The Way Forward ... To 2016

Mayor's State of the City Address, February 7, 2011

On behalf of the City Council, I would like to welcome you to the City Council Chambers and thank you for attending tonight.

After what all of us have been through in 2010, as your mayor, the message that comes to my mind is, “Whew!”

We made it through a year when money was in short supply for everybody, when the political rhetoric everywhere became much more unforgiving, and, whether we liked it or not, when the choices before us were choices would have never before considered.

But what’s remarkable is that despite all these travails, our spirit as a community has not been dampened. Ventura remains a place where people love to live their lives, run their businesses, and enjoy everyday life.

We have made it through some very difficult times by working together, by making sacrifices by finding new ways to do things and by undertaking efforts that inspire us and lift our spirits.

So I think it is worthwhile to acknowledge people and organizations who have helped us – both our City Government and our community – make it to where we are today.

First, from our perspective here at City Hall, I want to reassure everybody that our city is in good financial shape. Our budget is balanced and has been all through this dark time.

Now, let me hasten to add we don’t like the way we’ve balanced it. We’ve had to cut many important things and we know that our reduced level of services is not sustainable. We must find ways to bring our services back so we can maintain our city’s quality of life.

But it’s important to note that we have not shirked from the tough choices. Other cities have papered over their problems and now they will face severe cuts. We have attacked the issue of declining revenue head-on – meaning that future cuts will not be nearly as painful as other cities will see. I want to thank our City Manager, Rick Cole, for his willingness to tackle the hard issues head-on; and our CFO, Jay Panzica, for leading us through these difficult financial times with clarity, simplicity, and goodwill. I also want to thank our line department heads – Elena Brokaw of Parks & Rec, Rick Raives of Public Works, Jeff Lambert of Community Development, and especially Police Chief Ken Corney and Fire Chief Kevin Rennie – for doing more with less under difficult circumstances.

We also have our employees to thank. They have agreed to changes and reforms that will help make our future city budgets sustainable. One of my greatest concerns is that even when the economy recovers we will not be able to restore necessary services because of increased pension costs. But just this month our employees agreed to contribute to their own pensions, thus covering increased cost of pensions and they agreed to pension reform for future employees, which will save us a great deal in the long run.

These changes require sacrifice on the part of our employees but will help our city to focus – revenues increase – on restoring those services that we desperately need to bring back. I would like to thank the Ventura Police Officers Association and the Service Employees International Union for their help. I also would like to thank the Ventura City Fire Fighters Association for their support and look forward to working with them on a contract Finally, I’d like to thank our Human Resources Director, Jenny Roney, for guiding us through these tough negotiations.
Making these changes has required change in the way we do business. It’s always easy here at City Hall to think that we can solve all problems – and pay for them too. And because we meet in public and on television every week, it’s also easy for others to appear before us and demand the same – solve all problems and pay for them too.

But we up here can’t solve and pay for all problems – not all by ourselves. And one of the most important accomplishments of the last year has been to partner with other organizations in the community to get things done.

Perhaps the most important partnership we have forged in the last year is with the Greater Ventura Chamber of Commerce. We cannot succeed as a city without a strong and involved business community and the Chamber has reinvented itself during tough times with great gusto and energy.

So I want to thank that dynamic duo of Marni Brooke, chair of the Chamber board, and Sandra Burkhart, the chamber’s new CEO, for everything they have done and also thanks to Steve Perlman, vice chair in charge of business development and a representative of, let us say, an older generation of Chamber leaders.

The City has also worked with many, many other community organizations and institutions to help get through these tough times and still provide important services to our community.

For example, in tough times volunteers play an especially important role in making sure essential services and activities move forward. As a member of the national “Cities of Service” organization, we have come to realize the value of volunteers more than ever before

Just the week before last we hosted the first-ever “Volunteer Summit” for all the organizations and agencies here in town that use volunteers.. More than 30 organizations participated, and we have now set a target of recruiting 200 brand-new new volunteers in our community in 2011. I want to thank everyone who participated in the Volunteer Summit and especially the City’s volunteer staff, including Cary Glenn and Rosie Ornelas, for putting it together with great enthusiasm.

Similarly, we are increasingly working with nonprofit organizations to pool resources so that all of us can move forward doing the things we all need to do to maintain a high quality of life in our community. And this cooperation goes both ways – sometimes they help us, sometimes we help them.

Last year we thought we would have to close our Downtown Senior Recreation Center. But thanks to a collaboration with the nonprofit organization Urban Encore, we are able to keep the building open. Urban Encore is leasing the building and providing space to other nonprofits, while maintaining the senior center’s activities. I want to thank Dave Armstrong of Urban Encore – and one of Ventura’s most dedicated volunteers – for his efforts.

We’re also entering into an innovative arrangement with the Ventura Botanical Gardens organization. Everyone loves Grant Park – but we’ve had to postpone our plans to improve it for many years. Now, we have entered into an agreement to possibly lease parts of Grant Park to this new nonprofit group as an alternative way to make Grant Park better! Thanks to Doug Halter, who is representing the Botanical Gardens here tonight.
At the same time, we at City Hall are partnering with other nonprofit organizations to help them through these difficult times as well. By creating the Nonprofit Sustainability Center on the 4th Floor of 505 Poli, the City has helped 10 nonprofit to make it through the recession. By providing these organizations office space at low cost, we at City Hall can help them to maintain the vital services they provide to the community – services that our community otherwise might lose.

Just to give you an example of the diversity of these groups they include Focus on the Masters, Turning Point Foundation and Ventura Film Society. I’d like to thank Donna Granata, Clyde Reynolds, and Lorenzo DeStefano for their leadership and cooperation.

Amazingly enough, we have also seen remarkable progress in constructing and remodeling a wide variety of buildings and facilities downtown – helping to strengthen Downtown Ventura as the very epicenter of our region. Last year the WAV was completed. During this past year, the Kingdom Center has opened. So did Phase 1 of the Museum of Ventura County’s expansion, including the fabulous Smith Event Center. We’ve seen refurbishment and new vitality at the E.P. Foster Library. And we’ve seen the Housing Authority begin construction at Encanto del Mar at Oak and Thompson; and People’s Self-Help Housing begin renovation of the historic and beautiful El Patio Hotel just a block away.

These would be remarkable achievements at any time. But to accomplish them all in 2010 – the worst year in recorded history for construction in the United States – is truly remarkable. I’d like to thank some of the community leaders that have made this possible – including Pastor Sam Gallucci of the Kingdom Center, Tim Schiffer of the Museum of Ventura County, Mary Stewart of Foster Library, and John Polansky, chair of the Housing Authority board for all of your leadership.

We also an excellent holiday shopping season downtown and everywhere else – much to our surprise. I want to thank each and every one of you for your commitment to shopping locally. I also want to thank everyone who took me up on my challenge at the Mayor’s Arts Awards – to buy one piece of local art during this holiday season and another piece during 2011. Personally, I’d like to thank Jennifer Livia of Red Brick Gallery for the wonderful art she created that now belongs to my family. And don’t worry – I’m still on the lookout for that beautiful piece of local art to purchase in 2011. The Mayor’s Local Art Challenge is still going on!

Finally, whenever a community endures tough times, there is nothing like a group of inspiring athletes to lift our spirits and keep us going. This year, all of us in Ventura were inspired by the Ventura Deep Six Relay Team and their dramatic four-day swim through cold and choppy ocean waters. These guys didn’t just beat the world record – they killed it. In case you haven’t heard, the previous world record for an open water relay team was 78 miles – by the way, on a lake in New Zealand. Our guys swam over 202 miles in the Pacific Ocean in one of the coldest years on record. Oh, and by the way, these remarkable athletes are all in their 40s and 50s.

Thanks so much to Jim McConica and the other swimmers for keeping our spirits up in a tough year.

I’ve gone on at some length about all these people and organizations and accomplishments because I think it’s important to remember all the positive things that occurred during a difficult year. Thanks to all of you, we have made it through what I called last year “Our Defining Moment”.

Now, we must all work together to channel all of our energies toward charting “The Way Forward” here in Ventura.

And I do mean all of us – everyone in the community, working together – not just the City Council.

The decisions we on the City Council make up here every Monday night about what to fund and what to approve -- yes, these are important. But we can’t do it alone – and, anyway, these days nobody trusts us in the government to do it all by ourselves anyway. But with all of us working together – government agencies, nonprofit organizations, private businesses, individuals – we can do a much better job of figuring out what’s right for our community and a much more effective job of getting it done.

I think I can speak for all seven of us up here when I say that we must focus on two important and inter-related goals.

First, working with all of you to create a sustainable and enduring prosperity for our community.

And second, using that prosperity to maintain and enhance our quality of life.

Let me begin with prosperity, because without prosperity we cannot succeed as a community.

I have spent most of my life trying to understand how cities work, and I can say one thing: whether they grow or increase in population or not they never stay the same. To prosper – and to maintain a high quality of life – cities have to reinvent themselves economically again and again. This is true no matter how big or small they are; and no matter how fast or slowly they are growing.

Ventura has already reinvented itself many times from mission town to fishing town to agricultural center to oil boomtown to surf town to government town – and we remain all these things to some extent today. But we cannot stand still. We must continue to forge ahead, reinvent ourselves – find enduring prosperity in the 21st Century global economy while retaining the small-town feel we all cherish.

Everything we are moving forward with right now is focused on exactly this goal – and these efforts are tightly intertwined.

We talk a lot about creativity and artists galleries and projects like the WAV. Sometimes it seems like we have staked our whole future on art galleries, artist housing, and arts events. Some people love this; others are understandably skeptical that we can base a city’s entire economy on this proposition.

To be sure, arts and culture are important for their own sake. But they’re also important as a way to connect to the fast-growing creative and innovation economies regionally and worldwide which we in Ventura must be a part of in order to prosper in the future.

The creative arts – performance, visual arts, graphic and architectural design, publishing, fashion -- represent one of the fastest-growing sectors of the American economy. No American city, large or small, will be able to prosper in the future without nurturing these creative arts. The future of the creative arts in Ventura is virtually unlimited – and essential to our future in so many different ways

Over the last year, we have increased our visibility in Hollywood with the Film Ventura! Initiative – kicked off last fall at our downtown movie complex with a screening of the independent film, “Not Fade Away,” by local filmmaker Meredith Markworth Pollack. This effort has reminded us that we have an enormous supply of local film talent here in Ventura – actors, craftspeople, and even many writers and producers.

We’ve also strengthened our connection with our most important local educational institution dealing with the creative arts, Brooks Institute. Hundreds of Brooks film and video students already live and work in Ventura, and I recently met with Brooks’s new president, Susan Kirkland, to reaffirm our mutual commitment to each other. Brooks is a critical component of Ventura’s creative economy – attracting talented young people to Ventura and helping us to attract regional and national attention. Thank you, Susan, for your leadership.

And even in these difficult times, we have seen many other business leaders in the creative arts strengthen their commitment to Ventura – and, in particular, to downtown. Rasmussen Associates moved downtown and transformed the top floor of the Earle Stanley Gardner. Thank you, Larry Rasmussen for this commitment. Ann Deal of Fashion Forms has continued to help build Ventura’s reputation in the apparel industry and recently located her designers in our creative downtown, where she has long lived herself. Thank you, Ann.

The creative economy is important to our future prosperity, but it will not sustain us all by itself. The creative economy is important to Ventura for a much bigger reason as well – it provides us with an important connection to the worldwide innovation economy. The creating of new products and new services – especially using the the Internet – today serves as the engine of the global economy.

No city can prosper in the 21st Century without strong, local innovators. Innovators are themselves creative and they thrive on a lively and creative local community.

That’s why our Ventura Ventures Technology Center on the 3d Floor of 505 Poli Street has been so successful. V2TC is now home to 19 startup companies. The entrepreneurs located there are changing the way the world uses information – through online advertising, geographic location systems, online marketing, and many other innovative ideas. They’re drawn to Ventura not just by this incubator but also by the high quality of life, the recreational opportunities, and the creative buzz in our downtown.

I’d like to acknowledge one of those entrepreneurs right now – Jeff Green, founder of The Trade Desk, an online advertising startup that has been so successful that it’s actually busting out of the incubator and moving to the 5th floor of 505 Poli. Jeff, on behalf of everyone in Ventura, I want to say thanks for your commitment in creating jobs here in town. I’d like to thank all the other entrepreneurs in the incubator as well for their commitment to Ventura. And I’d like to invite everyone here to visit the incubator during the reception at the incubator, on the 3d floor of 505 Poli in a few minutes.

Creative artists, designers, entrepreneurs – all are essential components in creating enduring prosperity. But businesses cannot succeed without startup capital. And local capital is especially important. If we can finance our innovative companies through local sources, then the resulting wealth will stay in our community, to be recycled into yet more business ventures and also providing the basis for local philanthropy.

That’s why I am grateful to people like John and Dan Peate of Peate Ventures, who have decide to locate their venture firm right here downtown. Thanks so much, John and Dan, for being financial pioneers here in Ventura, and thanks to our financiers and entrepreneurs -- we are getting more attention from investors every day.

There is yet another dimension to our future prosperity, one that is also linked to creativity and the global innovation economy – the medical and biotech fields.

Here in Ventura, we have long been blessed with extremely high-quality medical care, thanks largely to our two fine hospitals and all the medical talent they attract to our community. This year, we’ve seen both our hospitals make major, forward-looking investments in Ventura.

Community Memorial Hospital is building a new cancer center and is about to embark on a $300 million expansion that will improve medical care, create new business spinoff opportunities in the medical and biotech fields, and help to revitalize business in the Five Points area. It is inspiring to see such an enormous investment in our community during these tough times. And the new CMH will also be a place where biotech entrepreneurs will be able to create and innovate, bringing even more jobs and wealth to Ventura.

And Ventura County Medical Center is also about to embark on a major hospital expansion, adding even more good-paying jobs – construction jobs and medical jobs – to our community. Together, these institutions make Ventura a center of medical care – and medical innovation.

I would like to express my thanks to Gary Wilde, the CEO of Community Memorial Health Systems, and Mike Powers, the outgoing director of the Ventura County Health Care Agency, for spearheading these large and significant investments in our community. They have truly taught us here in Ventura that working together produces far more wealth, health, and happiness than the alternative!

The purpose of building prosperity, of course, is to provide the funds – public, private, and philanthropic – necessary maintain and improve our quality of life.

Part of The Way Forward here in Ventura must be to refocus on our quality of life – for all citizens. My colleagues and I on the council look forward to renewing our long partnership with the Ventura Unified School District and Superintendent Trudy Arriaga – not only to ensure safe and high-performing schools, but to work together toward major community goals that will benefit everyone in our community. Yes, Trudy, we will build the Westside Pool.

We also have to focus on our neighborhoods. Ventura’s neighborhoods are great places to live. But they’ve taken a beating in the last couple of years, as we at City Hall have been forced to cut back on many basic services that neighborhoods depend on – police and fire service, park and median maintenance, tree-trimming, street paving, libraries.

Again, we on this dais are committed to working in collaboration with our neighborhoods to create stability and improve the quality of life. I’d like to thank the chairs of Ventura’s Community Councils for meeting with me regularly to discuss these issues. And I’m proud to announce that we are all working together to bring about Ventura’s first-ever Neighborhood Summit later this spring.

Lastly, I would like to note that, in approaching the future, we must be inclusive. Ventura is a diverse community, and we must ensure that both our prosperity and our quality of life is shared by all residents. Frankly, we have fallen behind in our efforts to implement the Americans with Disabilities Act and ensuring that every place in our community is welcoming to everyone. I look forward to the City’s rollout in 2011 of new efforts to make our community more accessible to those with disabilities.

As a person who is rapidly developing a severe disability, I have learned that while there may be physical disabilities, there is no such thing as a disability of the heart or spirit. We are blessed in Ventura with fabulous people active in promoting the cause of those with disabilities. I’d like to thank Chera Minkler for being a personal inspiration to me – as an advocate for the disabled and as a person with great compassion for all.

Here in Ventura, The Way Forward inevitably involves a look backward toward the past. We are a city of history. Ventura was incorporated as a municipality in 1866; and, indeed, of the 481 cities in California, only 22 are older than we are.

On April 2, 2016, our city will celebrate its 150th anniversary. In case you’re counting, that’s 1,880 days from today.

So here’s a challenge:

Let’s dedicate ourselves to making Ventura’s new prosperity – and much better quality of life – a reality by that date. Let’s make sure that, by then, we are

A city that has successfully combined our creativity our innovation and our opportunities to create a new and lasting prosperity

A city that has fulfilled its commitment great education, high-quality public safety great medical care, great parks and recreation, by the way great and by the way, a great place for all kinds of people to live.

In short, let’s make ourselves the best small city in California.

We have a long list of things we know we must accomplish to achieve renewed prosperity and a better quality of life. So here’s my challenge: I ask you to join me in a concerted effort to get those things done.

Within 90 days, let’s form a group of community leaders to lead this effort.

Within 3 to 6 months, let’s agree on a to-do list – the high priority things we must do to establish long-term prosperity and a better quality of life by 2016. And then let’s spend every day between now and then getting things done, crossing items off the list, until we have made sure Ventura will be a great place to live and work for the next generation.

Remember, when you wake up tomorrow morning, there will be only 1,879 days left.

And on Wednesday, only 1,878.

So let’s get going. Let’s make every day count. Let’s make each one of these days count.

Stalemate on the North Avenue

With the downturn in the economy, the City Council hasn’t had to deal with land use issues much in the last couple of years. On Monday night, we were back in the land use arena – considering how to fund our ongoing effort to create a community plan for the Westside and the North Avenue area. In the end, we decided to focus our efforts – at least for the moment – on a plan for the Westside area that is already in the city limits. And we did not make a final decision about whether to pursue a plan for the North Avenue, or whether to include Canada Larga Canyon in that plan.

Along the way, we looked a little like the Keystone Cops, as we often do on land use issues. The problem is not that we don’t know what we are doing, however. The problem is that the whole Westside/North Avenue area has several moving parts and each of us is assessing those parts differently.

What Monday night revealed was not just a deep division on the council regarding Canada Larga Canyon – we knew that was there – but also uncertainty and a lack of consensus on other issues as well. When the City Council has so many divisions and unknowns, it’s not likely we’re going to operate like a well-oiled machine. We’re more likely to do what we did Monday night, which is to grope, a bit awkwardly, for consensus and see how far we can get.

On one end of the spectrum is revitalization of the Westside area, which everybody wants to promote. On the other end of the spectrum is the deep division over Canada Larga Canyon – a beautiful area just off Highway 33 in the North Avenue area. In between these two extremes we are wrestling with three other things – the possible annexation of existing residential neighborhoods on the North Avenue; the possible redevelopment of the Brooks Institute and old Petrochem USA oil refinery sites; and the uncertainty over the future of the state’s redevelopment law. Most of the North Avenue area is not currently located inside the city limits, and the process of annexation makes it even more complicated.

The high-profile issue you’ll read about in the paper is Canada Larga Canyon. Landowner Buzz Bonsall would like to develop this property with up to 100 executive housing sites, while donating perhaps up to 2,000 acres to a local land conservancy. The council is split 4-3 on this issue, with 4 councilmembers (Weir, Andrews, Monahan, and Tracy) in favor of this and three (Brennan, Morehouse, and myself) against. This is complicated by the fact that Councilmember Monahan, who owns property on Ventura Avenue, has a conflict of interest on most votes on the Westside plan. He cannot vote on any issue except those issues that are related to Canada Larga Canyon. What this means is that the council voted 4-3 to include Canada Larga in the Westside plan (because he can vote on that), but then deadlocks 3-3 on virtually all other votes about the plan because Canada Large is included (because he can’t vote on those). Crazy, I know, but that’s what the Fair Political Practices Commission ruled. (You can read my reasoning for not including Canada Larga in this blog; I still stand by what I said in the blog.)

This is the issue that gets the most publicity, but it’s not the only one at play. Here are the others:

-- The city has for years looked to the Brooks/Petrochem property for possible redevelopment, but that area must be annexed into the city. Brooks Institute is an important economic driver for the city, and the college wants to expand at its current location. Meanwhile, the Petrochem oil refinery property is blighted and cleaning it up makes sense. But the council was cool to the housing-oriented plan for the properties produced by developer Vince Daly; and not all counilmembers believe that possible expansion of Brooks is worth the cost of allowing all the housing and annexing other parts of the North Avenue (see below).

-- Meanwhile, the Local Agency Formation Commission, which oversees annexations, is not likely to permit annexation of any property – Brooks/Petochem or Canada Larga Canyon – without also requiring the city to annex existing residential neighborhoods in the North Avenue. But these properties could be very expensive for the city to serve and a lot of the residents up there don’t want to be annexed. This dampens some councilmembers’ enthusiasm about the whole North Avenue plan.

-- And then there’s Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposal to eliminate the state’s redevelopment program. Much of the rationale for including the Brooks/Petrochem site in the plan is to generate redevelopment tax dollars that can be used father south in the Westside neighborhoods that really need investment. But Brown’s proposal would eliminate that funding source, making the whole idea much less attractive to many councilmembers..

You can see how all these moving parts make getting four votes for anything pretty tough. It’s all a question of what you are wiling to “pay” and what you get in return, and each councilmember has a different calculus in his or her head.

Most councilmembers would consider some type of North Avenue annexation, but not if it means annexing the residential neighborhoods up there that could be money-losers to the City. Some councilmembers think development of Canada Large might offset the cost, either directly through tax revenue or indirectly by providing housing for executives who might bring businesses to town; others are adamantly opposed to development of Canada Larga under any circumstances. Some councilmembers think redevelopment of Brooks/Petrochem may offset the North Avenue cost, but others are skeptical. The Petrochem developers want to build housing, while the council wants jobs. The prospect of redevelopment funds from the Brooks/Petrochem site could trump everything, but no one knows whether redevelopment will even exist as a legal tool in California three months from now.

But I don’t think it’s worthwhile to hold the Westside plan hostage over these other considerations. After all, residents and property owners there have been waiting for a plan – with a consistent set of development rules – for 15 years. Nor do I think it makes sense to debate these financial pros and cons in a vacuum. That’s why I decided to make a motion Monday night that – as it turned out – broke the deadlock for now. After several 3-3 stalemates (with Monahan sitting it out), I proposed moving forward with the Westside part of the plan while doing a fiscal analysis to determine what costs and revenues we’d get under various scenarios – with Canada Larga, Brooks/Petrochem, North Avenue residential neighborhoods in or out. That motion passed 5-1, with only Councilmember Brennan opposed.

After designating the North Avenue as an expansion area in the General Plan and making it a priority in our Economic Development Strategy, it’s a little embarrassing to appear so disorganized about it now. But there are a wide variety of opinions on the council and a lot of factors at work. We’ll probably never reach unanimity on what to do. But at least the next step will be informed by some real information about what the fiscal consequences of developing various parts of the North Avenue might be.

Back to the Bad Old Days?

Last night, after more than 3 hours of debate, the City Council voted 4-3 to add the floor of the Canada Larga Valley into the North Avenue Community Plan Area. I voted against this proposal, mostly because I think it will make it far more difficult to accomplish the many important community goals on the Westside and in the North Avenue that we all agree on. Frankly, I am afraid that this vote portends the return of the “bad old days” on land use and development in Ventura.

A little background: Back in April, the City Council green-lighted new community plans for the North Avenue and the Westside, as well as initial work to create a combined redevelopment project area for the entire North Avenue/Westside area. At that time, the city attorney concluded that Councilmember Monahan had a conflict because of his property holdings on Ventura Avenue and could not vote. When it came time to decide whether to put the Canada Larga floor into the plan area, the vote was 3-3 with Mr. Monahan sitting out it. Under our rules, the proposal failed, but it was obvious at that time that there were 4 votes on the council to include Canada Larga in the plan.

More recently the Fair Political Practices Commission and our city attorney determined that Mr. Monahan did not have a conflict and could vote on the matter. Not wanting to hold things up, I scheduled the item for last night.

We heard 40 speakers, but the truth of the matter is that we didn’t really have to. When we took the vote at 11 p.m. it was 4-3. Nobody had changed their mind based on listening to the speakers. To her credit, Councilmember Christy Weir said that, while she is conceptually in favor of executive housing in Canada Larga, she will be open-minded about whether the cost of infrastructure and police and fire service would be too high for the city. While Deputy Mayor Mike Tracy did not make quite the same comment, I think he’s somewhat open-minded too.

I was opposed to including Canada Larga before and I am even more opposed now – not only because I think homes up there are a bad idea, but because I believe the Canada Larga issue will be divisive and a huge distraction over the next couple of years as we move forward with the North Avenue/Westside efforts. Here are a few things that will now happen as a result of last night’s vote:

-- The environmental impact report for the North Avenue plan, which the City is paying for, will become far more time-consuming, complicated, and expensive than before. This will, at the very least, show things down.

-- The inevitable lawsuits from environmental groups will become much harder to defend. I think some environmental groups might sue anyway – they don’t like the tentative inclusion of agricultural land and some other parcels owned by the Bonsall family along the Ventura Avenue – but those lawsuits would be much simpler and easier to resolve if we did not include Canada Larga in the discussion.

-- It will become much harder to get Ventura County to sign off of the whole thing, especially the redevelopment project area. The redevelopment component is important because redevelopment funds from the Brooks/Petrochem project could be used for improvements down on the Avenue. But the County may oppose redevelopment and could even sue us. With Canada Large in, it’s much more likely that the County will hold up the redevelopment effort.

-- I don’t think we’re going to get this annexation past the Local Agency Formation Commission – the county agency that approves boundary changes. If LAFCO doesn’t approve this, then we’ll have to sue them to get it, and I can’t see us winning that lawsuit.

-- I’m pretty sure that our local environmentalists will run a ballot measure to make development of Canada Larga subject to a vote.

There you go: All kinds of costs, delays, lawsuits, and maybe ballot measures that will make it much more difficult – maybe impossible – for us to move forward with all the things we unanimously agree on in revitalizing the Westside and the North Avenue. All those those good things we all agree on are being held hostage in order to try to force through a Canada Larga development that we are deeply divided on and have never in the past allowed to move forward. Not a good idea.

Beyond that, I fear that that the whole Canada Larga thing will take us back to the “bad old days” of the growth wars in Ventura – where developers engage in game-playing to try to get four votes, people on either side of an issue call each other names, and everything comes to a halt because it’s so contentious.

Ventura was riven by this stuff for 30 years. Recently, all of us on the city council have worked hard to put those days behind us. We passed our infill-first General Plan in 2005, we eliminated the dysfunctional Residential Growth Management Program, and we cleaned up the development review process.

This is real progress, and I thank all six of my colleagues for working collaboratively to make that progress happen. Do we really want to go back to the bad old days?

I certainly don’t, but last night I already felt that we were back in the bad old days. Three examples:

-- Landowner Buzz Bonsall and one of his allies withheld their speaker cards for two hours and put them in at the last minute, at 10 o’clock, after all the other 40 speakers had spoken. Buzz discussed his proposed project a little – but only after everybody else had spoken when they had no opportunity to respond. Buzz had the right to do this, but, I’m sorry, that just seems like pointless game-playing to me. If this is any indication of how the relationship between the city and the property owner is going to go here, I’m not optimistic.

-- Councilmembers Monahan and Morehouse got into a heated debate on the dais about why Cal State had not been built here in Ventura on Taylor Ranch -- something that happened, I think, when Ronald Reagan was president. Can we finally get over that one?

-- Councilmember Monahan and former Mayor Richard Francis, who spoke as a member of the public, got into a heated back-and-forth as well, with Mr. Monahan accusing Mr. Francis (semi-jokingly, I think) of having a hand in the earlier decision to rule that he was conflicted out of the vote. (Mr. Francis brought the house down by responding that if it was up to him, Mr. Monahan would never get to vote.)

The back-and-forth between Monahan and Francis was wonderful political theater 20 years ago, when they served consecutively as mayor, the town was deeply divided over growth, and I used watch the council meetings sitting on my sofa. But we’ve made great progress in the last few years – generally speaking, we’ve left those days behind and moved forward together as a community.

I, for one, don’t want to see the bad old days come back again. It may be good political theater, but it’s only going to tear our town apart.

State of the City 2010: Prosperity and Sustainability

Mayor Bill Fulton

Ventura State of the City Address

Feb. 1, 2010



Mayor Fulton:

On behalf of the City Council, I’d like to welcome all of you to San Buenaventura City Hall.



There is no question that in this economic climate, the state of our city government is challenged. As is the state of our school district, our county government, our Chamber of Commerce, and any number of other agencies and organizations around town. Money is short; businesses and institutions we depend on and cherish are at risk, and we are often at the mercy of events and circumstances beyond our control.



But the state of our community – the state of Ventura as a living, breathing, thriving place of 100,000 people – is stronger than ever.



The people of Ventura bring an enormous amount of passion and energy every day to task of sustaining our community as a terrific town: soccer leagues, little leagues, community organizations, arts and cultural activities, education, music, and businesses that are born and grow and prosper. It is all of you who make our community strong and give us the passion and the energy to deal with hard times.



And these are indeed hard times. But if you think back over the last decade, it’s remarkable what Ventura, as a community, has accomplished:



* We have paved almost every street in town. This may not be the most headline-grabbing accomplishment in history, but it’s one that affects everyone’s life every day and we should be proud of it. It shows we can focus on the basics and get them done.



* We have built a world-class aquatics center at the Community Park and a nationally recognized links golf course at Olivas. These new facilities enhance the quality of life for our local residents. But they also bring in many tourists and visitors, adding to our emerging “brand” as a center of outdoor recreation that also includes the Channel Islands, boating, surfing and kayaking, bicycling and hiking.



* We established downtown as a regional attraction that benefits local residents and again, brings visitors and their money into our town. There is nothing like our downtown scene, our art, culture, music, and restaurant scene anywhere along the coast between Santa Monica and Santa Barbara. And people are discovering it. How many other retail “draws” anywhere in the country can say they have increased their business in the last two years?



* Up here on this dais, we eliminated a structural deficit and have maintained a balanced budget every single year. This has involved making tough choices, and you may not like the way we’ve done it, but we have faced these hard issues head-on.



* As a community, we created a community Vision; and as a city we have translated that Vision into a new General Plan, new development codes that are much more understandable, and a more predictable development process.



These are remarkable achievements for any community in any decade, and we should be proud of them. They remind us not only that Ventura is a great town, but that even in hard times, we remain a community capable of pulling together and getting things done.



Now is the time to rely on that passion and energy to lay the foundation for the future that is both more prosperous and more sustainable. In working with the City Council since the swearing-in back in December, it has become evident that achieving long-term goals requires us to focus on three things:



n Creating and sustaining an enduring prosperity;



n Sustaining the environment that supports us; and



n Reinventing the way we provide our public services so that we can sustain those services at a high level in the long run.



Our most important job is to do everything we can to restore prosperity to Ventura.



Here at City Hall, we tend to think of prosperity in terms of the tax revenue that supports vital city services.



But to the community at large, prosperity means far more. It means creating jobs that give all of us a sense of security and stability. It means creating business opportunities that allow the entrepreneurs among us to innovate and thrive, and creating wealth for our community so as to create an endowment for generations to come just as we continue to benefit even today from the endowments bestowed upon us generations ago by the Bards, the Fosters, and other pioneers of our community.



Over the past few years, we’ve raised our development standards, and this is beginning to pay off with high-quality projects such as the new beachfront Embassy Suites Hotel approved last year. But we’ve also made adopted many new plans and codes – literally from Downtown out to Saticoy – that will make it easier for us to keep our promises to both neighborhoods and developers. New projects can and will protect the quality of life in our neighborhoods; and new projects that follow our codes and plans can and will be processed more quickly.



These reforms in the development process are very important. But all by themselves they will not get us where we want to go. Just as important as high-quality developments that will be built are the businesses that will occupy them.



Enduring prosperity comes from a robust entrepreneurial climate for businesses to thrive. This requires us to do three things:



First, encourage business sectors that are growing rapidly and will enhance Ventura’s wealth rather than deplete it.



Second, encourage the growth of business opportunities that will provide our community with high-wage jobs.



And third, encourage retail and visitor opportunities that are unique – that you can only find in Ventura – instead of those you can find anywhere.



I am proud to say that we are doing all of these things, and they are beginning to pay off.



We are fortunate to be located close to two major economic engines – institutions that constantly spin off startup businesses in the high-tech and biotech centers: UC Santa Barbara to our north and Amgen to our south.



In the past two years, Ventura has made a major effort – unlike any other city in this region – to connect with these institutions, with startup entrepreneurs, and with venture capitalists, to encourage spin-off businesses to locate and grow here in Ventura. And it’s working. Today - for the first time - we are part of the high-tech/biotech business ecosystem.



Just last Thursday, more than 200 people gathered for a launch party for our Ventura Ventures Technology Center (V2TC) business incubator, located only a few steps away from where we are standing right now.



The incubator was designed to foster a creative environment where high-tech companies and entrepreneurs can network with each other, brainstorm their ideas, and grow their businesses. At that’s exactly what the 10 firms now located in our incubator are doing right now here in Ventura today. Here are a couple of examples:



* The Trade Desk is an exchange for online ad networks. It was founded by Jeff Green, whose last startup was sold to Microsoft after two years of operation and now employs 50 people in Carpinteria.



* Lottay.com is a web site that allows you to donate money through PayPal as a meaningful and fun gift. With the assistance of our venture capital partner DFJ Frontier the City participated in Lottay’s financing out of the City’s Jobs Investment Fund (JIF).



* In addition to bringing Lottay to town, our Jobs Investment Fund and DFJ partnership also helped to attract Ventura’s first venture capital firm to Ventura.



Peate Ventures manages the BuenaVentura Fund and their offices are headquartered in Downtown. It’s said that venture capitalists have a tendency to “invest in their back yard” and already the BuenaVentura Fund has invested in Lottay and one other Ventura company.



Acknowledgments

Jeff Green, CEO, The Trade Desk

Harry Lin, CEO, Lottay.com

Frank Foster, Managing Partner, DFJ Frontier

John and Dan Peate, Principals, Peate Ventures



All of the companies I mentioned are raising capital creating new jobs and stimulating the local economy. Those that succeed will grow rapidly, creating many new high-quality jobs for people who live in Ventura - exactly what our General Plan and our long-term economic development strategy call for.



We’re also working closely with Community Memorial Hospital to help facilitate their $300 million expansion, which should break ground in 2011.



The new Community Memorial will be a tremendous asset to all of us in Ventura by ensuring that we will have access to very high-quality health care for decades to come.



Acknowledgment:

Gary Wilde, CEO, Community Memorial Health System



But the expansion of Community Memorial is also a crucial part of our ability to nurture and grow biotech companies here in Ventura.



Part of the expansion, we hope, will be to create the all-important “wet lab” space that biotech startups require in order to do their work – space that is currently lacking in Ventura, which is one of the reasons why biotech startups are going to neighboring cities.



The expanded Community Memorial can also help give biomedical entrepreneurs a real-world partner where they can learn more about what patients and doctors need, making Ventura even more attractive to biotech companies.



All of these efforts will bring high-quality paying jobs for our residents and with the path-breaking assistance of Ventura College, which is a real innovator in technical training.

I am sure that as these companies grow, we can provide them with a highly trained “green collar” workforce. In fact, Ventura College has just received a grant from Southern California Edison to pursue a Green Jobs Education Initiative.



Acknowledgment:

Ramiro Sanchez, Executive Vice President, Ventura College

During this deep recession, the success of our downtown and our other unique destinations has been a remarkable story. Business downtown has continued to grow even as retail sales have dropped precipitously elsewhere. Our visitor and convention business has held its own as Channel Islands National Park and other local attractions have continued to draw people from California and throughout the world.



In a world where retail and tourism is changing rapidly, we must work hard to differentiate ourselves and focus on those things that are unique to Ventura – that people can get nowhere else. So we must further promote and develop these unique attractions – not just our downtown and the arts and music scene there, but also our remarkable array of outdoor recreational opportunities, including the islands and the Ventura Harbor, Olivas Links, surfing, and great hiking opportunities nearby.



Indeed, the combination of our terrific downtown and the outdoor recreation opportunities may be the biggest attraction Ventura has. We’ve also got to make sure that the very precious remaining space we have for retail opportunities, such as the Ventura Auto Center, which is close to many of those outdoor opportunities, is strategically used to reinforce the unique experience Ventura offers.



And, by the way, the more we are able to strengthen and promote these unique experiences in Ventura, the more attractive Ventura will become as a place for entrepreneurs and innovators in the high-tech and biotech industries. And create more jobs for people who live here.



Over the next year as we move forward with these efforts we will continue to work with the Chamber of Commerce and our business community to pursue the goals we crafted at the Economic Summit last spring. We’ve already put into place a business ombudsman, whose job it is to help businesses navigate the permit process at City Hall.

Acknowledgments:

Randy Hinton, Outgoing Chair, Chamber of Commerce

Dave Armstrong, chair, Downtown Ventura Organization

Doug Wood, General Manager, Crowne Plaza Ventura Beach



Let me turn now to the underlying foundation of our future prosperity - sustaining this beautiful and fragile location where we live.



As former Mayor Brennan often says, living in Ventura is like living on an island. We are bounded by the ocean, two rivers and a mountain range. It’s easy to forget that this is a very fragile place to live. We are reminded only occasionally when we are inundated … as were last week, or when fire threatens to overwhelm us, or when we are cut off temporarily from the outside world.



Yet people have made this small piece of land their home – living sustainability with the environment – for many thousands of years. It’s been two and a quarter centuries since the Mission was founded and almost a century and a half since the creation of Ventura as a municipality.



Sustaining our lives in this beautiful and fragile place has never been easy, but we have always been able to do it somehow. In order to continue doing so, we’re going to have to find new ways to live sustainably on this small piece of land we have claimed as ours.



For example: Unlike most communities, we have the privilege of actually seeing the entire “life-cycle” of water and how it gets polluted – from the moment rain lands on the ground and runs across our driveways, down through the storm drains, down the barrancas, and out into the ocean, picking up whatever there is along its path. When my daughter Sara was young, we used to try to race the rain to the sea.



Today we face enormous pressure from State and Federal regulations to be even tougher on ourselves in protecting water quality and we are responding with green streets and green landscaping and green stormwater improvements that make our community more inviting and beautiful, while at the same time making water quality better.



Acknowledgment:

Paul Jenkin, Environmental Director, Surfrider Foundation



Similarly, we are engaged in an enormous effort at City Hall and community-wide to green our operations so that we consume less energy and pollute less, which, by the way, means we save money as well. We power much of our city yard through photovoltaic cells on the roof. We use co-generation to produce energy at our Community Pool. We’ve reduced electricity use citywide by more than 25 percent.

Acknowledgment:

Ron Calkins, Director, City of Ventura Public Works Department



And of course Ventura is proudly home to some of the greenest businesses in America, most especially Patagonia, which has been declared by no less than Fortune Magazine as “The Coolest Company on the Planet.” Patagonia has much to teach the rest of us in Ventura about being truly green, and I hope we spend a lot of time learning from them over the next couple of years.



Acknowledgment:

Pedro Lopez-Baldrich, General Counsel, Patagonia



Now, however, our community faces a very real and very grave environmental threat to our long-term survival.



To most people, climate change is an abstraction. To us it is not. No matter what causes climate change, as a result the sea level will rise. As a result, it will rise in this city and it will rise in our lifetimes.



Throughout the state, scientists are forecasting a rise in sea level of somewhere between 16 and 55 inches – that’s somewhere between one and a half and four and a half feet – by 2050. If that seems a long way off, think of it this way. In 2050, Alec Loorz – the Ventura teenage activist who went to Copenhagen to fight for a climate-change accord will be about the age that I am now. For Alec and his generation – including my daughter Sara and so many of our children – climate change will shape the world they live in and the lives they lead.



So we have to start planning now to protect our community from the rising sea level. How will we protect our harbor and our Keys and Pierpont communities? How will we protect our sewer plant?



How will we protect the investments we make along the Promenade and Downtown? How can we work together with our neighboring communities, with the Navy (which is also dealing with this problem), and others who are at risk?



No matter whether we can stop the process of climate change, we must take steps – by reinforcing our traditional infrastructure and creating new, greener infrastructure – to protect our community from inundation.



As I have said before, we can’t prosper if we are drowning. But we can prosper if we take the lead in finding ways to deal with sea-level rise, not just attacking the problem, but nurturing businesses that can lead the way with green solutions.



Acknowledgment:

Rachel Morris, President, Ventura Climate Care Options Organized Locally (VCCOOL)



Finally, I’d like to speak about the third theme that has emerged as vital to our community: how we can provide our constituents with the quality of life they rightly expect at a time of steep declines in our revenue.



In these hard times, we have had to make difficult decisions to cut services. We have lost some of our most cherished businesses and community institutions, and many more are at risk. This in turn has understandably led to tension over how to live within our means today.



On this question, it often seems as though Ventura is being torn apart by two warring camps.



On the one hand, there are those who zealously believe that we must continue to do things the same way we have always done them… and raise taxes to pay for it.



On the other hand – the polar opposite – there are those who zealously believe that we must continue to do things the same way we have always done them… and cut everybody’s wages to pay for it.



But I’m afraid that if we frame the debate about the future of our community this way, we will never get past the logjam.



No wonder our City Manager often likes to repeat a quotation – often attributed to Winston Churchill – about Great Britain’s dire financial situation in the middle of World War II. To the Cabinet, Churchill supposedly said:



“Gentlemen, we have run out of money. Now we have to think.”



So maybe it’s time to think about more than simply how to pay for continuing business as usual. Maybe it’s time to think about how to do things differently; reinvent things; ask ourselves questions we’ve never asked before; questions such as:



Does every fire truck have to be attached to a fire station?



Does every library book have to be attached to a library building?



Does every person who wants to travel by bus have to be attached to a 40-foot, 20-ton vehicle?



We have always taken these things for granted. But thinking this way is very expensive. It requires us to build separate buildings and create separate systems for everything we do. But we can’t afford to think this way anymore. We must think differently.



We’ve already made some progress on this front – for example, our Fire Department greatly increased response times during the time we had Medic Engine 10, which is essentially a fire and emergency response vehicle not tied to a particular fire station.



Acknowledgment:

Kevin Rennie, Chief, City of Ventura Fire Department



We’ve had to park Medic Engine 10 for the moment because of budget constraints, but I suspect it will be back because it’s exactly the kind of innovation we’ve going to have to focus on in the months and years ahead. Indeed, reinventing public services through this kind of creative thinking was the one unanimous high priority that came out of our City Council goal-setting workshop a couple of weeks ago.



So we’re going to keep asking these kinds of questions: Can we find a way to make sure that everybody has access to library services even if they don’t live near a library?



Is there a way for firefighters and police officers and code enforcement officers to work together as they traverse the streets of our community, keeping an eye out for our well-being? Can’t we work with together with nonprofit organizations like the Serra Cross Conservancy, the Ventura Hillsides Conservancy, and the Ventura Botanical Garden to manage Grant Park and actually make it better than it is now, at less cost?



Similarly, we must think about how to create and strengthen our neighborhood gathering-places no matter what role they might currently play.



Here in Ventura, we have terrific parks and schools and senior centers and recreation centers and libraries. Every neighborhood should have all these things.



But it’s clear that we will never be able to afford to provide every neighborhood with each one of these things.



So how do we find a way to provide every neighborhood with a civic gathering space where they have access to all these things in the same place in a way we can afford?



This kind of transformation obviously requires creative thinking and an open mind, but it also requires a collaborative heart. We here at City Hall can’t do everything by ourselves. To reinvent the way we do things in Ventura, all of us must emerge from our silos and work together: our city, our college, our school district, our county agencies, our nonprofits, our philanthropies, our businesses, and of course, most important of all, the people of Ventura.



The people of Ventura are truly remarkable in their commitment to our community and their passion and their energy and their ability to constantly both reinforce our community and reinvent it so that it can continue to thrive. We do this not just through the political debates that we engage in up here in this dais, but more importantly – every minute of every day – when we volunteer to coach soccer or little league, help with the PTO bake sale, join a service club, or help out at a school, or sit on a committee to plan the future of our libraries, helping our police department, or working on a weekend beach cleanup.



That’s why I am grateful to my predecessor Christy Weir for making sure that Ventura was one of the first cities in the country to sign up for the national “Cities of Service” effort started under New York mayor Bloomberg, which highlights volunteer efforts in communities all over the nation. And Ventura is beginning to get national attention for our commitment to volunteer service. Friends: we need all of your to help us through this time of need in laying the foundation for the future.



This is a time of great change and uncertainty in our society. Old ways of doing things are falling by the wayside quickly and new ways are emerging rapidly. Such times can be frightening, but they are also pregnant with great possibilities. We in Ventura are very determined and well positioned to take advantage of those opportunities in order to reinforce Ventura as a great place to live and work.



Ten years ago this spring, in this very chambers, the Ventura City Council agreed to move forward aggressively to accept a new vision for our community created by the community itself and turn it into a reality. The result has been a decade of remarkable progress toward our commonly held goals.



Now, at a difficult moment in history, is the time for us to look forward to 10 years from now – to 2020 – and once again work collaboratively and aggressively to ensure Ventura’s future prosperity, and for another generation, to sustain the wonderful quality of life that we all enjoy. I look forward to working with each and every one of you over the next year in taking the first steps to making that prosperity and sustainability a reality.

Why I'm Asking You to Vote No on Measure B

Most of you probably already know that I’m opposed to Measure B, the so-called view protection initiative on the November ballot in Ventura. I believe it’s unnecessary, overly cumbersome, probably unlawful, and -- most important – undemocratic.

As the campaign for Measure B has unfolded, I have come to have new concerns about Measure B and how it is likely to be implemented by Ventura Citizens Organized for Responsible Development (VCORD) if it passes.

For one thing, it’s very sloppily written – and apparently inadvertently leaves whole sections of the city off the View Resources Board.

If you live Downtown, or south of the college, or near Buena High School, your neighborhood cannot be represented on this new board.

Remember that once the voters have approved this initiative, neither VCORD nor the City Council can fix these problems because it must be implemented word-for-word. So whatever mistakes Measure B contains, we’re stuck with them.

Also, in recent weeks, VCORD spokespeople have focused more and more on the narrow issue of building heights as the “magic bullet” that will solve view problems – even though previously they had stated the solution should be up to each neighborhood.

They’ve also gotten more aggressive in stating what the new View Resources Board “will do” if Measure B passes. It seems to me that this is at odds with their oft-stated promise to appoint a broad range of community members from different neighborhoods and then step away from the process.

Given what I’ve been hearing lately, I can’t for the life of me understand why VCORD didn’t just write an initiative permanently restricting building heights along the commercial corridors to two stories – since that seems to be their goal. Then we could have had a straight-up discussion about whether that’s a good policy or not, instead of complicated debate over whether Measure B is too convoluted, unlawful, or undemocratic to work.

In explaining my opposition to Measure B, let me first explain what the initiative does, then talk about why I am opposed to it in concept, and finally further explain my concerns about VCORD.

WHAT MEASURE B DOES

Measure B is an initiative that does three things:

First, it places a moratorium on all buildings over 26 feet high for up to two years in most parts of Ventura. Many business areas are exempt, including parts of Downtown, the area around Community Memorial Hospital, the Pacific View Mall, the lower part of Johnson Drive, the Victoria Corridor, and most areas on the south side of the freeway, including the auto center and the industrial park.

Second, it creates a View Resources Board (VRB) of 23 members and charges the board with drafting a view protection ordinance within a year. Of the 23 members, 20 would be appointed by VCORD (18 from neighborhoods and 2 from business groups) and 3 would be appointed by the City Council.

Third, it creates a process by which the height moratorium can be lifted prior to two years under certain circumstances. The View Resources Board recommends a view protection ordinance to the City Council. If the City Council does not approve the ordinance as recommended, the Council must forward suggested changes to the View Resources Board. If the VRB accepts these changes and the Council approves them, the moratorium is lifted. If the Council does not adopt the ordinance, VRB members have the right to place the measure on the ballot as an initiative and, if voters approve it, the moratorium is lifted.


WHY I’M OPPOSED TO MEASURE B IN CONCEPT

I have opposed Measure B from the beginning because I believe it’s unlawful and undemocratic – and the reasons it’s unlawful are the same reasons it’s undemocratic.

First, VCORD – a private political action committee – does not have the power to appoint a city board.

Under the City Charter, the voters delegated that authority only to their elected representatives on the City Council. This makes sense because only the City Council is accountable to the voters. You wouldn’t want to appoint a board to look at pension reform and have the members appointed by the firefighters PAC; nor would you want to appoint a board to look at reforming the planning process and have the members appointed by the Building Industry Association PAC. There’s no accountability.

VCORD has countered this argument by saying that the View Resources Board isn’t really a city board, even though it’s a board created by the city’s voters in an election. Rather, it’s a “community board”.

To me, this defies credibility. If VCORD wanted to appoint a community board to draft a view ordinance, they don’t need the voters to do it. They could just do it themselves.

The very fact that VCORD wants the voters to create the VRB suggests to me that it IS a city board, because through the initiative process the only thing voters have the power to do is enact city legislation.

Second, the process by which the moratorium can be lifted early impermissibly grants some legislative power to the VRB and hence to VCORD as well.

There are two things that voters cannot do in an initiative. One is give away their own legislative power to a private entity. The second is to direct that legislation be enacted by the elected officials. Measure B does both these things even though they are prohibited by the state constitution.

VCORD has quite rightly pointed out that the view protection ordinance won’t actually go into effect unless either the City Council or the voters approve it. Nevertheless, I believe Measure B gives the VRB – and, hence, VCORD – the power to interfere with the legislative process, which under our state constitution belongs only to the voters and their elected representatives. Here’s why:

The City Council can lift the moratorium in less than two years by approving a view protection ordinance. But the moratorium is lifted ONLY if the City Council adopts the ordinance approved by the View Resources Board. I believe this ties the hands of the City Council in violation of the constitution.

The only people who have the right to interfere with your elect representatives to enact legislation are you, the voters. Measure B gives the City Council the power to lift the moratorium -- but only with the permission of an unelected board that is appointed by a political action committee. That’s undemocratic.

For that matter, the VRB also appears to have veto power over the ability of the voters themselves to lift the moratorium in less than two years.

Although it’s not completely clear in the initiative language, it would appear that the voters, like the City Council, can lift the moratorium early by enacting a view protection ordinance – but only the ordinance approved by the VRB, which again is unelected and appointed not by your elected officials but by VCORD.

I also believe the provision that allows us on the City Council to lift the moratorium in less than two years violates the constitutional provision requiring that voters cannot direct that legislation be enacted. The idea behind this provision is that voters need to actually see legislation before authorizing its approval.

Under Measure B, if we on the City Council agree with the VCORD-controlled View Resources Board about what should be in the view ordinance, it gets approved and the moratorium gets lifted – all without the voters ever voting on it. That too is undemocratic – to say nothing of unconstitutional. In this case, the VCORD initiative tries to give us on the City Council power that, under the constitution, we don’t have.

More to the point, if you don’t trust the City Council on the view question, why would you vote for something that takes away your right to vote on the view ordinance and, instead, turns that power over to the combination of a board you didn’t vote for and a City Council you don’t like?

Third, the composition of the View Resources Board is inherently undemocratic.

The VRB would have 23 members. Three would be city representatives appointed by the City Council. Two would be business representatives (Chamber and Visitor Bureau) appointed by VCORD. The other 18 would be neighborhood representatives appointed by VCORD. But 14 of those neighborhood representatives would be appointed from areas west of Victoria. Only 4 would be from areas east of Victoria, where half the population of the city lives. As an example, the Westside – which has a population of less than 10,000 people – would get 3 representatives, while East Ventura – with a population of more than 50,000 people – would get 4 representatives. That’s undemocratic.

But it gets worse. Some neighborhoods have no representation at all. Downtown has no representatives. Neither do some parts of Midtown – especially the Preble neighborhood south of Main Street toward Channel Drive east of Seaward; as well as the San Pablo neighborhood around Telegraph and Mills. And the entire neighborhood south of the college – from Mills all the way to Victoria, including the areas around Elmhurst Elementary and Buena High – have no representatives. Whether purposely or accidental, they have been left out.

And VCORD does not have the discretion to appoint people from these areas. The fact of the matter is that the initiative designates board representatives from other neighborhoods, meaning people from these neighborhoods cannot be appointed. This may be simply be an oversight; but once Measure B passes, VCORD cannot correct its own mistake.

It’s also worth noting that the process does not guarantee representation to any other neighborhood group besides VCORD. If, say, the Midtown Ventura Community Council or the Westside Community Council wants a seat on the board, they must ask VCORD – and if VCORD says no, there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

Finally, significant drafting errors and other provisions will make Measure B difficult to implement.

When you adopt an initiative, you adopt the whole thing. You can’t pick and choose. So you’d better be sure you like the whole thing.

Measure B has a number of drafting errors both large and small that concern me. If it’s riddled with drafting errors, what other bombshells – intentional or unintentional – are hidden in the text?

To give just a few small examples:

-- Fir Street is incorrectly identified as Fir Drive.
-- The downtown exemption area is described as being bounded on the north by Poli and the west by Ventura Avenue. But, of course, Poli and the Avenue don’t meet.
-- There’s a math error in describing the number of VRB members appointed by VCORD.
-- In one section, City Council is accidentally spelled City Counsel – as in attorney. Does this man that a view ordinance can be adopted by our City Attorney (our counsel), nor our elected City Council?

Admittedly, those are small. But there are larger concerns about vague drafting.

As I said before, whether by accident or on purpose, significant chunks of the city – including Downtown and the neighborhoods south of the college around Elmhurst Elementary and Buena High – have no representation whatsoever.

Also, it’s not clear whether the VRB members – if they want to put the view protection ordinance on the ballot – must gather signatures like any other initiative proponents. VCORD says yes, they must gather signatures; but it’s not clear from the text. What VCORD intends to do is, unfortunately, not what you are voting on. You’re voting on what the text says and that’s not clear.


WHY I AM CONCERNED ABOUT HOW VCORD WILL IMPLEMENT THE INITIATIVE

Like most people in town, I take in on faith that VCORD’s initiative proponents have no hidden agenda and simply want to do they think is best for the community. I have known both Diane Underhill and Camille Harris for a long time – we all live in the same Midtown neighborhood – and I know they are caring people with big hearts.

During the campaign, however, I have become more concerned about how VCORD will actually wield its newfound power. My concern falls into three categories.

First, VCORD representatives are getting more bold in suggesting that their agenda is to lower building heights, not empower neighborhoods.

From the beginning, I have believed VCORD when they say their objective is to bring more – and more diverse – neighborhood voices into our community discussion about how to protect views. VCORD representatives have stated that different neighborhoods might have different solutions to the view question, and so therefore many different neighborhood representatives should be involved. This makes sense to me.

Indeed, the city’s View Task Force – which Diane Underhill served on – quickly came to the same conclusion earlier this year. Even one-story buildings can often block views, especially along Main and Thompson. So lowering building heights won’t necessarily protect views; a wide range of techniques, including setbacks and variation in heights, must be employed.

During the campaign, however, VCORD has reframed its message. The real problem is not that diverse points of view aren’t being heard. The real problem, they are now saying, is that people who believe that allowable building heights along the commercial corridors should be lowered are not being heard.

The solution, they are suggesting, is to stack the View Resources Board with people who want lower building heights. If you don’t believe me, read Diane Underhill’s article in last Sunday’s Star, http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2009/oct/04/protects-citys-priceless-views-promotes-business/)

This seems to me to be the opposite of VCORD’s previous message. Are they interested in many points of view – or just their own?

Second, VCORD representatives say things that suggest they have already decided what the View Resources Board will do.

VCORD representatives have repeatedly stated that although they will appoint the View Resources Board, they will not try to influence what it does. In fact, they often say VCORD will “step away” from the process once the board members are appointed.

More recently, however, VCORD representatives have made statements that suggest they do not intend to step away. Recently, for example, Measure B opponents have expressed concern that passing the view ordinance might require a special election that could cost a quarter-million dollars. In response, in her Star piece last Sunday, Diane Underhill wrote that if an election is required, “the View Resources Board will request that it be on the November 2011 ballot so that no special-election expenditures will be required.”

Huh? The board hasn’t even been created yet, much less appointed. Yet VCORD has already decided what the board’s going to do, at least on this one issue. This makes it hard for me to believe that they are really going to step away.


Third, VCORD does not appear to be listening to all neighborhood groups—only the ones they agree with.

Here’s an example: In writing the initiative, VCORD carved out many exemption areas, mostly around employment centers. But they did not exempt the property at Harbor and Seaward, where Anastasi Development has been working with the Pierpont Community Council and the surrounding neighborhood, quite successfully, to craft a project everyone likes.

Part of the project is three stories high, but most neighbors appear to support it, and the Pierpont Community Council has been in constant discussions with Anastasi and also has been participating in the city’s review process. Nobody wants a big hole in the ground at Harbor and Seaward forever.

But if it passes, Measure B will stall the project for at least two years, and nobody knows whether there will be a permanent height limit that will make this popular project impossible to build.

So why did VCORD not exempt this property? Did they forget to call up Pierpont Community Council and ask about it? Or are they just not interested in neighborhood groups who favor a three-story building?

Either way, once again this seems undemocratic and suggests that if the voters give VCORD power, they may not listen to all neighborhood groups but, rather, only the ones they agree with.

I’m sorry that this has been such a long post. But I wanted all of you to understand the reasons in detail that Measure B concerns me. I hope you will join me in voting against it on November 3.

Moving Forward With View Protection

We’re moving forward with view protection.

Monday night the City Council voted 5-2 to accept a proposal by Councilmember Summers and me to give the General Plan policy on “public viewsheds and solar access” a high priority and create a task force to make recommendations on how to implement that policy. The task force is scheduled to come back to us in the spring

The vote was 5-2, with Neal Andrews and Jim Monahan opposed. Neal said he believes the council can deal with these issues individually at the plan and project level, as we did with the Midtown Corridors Code – an approach that has merit, and might be worth considering were it not for the pending VCORD initiative. Jim said he would have supported the idea if we committed ourselves to placing the resulting view protection policies on the ballot – something we still might do in the future, once we have an actual policy in place.

In the course of a discussion that lasted more than two hours, we also made a number of other changes and clarifications:

-- The task force will have 15 members, not 11. This did not change the composition of the task force but, rather, corrected a math error that Ed and I had made.

-- Instead of 3 members drawn from the old Vision Committee and Community Plan Advisory Committee, we will draw 2 from that group and 1 representative nominated by the Building Industry Association.

-- Both citizen and business representatives from different neighborhoods around the city will be appointed by the local Community Councils.

-- The committee will not be charged with specifically making recommendations on viewsheds and solar access for the Wells & Saticoy Community Plan, which is likely to come before the council prior to the task force’s recommendations; but East Ventura Community Council will nevertheless have two representatives on the task force.

-- The two public members and the two Vision/CPAC members will be nominated through the normal council appointments committee process.

The task force will report back to the council no later than March 15, rather than February 15.

One very important point is that we clarified that we are asking this task force not only to make recommendations on how to implement the “public viewshed and solar access” policy but also to suggest what those terms really mean.

There has been considerable discussion as to whether this policy means we intend to protect views (of the ocean, the hills, or whatever) from private property as well as public locations; as well as which public locations we should emphasize – for example, should we focus only on north-south vistas (such as along Seaward or California streets) or should we protect views from east-west locations along Seaward and Thompson, which would obviously require much more restrictive policies?

Neal called the fact that we charged the committee with figuring this out “a punt,” and in a way he’s right. This is a tricky issue that requires a lot of discussion – and in my opinion such a detailed discussion is better conducted by the stakeholder task force than by us. This is often the case on planning issues.

Having said that, I will say that in the Midtown Corridors Code, the council interpreted “public viewsheds” to mean the protection of views along the north-south roadway corridors. We also interpreted “solar access” to required stepped-back development on commercial parcels adjacent to the yards of residential parcels.

On Wells & Saticoy, Nelson Hernandez, our Community Development director, pointed out that if we wanted this committee to make recommendations on how to incorporate view/solar policies into the Wells & Saticoy Community Plan, we might further hold up approval of that plan. That plan has been in process since 2005, and we have already held it up several times to introduce additional issues for discussion. So we removed the Wells & Saticoy plan from the task force’s charge but retained the East Ventura Community Council members on the committee.

EVCC members at the meeting were understandably not happy with us for doing this. We will have to deal with view/solar issues in Wells & Saticoy when the Community Plan and the project-level Specific Plans (for example, for the Hansen Trust and Parkland properties) come before us. Dan Cormode of EVCC pointed out that the City Council may have to come up with our own definition of public viewsheds and solar access in those situations – possibly different from what the task force will come up with.

He’s right about that. As a trained city planner, I have to say that I wish we could stop the world from moving forward while we write our planning policies until they are perfect. As a politician, I know this is not realistic in most cases. Doing a Community Plan at the same time that we are doing Specific Plans in Wells & Saticoy has been an “awkward straddle” from the beginning, and it will continue to be so until we are done.

A lot of the discussion on Monday night revolved not around how the committee would be formed or what its charge would be, but whether the resulting policies should go on the ballot. VCORD’s representatives criticized us for attempting to “end-run” their initiative and for a “bait-and-switch”. Although they weren’t specific about what they meant by this, I assume that they think the end result is that we will place a completing measure on the ballot in November of 2009.

Meanwhile, Councilmember Monahan made it clear that a competing initiative was exactly what he was looking for. He asked two pro-business speakers if they would support putting a competing measure on the ballot; and indicated that he voted against the task force idea because it did not include a provision to place the resulting policies on the ballot.

I think the question of whether we should place our public viewshed/solar access policy on the ballot in November of 2009 is premature. Right now, all we are doing is creating a task force to make recommendations to us about what that policy might be. If all goes according to plan, those recommendations will return to us next spring and we can debate at that time what policies and code changes we should put into place.

If and when we put these new items into place, we can decide whether to place them on the ballot in November 2009 as well. But let’s take this one step at a time.

Revisiting Heights in Midtown -- and Elsewhere

Next Monday night (7/21), the City Council will embark on a new experiment -- a monthly meeting devoted exclusively to planning matters. Under some revisions we made a couple of months ago, we now deal with general city business on the first and third Mondays of the month and planning matters exclusively on the second Monday. We also meet earlier -- at 6 pm. We are going to try to take the fourth Monday off. Good luck.

In keeping with the spirit of the new planning-only meeting, Councilmember Ed Summers and I have placed two items on next Monday's agenda dealing with building heights.

The first is a further refinement of building heights in the interior residential neighborhoods in Midtown, placing additional conditions on buildings over 30 feet.

The second is an attempt to deal with the overall citywide height and view issues - which have been brought into focus by the VCORD initiative, now schedule for the ballot in November 2009 -- by creating a city task force to make recommendations for the City Council to consider.


Midtown Residential Building Heights

In some parts of Midtown, it is possible to build 40- to 45-foot residential buildings in the middle of residential neighborhoods. Until 2006, these "2 1/2" story buildings could be approved over the counter. We now require planning commission review for such projects.

The first proposal from Councilmember Summers and I for Monday night would place further restrictions on these essentially 3-story buildings. Under our proposal, buildings would be limited to 3o feet high unless the upper stories are set back further than the ground floor.

This doesn't solve all problems associated with tall buildings in Midtown, but at least it should mean that residential buildings in residential neighborhoods are more compatible with their surroundings. The proposal doesn't affect the heights of buildings along the Main and Thompson corridors, which are subject to a new code we passed alst year. Under that code, the upper floords of these buildings already must be set back 30 feet from back property lines.


View Protection Task Force

The second proposal from Councilmember Summers and I would create a "Public Viewshed and Solar Access" task force charged with providing the City Council with a set of recommendations for how to protect viewsheds and solar access.

This proposal was inspired by the VCORD initiative, which has qualified for the ballot for November of 2009. The VCORD initiative would impose a temporary 26-foot height limit in most parts of town and create a "View Resources Board" charged with drafting a view protection ordinance.

I have a hard time supporting the VCORD initiative, for two reasons. First, I don't think a moratorium on buildings over 26 feet is necessary, especially in a real estate downturn. And second, I can't support the manner in which the View Resources Board members are appointed. Under the initiative, these members would be appointed by VCORD -- a civic-minded but nevertheless private organization -- meaning that these appointments would be beyond the reach of the voters.

Nevertheless, VCORD's efforts have highlighted an important public issue -- how do we protect views from public places, and solar access to people's property, as we allow greater densities in certain parts of the city? VCORD's initiative admirably couches its provisions as an effort to implement the 2005 General Plan's provisions that public viewsheds and solar access should be protected. VCORD gathered more than 7,000 valid signatures for its initiative -- enough to qualify for the next municipal election in November of 2009, but not enough to qualify for the general election ballot this fall.

Even though I cannot agree with all the provisions of VCORD's initiative, I believe we should start the process of figuring out how to implement the General Plan's call to protect public viewsheds and solar access sooner rather than later. Therefore, our proposal would create a task force that is similar to the proposed VCORD committee and charge that task force with coming up with recommendations to the City Council no later than next February. Presumably this would permit us to adopt those recommendations next spring, and then voters can decide in fall whether we have done a good enough job or whether they still want to vote in favor of the VCORD initiative.

There are two major differences between our proposal and the VCORD initiative, baesd on the two areas of disagreement between some councilmembers and VCORD. The first is that our proposal does not call for a temporary height limit, as the VCORD initiative does. The second is that the task force would be appointed by the City Council, which is directly accountable to the voters; rather than by VCORD, which is not directly accountable to the voters.

Our proposal calls for an 11-member task force including the following members:

-- 3 representatives who served on either the Seize The Future Citizen Outreach Committee (the “Vision Committee”) or the Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee (the CPAC), not to include any current members of the City Council or the Planning Commission.

-- 1 representative nominated by the Chamber of Commerce.

-- 1 representative nominated by the Visitor and Convention Bureau

-- 1 representative nominated by the City’s environmental organizations.

-- 1 representative nominated by the Ventura Citizens Organized for Responsible Development (VCORD)

-- 2 representatives from each of the three neighborhoods scheduled to have Community Plans prepared in the foreseeable future (Saticoy & Wells, Westside, and Midtown), including 1 representative nominated by the local Community Council and 1 business owner.

-- 2 members appointed at large.

Our proposal also specifies that all meetings of this task force will be publicly noticed meetings open to the public.

At Last, A New Midtown Corridors Code

I’m sorry for the delay on this, but I fell ill after Monday’s meeting and am only now recovering.

Last Monday (11-26), the Council approved the Midtown Corridors code, including a large number of changes from the draft that was prepared by the staff. This action took place at the end of our second very long joint meeting with the Planning Commission.

Technically, both bodies discussed the code; then the Planning Commission made recommendations, then we approved the code with changes. Thanks to the Planning Commission for their hard work. The code will return to us for a second reading, probably on the consent calendar, in a couple of weeks – on December 17th, I think.

Overall, as I’ve said before, I think the Midtown Corridors code is a great improvement over the current code, and it’s an important step forward in implementing the General Plan. Gradually, we are knocking off these codes and plans called for in the General Plan. The Downtown Specific Plan is approved; now the Midtown code. In January we will hopefully knock off the Victoria Corridor plan and then wrap up the Saticoy & Wells Community Plan. Then we can move on to the North Avenue, Westside, and Midtown community plans. You can read more detail about this in the article I wrote in the Star on Sunday 12/2.

The big issue, of course, was views. I’m proud to say that we took what I think is the first action ever in a city code to protect views.. Here’s what we did:

-- We retained the suggested five-foot side-yard setback for corridor properties that are located at intersections with north-south streets.

-- We decided to require a 10-foot-wide sidewalk on the side-yard portion of all the corridor properties – that is, a 10-foot sidewalk will wrap around to the side street.

-- In order to maintain viewsheds along the hillside-to-ocean corridors (through streets), we will now require the upper floors of buildings on the through streets to be set back even further. That is, a building at Main and Seaward would be required to have a 10-foot sidewalk, a five-foot setback, and a further setback on the second and third stories.

-- To protect the terminating vistas looking northward, we required that the third stories of three-story buildings at a terminating vista be set back such that the ridgeline is visible from 200 feet to the south at a height of five feet.

Here’s a rundown of the other changes we made:

-- We clarified that all building heights must be expressed in the code in terms of both stories and feet.

-- We knocked down the height limits for buildings south of Thompson on either side of Borchard (the Vons and Big Lots shopping centers). Height limit will now be 45 feet (three stories) except on the areas immediately adjacent to residential areas, where height limit will now be 35 feet (two stories).

-- While retaining the “arcade” and “gallery” building types, we clarified that the arcades and galleries could not encroach on the public right-of-way (i.e., can’t be built over the public sidewalk).

== In deference to Community Memorial Hospital, which is required by state law to under a major renovation, we clarified that CMH’s future plans are probably best addressed by a specific plan rather than simply following the terms of the new code.

-- We decided to permit four-story buildings on the south side of Thompson at Seaward.

-- We allowed a few more uses in the main zone along Main and Thompson to permit business support services, as well as art studios and bars and taverns with a use permit.

-- We required landscape screening in the rear of the corridor properties where they abut residential properties.

-- We specified that the code should come back to us in a year for review.

Several other ideas didn’t fly. They included the following:

-- Picking up on an idea from Planning Commissioner Scott Boydstun, I suggested that we require all third stories be set back 10 feet from the street, to maintain the two-story feel of Main and Thompson. This didn't pass.

-- Councilmember Jim Monahan moved that we cut the parking requirements to match those downtown – essentially, from 2 spaces per unit to 1-1.5, Nobody seconded the motion.

-- Mr. Monahan also moved to limit heights to 26 feet to match the VCORD initiative. No one seconded this motion either.

The Midtown Corridors Code

On Monday, at long last, the City Council – together in a workshop with the Planning Commission – will consider the proposed Midtown Corridors Development Code.

The Midtown code is one of many steps our community is taking to implement the 2005 General Plan. As I have said before, our General Plan is very general, and especially in those parts of town that we have designated for infill development, we must draft very specific codes and policies to implement the General Plan.

I believe that the code can still be improved, and on Monday night I will work with my fellow councilmembers to make it better, especially in the dealing with views and the relationship between the projects on the corridors and the existing neighborhoods adjacent to them. But it is important to adopt this code very soon – if not Monday night, then as soon as the staff can return to us with the final changes. That’s because this code is a vast improvement over the code that is currently in place, for two reasons.

First, despite the rhetoric we have heard from some residents, this code represents a very significant downzoning along most of the Main and Thompson corridors from what is currently allowed. The current code permits six-story (75-foot) buildings in significant portions of the Midtown corridors now. The proposed code reduces the maximum height to two or three stories (between 35 and 45 feet) everywhere except at the Five Points area. Enacting this downzoning is long overdue.

Second, the code provides much more detailed direction to developers on setbacks, the mass and scale of buildings, and general design (as opposed to architectural style). This is a vast improvement over the current code, which is either too vague or too permissive on most of these points. This lack of specificity is part of the reason why recent projects have drawn a lot of fire.

For this reason I favor the quick adoption of the code, subject to additional changes we may direct Monday night. It may not be perfect, but it’s way better than what we have now. As the saying goes, we should now allow the perfect to become the enemy of the good. We should get this thing as far as long as we possibly can on Monday night and pass it as soon as we can.


Implementing the General Plan

As I said before, there are a number of policies and action steps in the 2005 General Plan that lead the City toward a new code for the Midtown corridors. Chapter 3 of the General Plan calls for an “infill first” approach to development and identifies the Midtown corridors as one of the focus areas for infill development. Specific actions called for in the General Plan include:

* Action 3.9, which directs us to adopt code provisions that designate mixed-use areas.
* Action 3.14, which directs us to utilize infill development to accommodate needed housing as identified in the Housing Element.
* Action 3.15, which directs us to adopt new codes to comply with the Housing Element.

In the Housing Element, which is also part of the General Plan, there is a specific policy (Policy 3.9), which directs the city to “promote higher density housing as part of mixed-use developments along parts of Thompson Boulevard and Main Street in Midtown Ventura.”

In passing the General Plan two years ago, we adopted all these policies and action ste[s and we reaffirmed adoption of the Housing Element, which was originally adopted in 2004.

The General Plan also contains a policy (Policy 3A) that we maintain our “cherished community characteristics,” and there is an action item under that policy (Action 3.3) that we “require preservation of public view sheds and solar access”. I do not believe the code currently implements this policy effectively and I will work with my colleagues Monday night to make changes to address this problem.


Possible Changes to the Code

Over the past few weeks I have read the code in detail and consulted with a wide variety of people on the staff and in the community about the proposed Midtown Code. For example, I met with Camille Harris, Diane Underhill, and Claudia Armann, all of whom are involved in Bungalow Neighbors and VCORD, to discuss the proposed code in detail. I also reviewed Diane’s very detailed suggestions. I met with Scott Boydstun, an architect who is a member of both our Planning Commission and our Design Review Committee. Under the Brown Act I am permitted to speak with two other members of the City Council before the meeting, and I chose to chat with Christy Weir and Ed Summers, hoping to find a lot of common ground – which I did.

I also talked to a lot of people in the neighborhood when I walked precincts during the recent campaign. In general, I found the neighbors to be most concerned about what I call “adjacency” – they wanted to make sure that the adjacent neighborhood is not overwhelmed by the size and scale of the new development. Many were concerned about views; and others said that they did not like the current blighted properties near their houses.

All that said, here are some areas of concern and some thoughts about how the City Council might tweak the proposed code on Monday night:

Views

While the code has been pending, there has been a lot of debate over how to protect views of the hillsides from the flats of Midtown as infill development along the corridors takes place. The General Plan calls for preservation of public viewsheds and solar access, but it doesn’t define public viewsheds. (For the record, the pending VCORD initiative calls for the preservation of the ”existing City views of the hillsides and coast”– it doesn’t use the word “public” – but the initiative doesn’t provide a specific definition of viewsheds either.) Clearly, to truly implement the General Plan policy, the Midtown code must provide more specific guidance on public viewsheds in Midtown.

This is a somewhat tricky issue, because the height of the hillsides varies dramatically from block to block in Midtown. In many locations, even existing one-story buildings block hillside views from nearby public vantage points, while in other locations a three- or four-story building would not block the views. So on the question of views, where you stand really does depend on where you sit.

The most important public viewsheds in Midtown are the hillside-to-ocean view corridors that run along the north-south streets. It’s important to keep these view corridors clear, so that you can see the ocean from up on the hill and from the flats you can see the hillsides.

But there are two types of north-south streets in Midtown: through streets and terminating streets. Catalina or Seaward would be a through street, which goes up into the hillsides or ends in a place where there are no buildings. Santa Rosa or Pacific would be a terminating street – a street that terminates at Main Street and would therefore have a building on the north side, potentially blocking views. (The “terminated vistas” are identified with stars on the Regulating Plan between pages 20 and 21 of the code.)

Through Streets: “Daylight Plane”

The code currently proposes a five-foot sideyard setback on properties at the intersection of a north-south street and one of the two corridors. This is a good attempt at maintaining the view corridors catching hillside views to the north, but the setback standard on through streets such as Seaward should be more stringent.

There’s a concept in architectural regulation known as the “daylight plane” – a kind of a geometrical standard that requires buildings to step back, wedding cake style, from the street according to a specific angle – say, 45% -- as they get taller. A building located on the corner of a corridor and a through street should be subject to a daylight plane requirement for the sideyard setback – call it a “sideyard plane”. That way, view corridors will remain open – and the higher up you go on the building, the wider the view corridor will be.

This same rule should be applied to intersection parcels on Thompson, where virtually all the streets in Midtown are “through” streets – that is, they continue north at least to Main.

Terminating Streets: Third-Story Setback

Terminating streets represent a different problem, because a building on the north side of Main Street holds the potential to completely block hillside views from terminating street
that faces the building. However, this potential problem can be solved by adopting one simple rule: If a building on the north side of a terminating street is three stories high, the third story should be set back from the street sufficiently so that the ridgeline of the hillside is visible from 200 feet south on the terminating street at a height of 5 feet. The code should allow thin or narrow architectural features (such as a steeple) to protrude higher so long as the view is not obstructed. This is easily included in the code because there is already a Terminating Vista Overlay District proposed (page 28).

Not all views from every point on Main Street would be protected by this rule – but not all views from every point on Main Street would be protected even if buildings were limited to two stories. A distance of 200 feet is about a third of the way from Main to San Nicholas, meaning that the hillsides would become more prominent as you move farther south. They would be readily visible from San Nicholas and certainly from Thompson. Combined with the application of the “sideyard plane” rule on intersection lots on Thompson, this rule would maintain excellent north-south viewsheds along Thompson.


View From Along the Corridors Themselves

It is impossible to maintain every public view of the hillsides from every vantage point on both corridors. Existing buildings – even one-story buildings -- already obstruct some views completely. However, the combination of the sideyard plane rule (applied at through cross-streets at both Seaward and Thompson) and the third-story setback rule (applied on terminating streets) will maintain varying building heights throughout Midtown. The hillsides will remain visible from most locations along the corridors.


Adjacency

The most frequent concern I have heard from Midtown residents about infill development along the corridors is that new buildings will tower over adjacent residential neighborhoods. The new code represents a significant improvement over the current code but I think a couple of tweaks would make it better.

The current code permits a three-story building to back up to a residential neighborhood with a 20-foot setback. As it is currently written, the new code increases this setback to 30 feet, while retaining the 20-foot setback for two-story buildings. I think the practical effect of this change will be that most developers will create “wedding cake” buildings that will step down to two stories toward the rear property line.

However, the proposed code should be changed so that landscaped screening is required at the rear property line between a corridor parcel and an adjacent residential parcel. This can be easily achieved by simply expanding the “Landscape” section associated with each building type.

Having a one-story difference between the corridor building and residential building behind it is good policy. But I am hesitant to require the step-down in all circumstances – that is, create a complete prohibition on three-story buildings adjacent to one-story houses – for one simple reason: Every homeowner backing up to the corridor has the right under our zoning code to add a second story. Therefore, as it currently stands, the theoretical maximum height for a commercial parcel is one story taller than the theoretical maximum height for a residential parcel. If we ever create, for example, an historic district somewhere in Midtown that removes the possibility of homeowners adding a second story, then I would favor eliminating the step-down option and requiring that adjacent buildings on the corridors be only two stories.


Building Height Definitions

The current code defines allowable development mostly in terms of stories, rather than feet; though it does use feet in at least one instance (the T4.5 zone on page 22). The staff report does include a chart translating stories into feet.

The code should include both stories and feet in every reference to avoid confusion.

There has also been some concern that the allowable building heights on the corridor parcels are higher than one might expect – for example, 45 feet, rather than 35 feet, for a three-story building. This is mostly because the ground floor of a commercial building is typically 15 feet high with at least a two-foot space above it for mechanical installations. In fact, as proposed, the code requires a 15-foot minimum ground-floor height. Most of the three-story buildings that have been proposed along the corridors so far have come in at about 40-42 feet high.

Part of the purpose of the code is to encourage retail and live-work on the ground floor with residences above, so therefore I think a height limit in the 42-45-foot range is appropriate. However, we should also define the maximum height of each floor (15 feet for the ground floor, 10-12 feet for the floors above) to ensure that no project can actually have four floors.


Building Types

The list of allowed buildings types include two types – “gallery” (page 46) and “arcade” (page 47) – that permit the buildings to encroach onto the sidewalk space if the sidewalk space is provided beneath the second-floor building (arcade) or balcony (gallery). The intent is to provide a “walkway” effect like The Arcade in Ojai, but with living space jutting out into the public right of way above.

These building types do not currently exist in Midtown – or, so far as I know, anywhere in Ventura. Furthermore, because of noise concerns applicants seem to be pushing upstairs residential units away from the street rather than pulling the building toward the street.

Therefore, these two building types should not be permitted under the code.

Diane Underhill has suggested that two of the larger building types that would be permitted – “stack dwelling” (page 72) and “commercial block” (page 74) – should be prohibited on lots shallower than 150 feet. I frankly think it is unlikely anybody will try to build these building types on shallow lots, but I appreciate the point. It is possible that some developers will assemble two or three fairly shallow lots (say, 100 feet deep) along one of the corridors and seek to build one of these two building types.

Some residents may fear lot assembly because they think it will result in a monolithic project, but I have a different view. I’m more concerned about applicants trying to stuff big projects on narrow lots rather than shallow lots. The worst projects I have seen are the ones on the 50-foot lots. So I think that assembling lots gives the city far more ability to force the applicant to design a good project. And remember that the 20- and 30-foot setbacks would still apply. If we prohibit these building types, I’d suggest we prohibit them on narrow lots rather than shallow lots.


Encroachment

On some portions of Main and Thompson, the residential character of the area remains, and the code respects this character by requiring the buildings to be set back from the street according to the predominant existing setback on the block. A block where buildings currently come all the way to the sidewalk will require no setback; a block where buildings are set back residential style will require a similar setback for new buildings.

However, in both T5.2 and T4.5, a variety of front-yard encroachments are permitted to allow for porches, stoops, and the like. This might make sense in a brand-new development where it is also possible to design streets to be narrow with slow-moving traffic. But it does not make sense along Main and Thompson. These encroachments should be eliminated.


Five Points South of Thompson

The proposed code would designate the Five Points area as T5.2, which is the only place where the current six-story zoning would be retained. Taller buildings make sense at Five Points, especially near Community Memorial Hospital and on the triangle of Five Points, which is not adjacent to any residential areas. However, tall buildings don’t make sense south of Thompson along Borchard, which is adjacent to a residential neighborhood. As it is currently written, the code retains the T5.2 zoning south of Borchard but places an overlay (“Residential Overlay Two”) on the areas adjacent to residential to limit them to three stories. The entire area below Borchard ought to be rezoned to T4.5.



Three-Story Moratorium and the Pending VCORD Initiative

Diane Underhill of VCORD has asked that we include in this code a moratorium on all buildings over 26 feet in the Midtown corridors because of the VCORD initiative, which is currently pending at the county while the signatures are verified. I see why VCORD would be interested is taking this course of action. But I do not believe we should allow the pending initiative to stand in the way of taking steps to protect views in Midtown now.

Essentially, what VCORD is asking is that we place a moratorium on buildings over 26 feet tall along the Midtown corridors while we wait to see whether an initiative has qualified for the ballot which, if it qualifies and if it passes and if it is legally valid, would place an moratorium on buildings over 26 feet fall for up to two years while a committee is appointed to draft an ordinance to protect views.

My opinion is, Hey, let’s take concrete steps Monday night in the Midtown code to protect Midtown views now.