Fillmore and SOAR Supporters Compromise

Fillmore officials and slow-growth advocates have reached a compromise on a proposed development boundary for the city, avoiding another showdown at the ballot box.

Mayor Don Gunderson and Councilman Evaristo Barajas created the agreement with members of a slow-growth group that had been gathering signatures to place an anti-sprawl measure, known as SOAR, on the ballot for March.

That measure aimed to set boundaries for development for the next 20 years and would have required any development beyond those boundaries to win voter approval.

But under the compromise reached this week, the Fillmore SOAR group agreed to push a new measure that adds 46 acres to the inventory of land that can be developed without a public vote. City leaders have maintained that the additional acreage is needed to accommodate development projects necessary to meet housing needs.

In return, Gunderson and Barajas pledged to recommend to their fellow council members that they adopt the new growth-control measure into law once SOAR supporters gather enough signatures to put it on the ballot.

That move would allow Fillmore residents to avoid the battles that erupted last year when SOAR proponents and city leaders put competing growth-control measures on the ballot. Both of them were defeated.

“After going through this whole ordeal last election, we saw the benefit in getting together and seeing what we could work out,” Barajas said. “It took a tremendous amount of energy last time. We thought this time we should be able to come up with a better way of figuring things out that would satisfy both sides.”

Under the compromise, development could proceed without a public vote in the city and several hundred surrounding acres.

But SOAR proponents said they were especially pleased that the council members agreed to shield from development sensitive areas near the state fish hatchery and Goodenough Road.

Because the boundaries have changed, SOAR proponents will have to start the signature-gathering process over again.

Fillmore resident Paul Harding, a slow-growth proponent, said he believes his group will be able to gather the 750 signatures necessary to qualify the measure for the ballot in short order and that the City Council will adopt the measure into law by year’s end.

“This whole issue has been very divisive; there are varying opinions across the dinner table and down the mattress,” Harding said. “We are certainly delighted this has now been resolved and we can move on to other things.”

If the new measure is adopted, Fillmore would be the eighth Ventura County city to pass an anti-sprawl initiative. Those measures are complemented by a countywide initiative, approved by voters in 1998, that prevents farmland and open space outside cities from being rezoned for development without voter approval.

But Ventura County Supervisor Steve Bennett, a leader of the county’s growth-control movement, said the measure in Fillmore is particularly important because of planned construction of the 21,600-home Newhall Ranch project east of the city, just across the Los Angeles County line.

“If the city wanted to start expanding dramatically toward Newhall, it could have really opened up an urban sprawl corridor between Los Angeles and Ventura counties,” Bennett said.

“That was the most threatened area and the last area where we needed to complete SOAR coverage,” he said. “And to have the last city picked up in such a dramatic fashion . . . really makes this a historic agreement.”