Ventura Aims for Share of U.S. Cleanup Funds

Ventura officials cheered when Congress recently approved $250 million to speed cleanup and redevelopment of underused or abandoned industrial sites nationwide.

City officials hope to tap into the funds to redevelop a three-mile stretch of privately owned oil and chemical manufacturing sites in the blighted Avenue area on the city’s west end.

In addition to providing new money, the legislation bolsters legal protection for landowners with potentially contaminated parcels. City officials hope this will convince owners to come forward for site testing.

“It’s important to find out as much about the legislation as possible and its potential to us,” said Bob Tague, Ventura’s interim economic revitalization manager. “We’re going to put that information together and go after as much money as we can.”

Ventura officials have long contemplated redevelopment of the economically depressed Avenue area, which for decades was the site of oil drilling and exploration.

Officials began pursuing federal “brownfields” funding in the late 1990s. Three years ago, the city secured a $200,000 grant through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Economic Development Initiative to study the west side neighborhood and begin targeting sites for environmental testing.

But property owners were reluctant to participate. They feared that if regulators found contamination on their land, they could be forced to pay for cleanup or face litigation, said Susan Daluddung, community development director.

The city is now working to identify industrial landowners and determine what contamination might have occurred on their properties.

Roger Case, a real estate broker who lives on the west side, said the new legislation sounds promising, but property owners still distrust the government. He said they need more information about cleanup funding and legal protections.

Landowners would basically be allowing “the government to come in and say, ‘You have contamination here,’ and now all [they] have is a whole can of worms here and massive exposure,” Case said.

“When you can guarantee that [the government] will clean it up or provide some kind of underwriting, then I think you’ve got something going,” Case added, “but you’re not going to find anyone just volunteering for this.”

Case thinks there is a demand for mixed-use development on the Avenue, noting that Santa Barbara housing prices are so high that commuters have created a niche market for Avenue housing.

The area the city would like to improve is about 1,200 acres, about a quarter of which is zoned for industrial use. Those 300 acres are divided into at least 140 parcels within city limits and owned by dozens of individuals and corporations.

Ventura City Councilman Brian Brennan said he doesn’t expect landowners to step forward at once. But if the city can work in partnership with one or two owners at the outset, he said, others will be more likely to follow.

“It’s opening Pandora’s box and nobody wants to do it,” he said.

But if the city obtains funding, Brennan said it would be better for landowners to take advantage of it now. If they wait, “they’ll wish they dealt with it 10 years before, when the funding was available,” he said.

With tough growth-control laws in place, Brennan sees government assistance to clean up industrial sites as more than a giveaway to developers.

“Just stopping sprawl was one thing,” Brennan said. “Looking at some of these rundown old properties and understanding why people were jumping over them to go out to greener pastures was why I got the city involved.”

Besides convincing landowners to participate, the city still has much work to do before applying for a share of the federal funds. Two city employees overseeing the brownfields effort early on have left their jobs, and their replacements have been struggling to catch up.

The city expects stiff competition for federal cleanup funds. There are 67,000 brownfield sites in California alone.

Some local developers see the brownfields funding as an incentive to improve the Avenue area.

“I would love to participate in working with the city on some of these industrial sites,” said Scott Bulmer, vice president of the firm that developed Sycamore Village, a new residential project on the Avenue.

Bulmer’s project was built on a former orchard, and tests were negative for contamination, he said. But if he had sought to use a contaminated parcel on the Avenue, it wouldn’t automatically be a “deal-killer” now, he said.

“The brownfields funds would be a useful enticement for me to clean it up and make good use of it,” Bulmer said. “I’d be willing to go the distance to make a good site viable again.

“In the 1800s, it was a beautiful residential area,” he said of the Avenue. “Then they discovered oil, and in came all the stuff that came with the oil industry. Where else in California do you have all that industrial stuff a mile from the beach?

“You’ve got some of these businesses just lingering and hanging on even though everything they were there for is gone. Now this area is ready to return to residential. It can be turned back into what it once was.”