Staking New Territory in Land Preservation

Ten years after a lawyer and a high school teacher founded one of the most aggressive growth-control movements in the nation, Ventura County has preserved thousands of acres of farmland and open space and sown the beginnings of a new way for cities to grow.

A series of initiatives approved over the last decade have required that voters, not politicians, approve any subdivisions on land set aside for open space or agriculture.

At the same time, city councils and planners have begun to change the rules for growth -- looking up more often than out -- when considering where to put the 10,000 new residents who arrive in the county every year.

“SOAR changed the debate,” said Ventura attorney Richard Francis, one of the founders of Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, which pushed for the measures’ passage. “Developers will still develop. But we said they should develop within these lines. And that is what has happened. When I drive through Ventura County, it is still awfully pretty.”

As SOAR marks the 10th anniversary of its first ballot success, even its fiercest opponents acknowledge that it has been effective in its primary goal of confining new development within city boundaries.

But what is just as certain, land-use analysts say, is that the grass-roots group’s success remains an anomaly.

For a variety of reasons, the use of SOAR-like initiatives to contain growth has not caught on across the state. Although a few Bay Area cities have passed similar measures, Ventura County is alone in adopting restrictions for virtually every city as well as its unincorporated land.

“It was unprecedented and has never been replicated,” said William Fulton, a Ventura planner and land-use analyst who has researched SOAR extensively. “It came at the right time because there was still something to save.”

Agriculture was still a vibrant industry when the first SOAR measure was approved, Fulton noted. It remains so today, with valuable strawberries, lemons and nursery stock being farmed on more than 100,000 acres of rich Ventura County cropland.

Scenic orchards and hillsides make a drive through the Santa Clara River Valley appealing. On the Oxnard plain, verdant row crops stretching to the Pacific Ocean release the scent of onions in winter and strawberries in spring.

SOAR promised to maintain that semirural feel by preserving the agricultural greenbelts that for decades had separated the largest cities in this county of 800,000. Under the SOAR laws, city councils can still approve development that falls within the city’s urban boundary. But any project outside urban borders is subject to a public vote.

Over the last decade, voters have approved a handful of small projects that fell under SOAR restrictions. But they soundly rejected proposed large-scale housing developments in Ventura, Santa Paula and Moorpark.

Many big builders have abandoned Ventura County, said Donald Brackenbush, a Pasadena developer and former Los Angeles chapter president of the Urban Land Institute.

“I don’t think a national builder is going to take that local political gamble again,” Brackenbush said, referring to the time and expense of holding a public vote. “It’s just easier to go someplace else.”

Developers who stay, meanwhile, are adjusting to the new law of the land.

Although spacious single-family homes are still being built, some of the newest projects incorporate “smart-growth” guidelines that squeeze more homes onto smaller lots and include a mix of condos, apartments and retail space.

RiverPark in north Oxnard will include 1,800 homes and about 1,000 apartment units tightly clustered on the site of a former mining pit. It has been approved by the Oxnard City Council.

But other projects are pushing the envelope of what local residents might find acceptable.

A San Diego developer said he was embracing smart-growth concepts in proposing three condominium towers up to 500 feet tall next to the Ventura Freeway in Oxnard. That proposal has so far gotten a chilly reception from city leaders.

The SOAR laws will get their next test in February, when Moorpark voters decide whether to approve a 1,700-home development in rolling hills north of the city.

The city of Ventura, meanwhile, has created a new growth plan that focuses on using vacant parcels within the city, increasing densities and rebuilding aging properties to accommodate residential and retail growth.

Proposals call for multistory buildings that include residential units over retail storefronts and condominiums that maximize the use of space.

SOAR’s leaders point to the beach town of 105,000 as the best evidence yet that the growth-control measures have proved beneficial. For the first time in its 139-year history, Ventura is not contemplating expanding its borders.

“If you said in 1995 that Ventura would fully embrace the principles of smart growth, you would have been laughed out of the room,” said Ventura County Supervisor Steve Bennett, a former high school history teacher who founded SOAR with Francis. “But that’s exactly what we’re seeing today.”

Other counties have attempted to pass versions of SOAR, with little success. Measures in San Luis Obispo, San Diego and Sonoma counties were trounced, said Fulton, who edits a statewide planning newsletter and tracks growth-management techniques.

Santa Clara, Contra Costa and Alameda counties have adopted growth-management techniques that are not as aggressive, he said.

Santa Barbara County, meanwhile, keeps the lid on growth by “making life miserable for developers,” he said.

Efforts to control growth are usually concentrated in coastal counties where residents are wealthier and more educated, and pay top dollar for their homes, Fulton’s research has shown. Interior counties have shown little appetite for ballot-box zoning, he said.

Ventura County’s history of greenbelts and strong citizen desire for growth control benefited the SOAR group’s efforts, Fulton said. He also credited the strong organizational and political skills of the nonprofit group’s activist leaders.

“In 1998, they paired the countywide measure with city initiatives, which gave local voters incentive to get out and vote for both,” Fulton said.

Francis and Bennett launched their first SOAR ballot in Ventura, borrowing heavily from a similar effort in Napa. Despite being outspent 30 to 1 by a coalition of developers, Realtors and farmers opposed to the measure, SOAR won with 52% of the vote.

The anti-SOAR forces called the measure “social engineering” and sent out mailers warning that the cost of litigating the measure would cause crime to rise. (Napa’s growth-control laws have been challenged but upheld by the California Supreme Court, and there have been no suits in Ventura County.)

One mailer depicted a thug on a street corner with a gun shoved down the front of his pants as a warning of what was to come.

To drum up support, SOAR volunteers manned phone banks for three days before the vote, recalled Bennett.

“It was a Valley Forge moment,” he said. “We hung on by our fingernails at the end.”

The dire consequences predicted by opponents did not occur, and over the next five years, the county and seven other cities adopted similar measures by wide margins.

Port Hueneme and Ojai did not need to pass SOAR initiatives because their growth was already restricted.

Although opponents have laid down their swords for now, some question whether SOAR can remain intact in the long run.

As cities build out to their limits, pressure to build in protected greenbelts will increase, predicted Brackenbush, the Pasadena developer who lost a well-publicized bid to develop Ahmanson Ranch at the county’s eastern edge. It will get even more difficult to provide a range of housing as space tightens up, he said.

“We are in denial about the amount of growth that is coming,” he said. “There is going to be a tremendous struggle to change those boundaries.”

Farmers must find ways to maximize the value of their land if they are unable to sell it for new subdivisions, Fulton said. That means some of those bucolic orchards could be ripped out to make way for less attractive row crops and greenhouses, he said.

And, without big improvements to highways and public transit systems, traffic congestion on the Ventura Freeway will worsen, Fulton said.

“That’s the biggest growth problem we’re going to face in the next 20 years,” he said. “If it’s not solved, it will be gridlock from Thousand Oaks to Santa Barbara.”

But Bennett and Francis say those are challenges Ventura County will be facing with or without SOAR protections.

“The major lifting has been done,” Francis said. “Now it’s just a question of holding it together.”