Fillmore the Last to Join SOAR Fight

Forging the final link in a countywide chain of growth-control measures, Fillmore officials have adopted restrictions that shield hundreds of acres of farmland and open space surrounding the city from urban development.

The new law, approved this month by the Fillmore City Council, prevents the city from growing beyond designated borders without voter approval until 2020.

The small Santa Clara Valley farm town became the eighth of Ventura County’s 10 cities--plus the county at large--to adopt the slow-growth measure known as Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources or SOAR.

And it capped a grass-roots movement to throw up barricades around every community threatened by unchecked growth, a coordinated campaign that has swept across the county in recent years in an effort to save what remains of its fertile topsoil.

“It is absolutely the final link in the chain,” said Bill Fulton, a Ventura-based expert on regional planning and development.

The only cities that have not adopted SOAR boundaries are landlocked Port Hueneme and Ojai, which allows development at a rate so slow that additional restrictions are not required, Fulton said.

“There is no place else in the state that has enacted these kinds of urban growth boundaries plus voter restrictions on rural land,” he said. “That’s why we continue to get national attention.”

The movement began in 1995 in Ventura, where slow-growth activists unveiled an anti-sprawl blueprint--patterned after a court-tested Napa County law--that would effectively put thousands of acres in and around the city off limits to urban development.

At the heart of the measure were provisions that stripped elected officials of the power to rezone farmland and open space without voter approval. Days after voters threw their weight behind the ballot measure, architects of the slow-growth campaign began talking about pushing the same kind of greenbelt protections countywide.

“Nothing breeds success like success,” said Oxnard attorney Richard Francis, coauthor of Ventura’s SOAR measure and a key player in the countywide campaign.

“When we were successful in Ventura, there were a number of people countywide interested in becoming more active on a larger scale,” he said. “It took a couple of years for us to realize we might be able to do that, but once that realization came, the plan really was to get every city and the county on the same page.”

In fall 1998, voters overwhelmingly approved a countywide SOAR measure that prevents farmland and open space outside cities from being rezoned for development without voter approval.

At the same time, voters in Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, Camarillo and Oxnard adopted similar initiatives. Moorpark voters followed suit in 2000 and Santa Paula hopped on the SOAR bandwagon the next year.

Fillmore was the last to climb aboard, as residents grew increasingly concerned about checking development in one of the region’s last predominantly agricultural valleys.

The issue was seen as particularly crucial in the bucolic farm town because of the planned construction of the 21,600-home Newhall Ranch project east of the city, just across the Los Angeles County line.

After bruising campaigns on both sides of the growth-control issue, Fillmore voters in November 2000 rejected two growth measures, one sponsored by SOAR proponents and a less restrictive law sponsored by the City Council.

Months later, SOAR backers filed a second growth-control plan with the city and began collecting signatures to put another measure before voters next fall.

This time, however, Fillmore officials and slow-growth advocates were able to reach a compromise on a proposed development boundary for the city, avoiding another showdown at the ballot box.

Under the compromise reached late last year, 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, City Council members pledged to adopt the new growth-control measure once SOAR supporters gathered enough signatures to put it on the ballot.

“We’re confident that everything is in place now and that we’ve accomplished what we set out to do, which was to give the citizenry a greater voice in how their community is going to grow,” SOAR proponent Paul Harding said. “It doesn’t mean there will be no growth. It just means whoever is promoting growth is going to have to take their case to the people and win the support of the people.”

Indeed, while the new law shields sensitive areas near the state fish hatchery and Goodenough Road from development, it still provides for construction--without voter approval--of the largest development in Fillmore’s history.

That project, an ambitious mix of houses, parkland and a new elementary school proposed by Griffin Industries, is awaiting city approval. But the new growth-control law has forced the developer to scale back the project from its original vision of 1,000 homes on 400 acres to 750 units on 236 acres.

But on all sides of the issue, even at Griffin Industries, there is appreciation that the issue was settled by compromise rather than another divisive showdown at the ballot box.

County Supervisor Kathy Long, who represents the Fillmore area, said attention in Fillmore and elsewhere should now turn to finding ways of accommodating necessary growth within SOAR-created boundaries.

“You now have consensus, whether it be by leadership or initiative, that there needs to be growth in our respective communities and contained within boundaries,” said Long, noting that SOAR’s 2020 expiration date provides a deadline for answering key development questions.

“I think we have communities [where residents] either came from, or were certainly aware of, what they didn’t want, which was L.A.-Orange County sprawl,” she said. “And by taking the steps they have, they’ve now at least secured a baseline from which to work and continue to preserve that dream.”