a district would raise money to buy and maintain selected parcels rather than simply forbid development without voter approval, as under the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) laws.

We are glad that newly elected Supervisor Steve Bennett, one of the leaders of the SOAR campaign, is now part of the county’s official effort. He has said all along that SOAR represented only one approach to containing sprawl, and a temporary one at that. All interests must be heard from as Ventura County works out how to increase its supply of housing for a growing population without sacrificing the green vistas so fundamental to the county’s quality of life.

There should be nearly universal support for setting up an organization to seek and accept private donations for this purpose. Ventura County has missed out on millions of available private dollars because it had no appropriate body to accept and use them.

Far more difficult will be persuading taxpayers to contribute to the cause, according to voter surveys.

Merely creating an open-space district would not resolve the matters of which land residents want the county to buy, how they want to pay for it and how they want the land used. And many questions about who would direct the district and how it would operate remain to be answered.

“It’s more important that we do it right than that we do it now,” Bennett told his new colleagues. “But I’ve seen too many good ideas die because no one ever said, ‘Do it now.’ ”

We agree that the success of this venture will be determined by the details. We applaud the board for its unanimous vote to move forward cautiously but to indeed move forward.