Thank You, Ventura

Saturday was a fabulous day here in Ventura. First of all, it was a gorgeous day, and I had a wonderful run along the beach in the afternoon. Then there was the Holiday Street Fair – a longtime tradition we at the city have successfully turned over to the Downtown Ventura Partnership and other private sponsors. Just after sundown, I joined Santa Claus, Father Tom from the Mission – and a huge throng of people – in lighting up the Mission’s two Christmas trees, which by the way are the tallest Christmas trees in the United States. Then we all adjourned to the intersection of Main and California, where fake snow fell while we all danced and City Hall flashed with revolving, dramatic colors.

In other words, it was a great day to be the Mayor of this town. And all through it I kept thinking to myself something I have thought so many times over the years: This town can do things that other towns just can’t do!

It’s been easy to forget this during our recent hard times, when a lot of people have been focused on what we can’t do or aren’t doing or can’t afford to do. But as I stepped down as Mayor and a member of the City Council on Monday night, I wasn’t thinking about what we can’t do. I was thinking about all the things we can do – and all the things we do successfully on a regular basis.

I guess I could say a lot of the usual things that politicians say when they leave office – thanks for the privilege of serving, I am proud of what we accomplished, I’m humbled by all of this. (Actually, I did say all these things Monday night.) But what I really want to say is this: I’m the luckiest guy in the world because I got to be on the Ventura City Council for eight years and I got to be Mayor of Ventura for two years.

Things have been really tough in the last couple of years, so I think it’s important to understand what the situation was back in 2003, when I first ran for the City Council. We were in the middle of a divisive public debate over what to do about the Serra Cross, located on what was then city property in Grant Park. We had just lived through a divisive election over a very large proposed development project in the hillsides. Indeed, we had just been through three bruising decades of divisive growth battles, which had led to numerous ballot initiatives, wild swings back and forth in our political leadership, and the premature retirement or defeat of any number of councilmembers over the previous decade. Oh, yes, and by the way the City budget had been running in the red for the previous three years.

In those days, City Hall had a reputation for being opaque, not transparent, and not very responsive. In fact, one of the reasons I ran was because at that time it seemed to me that the only way to have true influence over the City’s direction was to be one of the seven members of the City Council. Paradoxically, I wanted to become one of those seven people in order to change that situation.We’ve tackled all those problems pretty successfully. And we’ve done it by staying focused on the fact that, at City Hall, everything we do is related to one of three overarching goals:

-- Enduring prosperity

-- A high quality of life

-- A strong sense of community

It’s been very hard to keep focused on those three things with the economic downturn and the resulting budget difficulties in the last two or three years. But I think that we have accomplished two important things in the last two to four years.

First, we’ve laid the foundation for future prosperity. As I have said many times, to be successful in the long run, all cities must constantly evolve economically. Ventura is no exception. Our traditional reliance on oil, agriculture, government, and a few other sectors will continue to provide a base of employment but will not carry us through to another generation of true prosperity. So we must constantly work at helping our businesses grow and encourage new high-growth businesses to locate in Ventura. We’ve laid a very good foundation for that – not just with out tech effort and our incubator, but by becoming more business-friendly without compromising our quality of life. We have restored positive relations with our Chamber of Commerce. We helped push through the $350 million expansion of Community Memorial Hospital. We’ve cleaned up our permitting processes. And, perhaps most important, we’ve just about eradicated the decades-old idea that Ventura is anti-business. This foundation will help us tremendously in the years ahead.

And second, we’ve learned how to work together as a community to get things done. In the old days, if you wanted to get something done in Ventura, the path to success was simple: You lobbied the City Council until you got four votes committing the City to take the lead on the project and pay for the whole thing. But that’s not a sustainable model for the future – not financially, certainly, but also not in community-building terms. Communities succeed not because the city government takes everything on and pays for it, but because a broad coalition of people, organizations, and institutions work together to get things done in a timely, high-quality, and cost-efficient manner. That’s what’s happening in the partnership between the City and the Ventura Botanical Gardens to improve Grant Park. It’s also what’s happening in the partnership between the City and Ventura Unified to open up school land on the Westside for parks and recreational use. This will have to be the model for getting things done in the future – and we’ve laid the foundation for it in the last two years.

Shortly after he was seated on Monday night, Mayor Tracy said that the city’s highest priority right now is to make sure that the public has confidence in the city’s ability to deliver basic services – police, fire, parks, street maintenance, and so forth. He’s right. We’ve balanced the budget and laid the foundation for the future, but the quality of our services has taken a hit in the process and now it’s time to show the people that we can still deliver the basics in a high-quality way. It’ll be a challenge, but I think Mike’s exactly the right Mayor for this moment, because he knows how to focus on the basics and make sure these things get done well. He’ll do a great job.

I’m comfortable with my decision to step down, because a successful community is not the result of one person’s actions, or even seven people’s actions. It’s the result of thousands of people waking up every day and committing themselves to make a town great – not just politicians and government employees, but volunteers and people who work for nonprofit organizations and PTO presidents and even all the people who go to work in private businesses every, generating the revenue and the profits that give us the prosperity we need to continue to be successful. Indeed, a successful community is a multi-generational effort, as stewardship of the community is handed down over time. As the word "stewardship" implies, no one truly owns a community’s success; we are all merely stewards of that success. We must learn how to create success every day and then hand it down to the next generation of leaders. It is important know how to pass the baton knowledgeably, gracefully – and before you wear out you welcome.

From my new vantage point in our nation’s capital, I will do the best I can – in any way I can -- to help Ventura move forward with enduring prosperity, a high quality of life, and a stronger sense of community. I always loved doing this in my travels around the country before I was elected, and proudly do so in the future. In other words, wherever I am, I will continue to be one of those thousand of people who wakes up every day and works to make Ventura a better place.

And no matter who is Mayor, I still think I’m the luckiest guy in the world because this town and my colleagues on the City Council had enough confidence in me to allow me to serve as Mayor for the last two years. I love this town. Thank you, Ventura.

Giving Thanks for Our Faith Community -- And Helping Them Prevent Homelessness

Tonight I’m giving thanks for Ventura’s amazing faith community. I just returned home from the annual Thanksgiving Service put on by the Ventura Interfaith Ministerial Association, which I’m proud to say was hosted this year by my congregation, Temple Beth Torah.

Every year, VIMA – a group of ministers from a wide variety of faiths – holds an interfaith service on the Tuesday night before Thanksgiving at a different congregation around town. It’s a truly remarkable service – beautiful and heartfelt and caring. In other words, a lot like Ventura.

As each minister and each choir came to our bimah at Temple Beth Torah to present a prayer of gratitude derived from their own faith, I remembered the times I visited so many of their churches and congregations over my two years as mayor. I went everywhere – from Evangelical Christian churches all the way to Hindu and Buddhist temples – and I am amazing at the range of our religious institutions, their commitment to our community, and the progress they have made in working together.

Tonight, in addition to our own Rabbi Lisa Hochberg-Miller, the service representatives from Seventh-Day Adventists, Mormons, Disciples of Christ, United Church of Christ, Bhuddist temples, the Baha’i Community, Methodists, Unitarian Universalists, and Methodists – as well as Captain Bill Finley from the Salvation Army, Rev. Rob Orth from Project Understanding, and Rev. Curtis Hotchkiss from Community Memorial Hospital. We prayed, worshipped and gave thanks in a half-dozen different languages.

In a world where religious observance, all too often, fosters divisiveness and hatred, tonight’s service was remarkable. All the more remarkable, however, is the community work that all these organizations do together, especially in feeding and housing the homeless and helping people in need. One of the most amazing things these organizations do together is help to support and run the Ventura Homeless Prevention Fund – a nationally recognized program that raises money privately to help keep families out of homelessness when they are at risk.

At a time when it’s easy to be cynical about how our charitable and tax dollars are used – and where we are all too accustomed to laying out money for good causes and not getting results – the Homeless Prevention Fund is amazing. Many families of modest means are always a paycheck or two away from homelessness, and often one single event – a broken-down car, a medical problem – can strain a family’s finances so much that they are out on the street. The Homeless Prevention Fund provides money to families at risk to keep them in their homes.

And it’s a great value. Once a family is homeless, getting them housed and back on their feet can cost, quite literally, tens of thousands of dollars. But the average cost of helping them through their emergency so that they can stay in the home is about $750. It’s a great investment in our community.

Tonight’s appeal was to provide funds for the Homeless Prevention Fund. Bill Finley from the Salvation Army – a remarkable, passionate, articulate, and effective leader in our community – made the appeal. I won’t try to repeat what he said here, but he claimed he couldn’t sing and therefore read a lot of song lyrics of his smartphone. The net effect was that he emptied my pocket.

And this Thanksgiving, I’d suggest you should let the Homeless Prevention Fund empty your pocket too. It’s easy – just go to this web site, and follow the directions to donate online. Or you can write a check to the United Way of Ventura County, with a note that you want to support the Ventura Homeless Prevention Fund, and mail it to the United Way at 1317 Del Norte Road, Suite 100, Camarillo, CA 93010.

To me, the most enjoyable thing about tonight’s service was seeing how much fun our diverse interfaith ministers have together. As a Jew and a Scot, I was blown away at the sight of Pastor Jim Ayars of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church playing the bagpipes while standing on our bimah at Temple Beth Torah. I just love this town, and I love the way the people in our community use their faith in a positive way to make Ventura a better place. That’s what I am giving thanks for this week.

Artists, Don't Ever Sell Yourselves Short

Here's an adapted version of the speech I gave at the Mayor's Arts Awards last Thursday night:

It’s been my privilege twice to present these awards to outstanding contributors to the arts here in Ventura. You’d think by now we would be past calling ourselves “California’s New Art City,” though I have to admit I’m a bit hesitant to call ourselves “California’s Old Art City”.

After all these years, we’ve begun to make a real impact in the arts – and the arts have begun to make a real impact on Ventura in more ways than I can count. As I prepare to leave office, my message to the artists and their supporters in this town is pretty simple:

Don’t ever sell yourself short.

I know that’s a funny thing to say, but artists have a tendency to sell themselves short – and then get mad because other people also sell them short. But don’t forget all the different ways that the arts help us.

In the business of running our city, we try to do three things. We try to create prosperity for our community. We try to improve the quality of life for people in Ventura. And we try to improve our sense of community and our sense of place. Everything we do is about one (or more) of these three goals; and the arts are vital in accomplishing all three.

We tend to speak generally about how the arts are good for residents of Ventura because the arts have the power to inspire and fulfill us; and we speak even more sweepingly about how the arts helps the economy because of the number of paintings and tickets so, and the spinoff effect, and so forth. But I want to take a moment to make these things more real.

Everytime somebody comes into contact with the arts, you are touching them – and you are changing and improving our community.

Every time a child creates something in school, and realizes that they can create, and gains confidence as a result, that’s you at work.

Every time somebody is moved and gains new insight into themselves and the world by experiencing art, that’s you at work.

Every time somebody is inspired by a piece of public art to renew their commitment to our community, that’s you at work. It doesn't matter whether commitment is a commitment to the arts -- it can be any renewed commitment to our community.

Every time somebody comes up with an idea for a business or a product, and uses creative thinking skills to figure out how to make that business or product a success, that’s you at work.

Every time somebody decides to move their business to Ventura – or keep it here – or expand it here – because the quality of life and the things Ventura has to offer are important, that’s you at work.

All these are examples of you at working helping us to achieve our three basic goals: prosperity, quality of life, and sense of community. So don’t ever sell yourself short. Don’t ever stop reminding yourselves – and reminding us – that the arts work every day, in every venue, to help us achieve our most basic goals as a community.

Thanks to all of you for what you have done. It has been my privilege to serve this community for the last eight years on the City Council and for the last two as Mayor. I hope I can continue to work with you in enhancing the arts – and leveraging the power of the arts to achieve our other community goals – for many years to come.

The New CMH: Key To Our Quality of Life -- And Our Prosperity

A few weeks ago I came into the mayor’s office on a Monday morning and found a huge stack of pretty intimidating documents to sign. They were, of course, the papers authorizing the city to work with Community Memorial Hospital to sell $350 million in bonds – to be paid back by CMH’s revenues, not by the city’s taxpayers -- in order to finance the enormous expansion and upgrade now underway at the hospital’s site in Midtown.

If you’ve ever bought a house or a car, you know that nothing focuses the mind like signing your name to a bunch of documents. But when the bonds went on the market, they were sold in a matter of minutes and – as the mounds of dirt near the hospital attest – construction has begun. Last Wednesday night, I was proud to participate in a moving groundbreaking featuring 14 speakers – patients, doctors, nurses, volunteers, construction workers – whose lives have been changed by their association with CMH. The whole experience has reinforced for me the notion that CMH is a cornerstone of our community – not only our qualify of life but our prosperity as well.

The CMH expansion is probably the biggest construction project we will ever see in Ventura. (By contrast, the Pacific View Mall expansion back in 2000 was about $100 million.) It may also be the most important. Although the expansion was driven by state law requiring hospitals to retrofit their buildings for seismic safety, CMH has gone far beyond that goal. The expansion will actually allow CMH to serve as one of the most important drivers of our community’s prosperity and well-being for decades to come, in three different ways.

1. High-quality medical care

Between CMH and Ventura County Medical Center, we in Ventura already have extraordinarily high-quality medical care already. These two institutions have strong connections to great medical schools at UCLA and USC, and each specializes in different aspects of medical care. But the new CMH will be a huge leap beyond the status quo – private rooms, a 35-bed emergency room, a serene garden in which to walk and heal, and a state-of-the-art medical facility that will be as good as any of its size in the United States. Thanks to this expansion, all of us in Ventura can be assured of great medical care for the rest of our lives.

2. High-quality jobs

Obviously, CMH currently provides hundreds of good-paying jobs for people who live and work in Ventura – doctors, nurses, technicians of all kinds, and on and on. But the new CMH creates a whole net set of opportunities that hold the potential to create spinoff businesses and great jobs for decades to come. Over the past few years in Ventura, we have put a great deal of effort into pinpointing and focusing on growth sectors of the economy – most of which have an important technology components. For example, our Ventura Ventures Technology Center has focused on emerging web-oriented businesses spilling out of Santa Barbara. Another sector we must focus on is biotechnology, and the new CMH can help us become more competitive. The biotech sector in Ventura County is strong – after all, Amgen is the largest private company in the county and one of the largest biotech companies in the world – and we in Ventura are currently missing out on important spinoff opportunities there. By using part of the old hospital building to create wet lab space and other facilities for startups, CMH can help Ventura kickstart our biotech sector. CMH can also serve as a testbed for clinical trials – thus combining the best of research and clinical work, which are both required to develop and test new products, build companies, and create good jobs. This opportunity is often overlooked in talking about the CMH expansion, but I can’t emphasize how important it is to our community’s long-term prosperity.

3. Midtown revitalization

CMH has long been an anchor in Midtown’s “Five Points” neighborhood, as the hospital’s employees and visitors have patronized businesses and thus helped the neighborhood economy. In planning for the new hospital, CMH has done an amazing job of collaborating with the city and the neighborhood to create an expansion that is sensitive to the neighborhood (there was no neighborhood opposition) and will strengthen Midtown’s business base. A new parking garage will be created collaboratively by the hospital to serve both CMH and businesses on Main Street. Most important, CMH will now serve not just as the economic anchor. . The new hospital will be oriented toward Main Street with a lovely plaza. CMH will surrender its Brent Street address and replace it with a Main Street address. A plaza and new pedestrian connections will link the hospital to Main Street. CMH has worked hard to help make Five Points in Ventura’s “Second Downtown” – a well-planned and pleasant employment district that will have strong retail businesses benefiting everyone in town.

I have to admit that when I was first elected to the City Council eight years ago, I didn’t think much about the importance of Community Memorial Hospital. Like most people, I thought about the effect it has had on my lives – the many emergency room visits, the times my mother was treated there (and eventually she passed away there), and so forth. But in world where competition for prosperity is tough, every community has to identify its greatest assets and learn how to make the most of them. CMH is one of our greatest assets – and I am very grateful to CEO Gary Wilde and everyone else for all the hard work they have put in. I wouldn’t have missed the groundbreaking for the world. And I hope to be there for the grand opening in a couple of years – so we can see just how much a better CMH means a better Ventura.

How to Make Sure We Keep Our Young Families in Ventura

A few weeks ago, I went out to Temple Beth Torah to observe a service honoring eight 16-year-olds who were finishing the Temple’s confirmation class. It was an emotional evening for me, because these kids are the last of the cohort I have known at the Temple for many years – the younger brothers and sisters of the kids who grew up with my college-age daughter.

It is also, sadly, the kind of event that doesn’t occur nearly as much as it used here in Ventura. The truth is that, as much as we love Ventura as a family, the number of children – and young people generally – is on the decline. And as a community we are getting older. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, between 2000 and 2010:

-- The number of children age 0-9 in Ventura declined by 11%.

-- The number of people between 30 and 50 – typically the parents of school-age children – declined by 10%.

-- The number of people over the age of 50 increased by almost 30%

To a certain extent, these statistics reflect a national and statewide trend toward a “graying” population. It’s also reflective of coastal cities throughout California, where the number of families and children is in decline.

More than anything, however, it might simply suggest a lack of turnover in Ventura’s population. Our kids are growing up and moving away and the rest of us are just getting older and staying here. I’m a good example: In the 2000 Census, I was in the 30-50 age category with a child at home. Now I’m an over-50 empty nester. (At least I was until a few weeks ago, when my Boomerang Daughter returned home … but that’s another story.) We don’t move away when we retire, because we already live in a great place to retire; and since we control new development strictly there aren’t many opportunities for new families to move in.

There was one bright spot in the Census: The number of people age 20-29 in Ventura went up 16%, a much higher figure than we saw statewide. This is a wonderful twist on the longstanding trend of kids from Ventura going away to college and never coming back. I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess there are two reasons for this bright spot. The first is that kids who grew up in town are sticking around because they can now go to college locally, especially at Cal State Channel Islands. The second is that young people from elsewhere are drawn to Ventura by the lifestyle and the growing opportunity for interesting jobs in our emerging economic sectors such as high-tech.

Like Ventura, mature communities all over the country are struggling because they can’t keep the people they need to fill important jobs and to give the community a family-oriented vitality. But the rise of the twenty-somethings here in town gives us an opportunity to reverse the trend. If we can hang on to these folks over the next 10 years, then they’ll stay here a long time and raise their families here.

But that’s not just going to happen. In order to keep our young families, we need to nurture the things that young families need – schools, jobs, and housing. We’ve already got the schools. Ventura Unified is an excellent school district with many choices – magnet and charter schools. We also have very good Catholic and Christian schools as well.

As for jobs, we’re working hard on creating a whole new sector of jobs in the “new economy” – high-tech, web development, and related companies that can provide stable, long-term employment. That’s why I’m so encouraged about the fact that our twenty-something population is on the rise. I think they’re coming to town – or staying in town after college – to work in these emerging businesses. We must continue our efforts to grow these private-sector businesses so that young families will have stable jobs.

That leaves housing. It’s true that, for the moment, housing in Ventura seems affordable. But it’s still expensive, especially compared with other places where young families might live. The median home price in Ventura in July was $327,000. That’s down 16% from last year, but it’s still way higher than the state average of $252,000 and more than double the cost of housing in the inland locations where young families typically move these days, like Bakersfield, the Inland Empire, and Las Vegas.

In the long run, we will have to be aggressive in making sure that there is enough housing – and the right kind of housing – for our young families to buy. That probably means building more townhomes and large, high-quality condominiums, because the families won’t be able to afford single-family homes as we did. It also means building more move-down housing for seniors – not just assisted living, but smaller units for older folks in places like downtown, where you don’t have to drive much. Because part of the problem, of course, is that we older folks are sitting on our larger houses even though we don’t have families. More move-down housing will encourage longtime Venturans to move out of their houses and stay in town – and also free up single-family housing for young families to buy so that we don’t have to build more sprawl to keep them in town.

In part, we can’t avoid the fact that we are an aging country, an aging state, and an aging city. We’re lucky that our health is better than our parents and we will be able to enjoy life – and also contribute to our community – far longer than they did. But Ventura remains – as it always has been – a great family town. We all need to work together to make sure that lots of people of all ages enjoy living here.

Measure J Was Illegal -- And Too Extreme For Ventura

By now, everyone in town has heard that last Monday Judge Mark Borrell removed the parking initiative from Ventura’s local ballot in November.

The right to vote on public issues is important to us here in Ventura. Our city has a long history of citizen-driven ballot measures, including SOAR in 1995. Sometimes these initiatives have won, as SOAR did, and sometimes they have lost, as did the convoluted “view protection” initiative on the ballot in 2009. So it’s understandable that some people are mad that Measure J will not be on the ballot and will try to make the Judge’s ruling an issue in the City Council campaign this fall. At the same time a lot of people are relieved -- and look forward to a City Council campaign that focuses on more important issues than parking meters.

But before things heat up in the City Council race, I think it’s important to step back and understand two important points.

First, whether you like it or not, the right to vote on local issues is defined by state law. And in this case, Measure J clearly violated state law.

Second, no matter how you feel about the downtown parking meters, Measure J was a very extreme measure. In addition to removing the downtown meters, Measure J would have required 2/3 voter approval for any future attempt to charge for parking on city streets and any city-owned property.

LEGAL VALIDITY OF THE INITIATIVE

Let’s begin with the first question: Why did Judge Borrell removed Measure J from the ballot?

We in California revere the right to initiative (where citizens place legislation on the ballot) and referendum (where citizens seek to overturn a City Council action via the ballot). Yet the California Constitution doesn’t permit us to vote on everything. For example, we can vote on legislative changes (like changing zoning ordinance to prohibit liquor stores in certain parts of town) but we can’t vote on how a law is applied to individual situations (like whether or not to grant a conditional use permit to a particular liquor store). That’s not me talking. That’s what the California Constitution says and how the courts have interpreted it.

More to the point, Ventura’s voters do not have the right to adopt an ordinance that conflicts with state law, any more than the City Council does.

While it’s very unusual for a ballot initiative to be removed from the ballot before it is voted on, courts have consistently confirmed that if an initiative is obviously unlawful there is no point in holding an election.

Which is what happened with Measure J. Measure J was a ballot initiative that would have removed parking meters and required future on-street and off-street parking decisions to be decided by the voters, not the City Council. That directly contradicts California Vehicle Code Section 22508 which states that parking meter actions are only subject to referendum – the right to veto City Council actions. California law does not allow voters to make parking laws of their own by an initiative, because doing so would make it difficult for a city to respond to traffic problems in a timely fashion. The exclusion of parking meters from the initiative process was tested in court and has been settled law since the Sixties.

In short: Carla Bonney, the local Tea Party leader who has been Measure J’s main proponent, could have gathered signatures to challenge the City Council’s action to install the paking meters at the time the decision was made (via referendum). But she was prohibited by state law from writing her own initiative law to govern local parking regulations.

All this seemed very clear to our City Attorney and to a majority of the City Council, which concluded it had no other option than to test Measure J’s validity in court. The proponents, of course, claimed that the lawsuit was seeking to “thwart the will of the people”. Yet they never really addressed the fatal defect: that their initiative ran afoul of the law.

In her statements before the City Council, Bonney did not seem to know the difference between a referendum and an initiative. In her interpretation, any ballot measure was a referendum until it was placed on the ballot, at which time the measure would become an initiative. She also repeatedly dismissed the long-standing California case law that forbids parking initiatives simply because the cases were old.

In court, the proponents argument was that the Vehicle Code didn’t apply to parking meters since they claimed the parking meters were not intended to control traffic. Instead, she argued that the City was really trying to create a “fee monopoly” with the paid parking system downtown. (I’m not sure how you create a monopoly by charging for 300 spaces when there are 2,000 nearby spaces that are free, but anyway, that was the argument.) It was a convoluted argument and Judge Borrell didn’t buy it. Instead, he followed the clear precedents of long-settled law.

That’s why Measure J was removed from the ballot,

TOO EXTREME FOR VENTURA

It seems to me that the legal defects in the initiative itself were related to the way the whole anti-meter movement morphed over time. The movement began with concern by some downtown merchants that their business would be hurt by the meters. By the time it reached the ballot, it had changed into an effort driven mostly by members of the local Tea Party who claimed that American freedoms were at risk.

When the paid parking first went in, I attended a couple of meetings of local merchants who were understandably fearful that their business would be hurt. These meetings were attended by about 15 merchants (out of the approximately 160 merchants downtown.) In response, the city made significant changes: removing some of the meters, reducing the hours that the paid parking was in effect, and providing thousands of one-hour-free coupons during the Christmas season. Although we discussed other possible changes, even the concerned merchants could not agree on which to implement.

Meanwhile, the City used the money from the meters to heavily beef up the police presence downtown – with impressive results. Since last fall, downtown crime is down 40%. Retail sales actually increased – by about 3% over the prior year, despite an ailing economy. When downtown merchants had a strong Christmas season, most of them stopped complaining about the meters.

From the beginning, however, members of the local Tea Party championed the parking meters as their political issue. Led by Carla Bonney and Gary Parker, who owned American Flag & Cutlery on Main Street, they claimed the parking meters constituted an illegal tax. As it became clear that downtown had not become “a ghost town” (as some claimed) but in fact was doing well, the entire argument against the meters shifted away from the impact on downtown merchants and toward a Tea Party crusade.

Indeed, when Carla, Gary, and Randall Richman (who's not a Tea Party guy) unveiled their initiative last spring, it went far beyond removal of the meters downtown. It would have required 2/3 voter approval anytime the City wished to charge for parking on any city street or city-owned property. This extreme provision had wide-reaching implications. It would make it nearly impossible for the City to build another parking garage downtown. It would make it very difficult for the City to partner with Community Memorial Hospital in building parking for the expanded hospital. Neighborhoods that hoped to use parking revenue to improve their parks, as at Marina Park, would be out of luck. Even neighborhoods that wanted residential permit parking, as around the hospital, would have to win a 2/3 citywide vote because the City charges $10 per year for the permits.

Carla and her team worked hard and collected over 10,000 signatures. Most of those were undoubtedly local residents concerned about downtown parking meters. But in order to secure the signatures, the signature-gatherers frequently used arguments that were just plain untrue (such as the idea that the City Council wanted to charge astronomical parking fees for everyone in town to park in front of their own house.) But the signature-gatherers rarely mentioned the 2/3 provision to voters.

Tea Party representatives began appearing before the City Council to claim that parking meters were just the beginning of a comprehensive plan to implement the United Nations’ Agenda 21 effort to promote on sustainable development, which they believe is a worldwide plot to undermine private property and threaten other freedoms. (Tea Partiers around the nation have attacked local planning policies by using Agenda 21 as well.)

Once the initiative qualified for the ballot, it became quite clear that the whole effort had turned into e campaign by Tea Party activists to galvanize support for their political agenda.

MY BOTTOM LINE

Much as I admire Carla’s tenaciousness and her impressive signature-gathering effort, I just never believed she and her supporters were really in touch with Ventura’s voters. Sure, people are skeptical of government – and rightfully so. But do folks around town really think that the City Council is planning to charge people astronomical prices to park in front of their own house? Or that we are part of a vast United Nations conspiracy to rob us of our freedoms because we charge for 300 parking spaces Downtown? I think voters are far more concerned about maintaining our vital public services so that Ventura will be safe, clean city that’s a great place to live.

This is a small town, and I can tell you from personal experience that Ventura’s voters – while cautious – are nevertheless practical. They like their elected officials to be local folks in touch with what’s really going on in town, not with some imagined, extreme threat. Venturans may be receptive to the fiscal conservatism of Tea Party folks – and with good reason -- but they don’t usually fall for hyperbole, half-truths, or overheated conspiracy theories.

I’m not running for re-election this fall, but it seems to me that the 11 people who are in the City Council race would do well to remember the lessons of the whole Measure J episode. Instead of focusing on the few issues we disagree on, let’s debate who can best move us forward on the 95% of things that we do agree on. Let’s bear in mind that, while we live in a democracy, we are a nation, and a state, and a city of laws and we must respect those laws even when we don’t particularly like them. And in trying to make our community better, let’s focus on the practical steps that will move us forward – things that will, for example, reduce crime downtown – rather than getting sidetracked by the idea that parking meters in downtown Ventura are part of a United Nations plot to take over our community.

Why I've Decided Not To Run Again

Eight years ago, I stood on the steps of City Hall and announced that I was running for the City Council. Today I am writing to let you know that I have decided to step down and not run for a third term this fall. It’s been a great ride – I love being on the City Council, and I especially love being Mayor. I am very grateful that you have given me the opportunity to serve you.

When I made the decision to run eight years ago, it wasn’t because I wanted to be a career politician, either by “moving up the food chain” to higher office or “being somebody” locally by occupying a seat on the City Council forever. I ran because I wanted to work with the community on some very specific changes that I believed were needed to move Ventura in a positive direction – ensuring long-term prosperity, conserving our open space and improving our downtown and our neighborhoods, maintaining and improving public safety, and most of all opening up City Hall so that our city government could be more transparent and accountable to the people it serves.

After two terms in office – including one stint as mayor and another as deputy mayor –I’m proud of the positive changes we have made. The “growth wars” of the ‘90s and early ‘00s are mostly behind us. We have far more stability in our city’s leadership than we used to. City Hall is, indeed, far more open and transparent than it used to be, and we are engaged in many more partnerships with the community at large.

Most important, we’ve dealt responsibly with a major financial crisis – one that nobody anticipated when I first ran back in 2003. Although we have had to cut services more than I would have liked, we took swift, early action to maintain a balanced budget. That’s why we do not face the deep financial problems currently confronting many of our surrounding cities.

I haven’t accomplished everything I set out to do, but I am proud to have done my share to help move things forward in many positive ways over the past eight years; and anyway no elected office-holder ever accomplishes every goal. It’s important to have experience and stability on the council, and during my time we’ve had both – a big change from the ‘90s and early ‘00s, when there was a lot of turnover. But I never intended to serve more than two terms, and I do sometimes worry that I will get stale in office.

I have to admit that personal considerations play an important role in this decision. I had a rich and fulfilling life before politics – professional, civic, personal -- and I am looking forward to focusing more on all of those activities again. In particular, I believe it is necessary for me to focus far more attention on my personal health, especially the ongoing loss of my eyesight.

As I revealed in a blog more than a year ago, I suffer from a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, a deterioration of the retina that is gradually diminishing my peripheral vision and night vision. There is no way to know how quickly RP will rob anyone of their eyesight; and there is no treatment or cure. Anybody who has spent time with me in the last couple of years knows that this condition is becoming worse and that I am struggling to adjust to it. But the demands on my time as mayor have prevented me from focusing on how to make the transition to living life as a low-vision person. For my own well-being and the well-being of those I love, it is time for me to focus more fully on making this transition successfully.

In many ways, it is hard to leave office at such a difficult time. Over the past few years, we have had to cut our service levels to a point that most of us on the council are not comfortable with. We have been extremely fiscally responsible – moreso than most of our neighbors – but we must begin the effort to restore and reinvent our services, so that we never again have to face the difficult choices we have had to make in the past few years. As the current chair of the Ventura County Transportation Commission, I am working on organizational and service changes for public transit that should benefit the county greatly, and I wish I could see them through. The same is true for libraries. Our libraries have taken a big hit in recent years, and I believe our current library planning process will yield great results. When the real estate market comes back, I believe we will begin to see fabulous new development projects downtown and elsewhere and it would be great to be on the Council when that finally occurs.

But when you’re an incumbent, you can always come up with an excuse to run for office again. It’s much harder to look beyond the office you hold and envision the many other ways you might be able to help your community. In deciding whether to run again, I have thought long and hard about what role I might play once I leave office. Ventura has a long history of community service on the part of retired mayors and councilmembers and I look forward to joining my predecessors in playing that role. Beyond that, I believe that there are now unprecedented opportunities for everyone in the community – former mayor or not – to participate in moving our community forward.

In the old days, a constituency that wanted something – a park, a transportation program, an arts program, a construction project -- simply lobbied the City Council, putting the City on the hook for organizing, planning, funding, and running the whole thing. We as a community can no longer afford to operate this way, and one of the great accomplishments of the last few years has been to partner with others in the community to move things forward. We have, for example, partnered with community nonprofits to keep the downtown senior center open, to plan the future of Grant Park, and to maintain and renew our beloved ArtWalk. The City and the community will be partnering frequently in the future. I hope to work with you in many of these efforts during my five remaining months as mayor -- and in the years ahead after I leave office.

First and foremost is the effort to use our upcoming 150th anniversary in 2016 as a “target” to improve our community. As I suggested in my State of the City address in February, we are now in the process of creating a community-based committee to discuss what our community’s goals over the next five years should be and how we can achieve those goals.

Beyond the 2016 effort, there are many other ongoing issues in our community that I am really interested in and hope to continue working on. These include our business incubator and Ventura’s “new economy”, transportation and public transit, arts and culture, planning and development, and arts, culture and libraries. And I think it’s a safe bet that I will become more active as and advocate for disabled persons – which, in my mind, is really just a way to advocate to eliminate physical barriers to mobility for all people.

As I said above, no office-holder accomplishes everything he or she sets out to do, and any politician can always come up with an excuse to run again. I view my decision to step down not so much as an end to my involvement in Ventura, but simply as a transition into a different role where I can continue to help make our community better. I love Ventura more than ever, and I will continue to do everything I can to pursue the two goals for Ventura that I have always had – enduring prosperity and a high quality of life. Thanks for the opportunity to serve you on the City Council and as Mayor. I look forward to working with you as mayor between now and December – I promise I will put my foot to the floor to get things done – and I look forward to working with you for many more years to come.

Weekend Update: Why Ventura Is Special

In writing about what it’s like to be mayor, it seems like I often come back to one particular theme: Ventura’s remarkable ability to pull together and accomplish things in ways that other cities just can’t.

So often I see this in action on the weekends. During the week, a mayor’s day is filled with meetings, conversations, gatherings that are very focused on specific issues. People come to you to complain about things or ask for things. But on weekends it’s different. That’s when I get to see Ventura at its best.

Last weekend (the weekend of June 4-5) was no exception.

My Saturday began by heading down to the Westside – specifically, the large vacant lot on the corner of Ventura Avenue and Kellogg Street, where our city folks were working with the Westside Community Council, E.J. Harrison, and dozens of volunteers in doing a Westside cleanup day. It was a remarkable effort that brought our Westside community together in so many different ways.

Often when we do a “cleanup day” – as we have recently done at the baech, Downtown and in Midtown – it consists mostly of picking up trash, scraping gum off the sidewalk, and things like that. These efforts not only beautify the community but also help limit the flow of trash into the rivers and the ocean.

The Westside effort was a little different – but with the same intent. With Harrison’s help, Westside volunteers and our folks set up dumpsters and recycling locations on the Kellogg site. Anybody who wanted to bring large items to dump could do so. The response was amazing. When the event started at 9 a.m., there was a line of cars around the block.

Now, at first glance, the sight of a bunch of cars idling in a neighborhood on Saturday morning to dump off mattresses, refrigerators, and other such items might not seem like truly a community event. But it was truly amazing. First, there were dozens of people volunteering to help haul and sort the trash and recycling material. And second, the people who were bringing their stuff were really helping the neighborhood and the community. Not only were they cleaning out their garages (and, in some cases, their yards), but they were also properly disposing of items that might otherwise wind up on the street or in the riverbottom.

In a world with so much “stuff,” it can be a constant battle to keep our city clean and beautiful. Just as important, however, is keeping trash out of the rivers and the ocean. Dumping trash in the riverbottom harms water quality – and also subjects the City and its taxpayers to possible fines from the Regional Water Quality Board of thousands of dollars a day. The Westside Cleanup Day built community pride and teamwork, made our city more attractive, and saved the taxpayers a lot of money.

Then on Sunday morning, I went down to Figueroa Plaza – across from the Mission – to watch and participate in the filming of saxophonist Dave Koz’s new music video for his cover of the Burt Bacharach chesnut, “This Guy’s In Love With You.” It’s a beautiful version of this wonderful old song. The video is designed to support marriage equality, and a lot of people came from all over the state to support that cause. In the process, however, lots of folks participated in a fun community event – as we all walked and swirled around Dave while he walked up Figueroa Plaza and lip-synched the song. Lots of folks said they had never been to Ventura before and would definitely come back; while many locals had a great time. Thanks so much to Dave and videomaker Graham Streeter for picking Ventura! And, oh yeah – thanks to legendary trumpeter Herb Alpert and his wife Lonnie Hall for stopping by to do a cameo!

Then, on Sunday afternoon, it was my privilege to attend the memorial service for Nick Haverland at Arroyo Verde Park. As everyone now knows, Nick was the promising 20-year-old kid – about to go off to Hawaii to study ethnobotany – who was killed by drunk driver on Telegraph Road a few weeks ago. I’ve written before about how Nick’s tragic death has brought so many of us in our community together But Sunday’s memorial service – attended by hundreds of people despite the rain – told this story better than I ever could.

Nick always said that nature was his religion, and so everybody said the rain was fine because Nick would have preferred it. There were several beautiful musical pieces, including a clarinet quartet from Cabrillo Middle School directed by Mario Boccali, who was Nick’s music instructor (and my daughter’s as well); in addition, Kyle McCormick, son of Jackson Brown bassist and producer Kevin McCormick, sang a moving song accompanied by his father. Then there were the eulogies and remembrances, from family friend Steve Svete, his aunts, and especially his friends Dylan Blossom and Henry Geerlings. Henry’s low-key, self-effacing talk was made all the more remarkable by the fact that he was the friend riding bikes with Nick when Nick was killed. (There’s a beautiful photo of Henry in front of a stunning image of Nick at Two Trees on the Star web site.

I cannot hope, in these few words, to recreate the emotion and love that Nick’s memory brought to Arroyo Verde Park yesterday. All I can say is that it was the third event I attended over the weekend that reminded me why Ventura is such a special place. I truly believe most communities cannot accomplish the things we do here. As I was driving back from Nick’s memorial, I glanced eastward and saw Two Trees shrouded in a misty fog – a gorgeous sight – and remembered why everything we do is worth it.

Thank You, Nick Haverland ... We Will Always Miss You

Fifteen or so years ago, when we decided to have some work done on our house, a contractor named Jim Haverland showed up to do the work. Jim was a friend of a friend. He turned out to be a terrific fellow – smart, knowledgeable, kind, low-key – and he and his wonderful wife Susan soon became our friends as well. Susan had a demanding corporate job in those days, so Jim took care of their boys. All summer he came to our house with Nick and Griff, then about 6 and 4, in tow. Every day they played in the yard with our daughter Sara, who was the same age as Nick, and they always played the same games. Hide and seek, because what little girl doesn’t want to be chased around by two little boys? And bug-hunting, because that’s what Nick loved to do.

Over the years, the Haverlands became a permanent part of my life – one of those Ventura families you know fifteen different ways, through school and play activities and work and civic events. We remained friends through so many changes – the kids growing up, a divorce on our side, the tragic early death of siblings on both sides. After a while I became friends with a lot of parents from the Open Classroom School on the Blanche Reynolds Elementary School campus and in so doing met a much wider range of Jim and Susan’s friends, because Nick and Griff had both been Open Classroom students. My daughter Sara and Nick were one year apart at Foothill Technology High School.

Jim still did contracting work for my former wife. Susan eventually left her corporate job and moved into community service jobs that brought she and I closer together in our professional lives. For several years she ran the Mixteco Project, aiding Oaxacan immigrants around the County. More recently she ran the County’s farmworker vanpooling project, and only about two weeks ago we had a meeting in the Mayor’s office to discuss how things were going. I brought her up to date on Sara, and she brought me up to date on the boys. Griff was almost done with high school and would be going to UC Santa Cruz. Nick – a personable boy whom everybody loved – was almost done with Ventura College and was planning to study ethnobotany at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, in the fall. He still loved hunting bugs.

Everybody in Ventura now knows what happened to Nick Haverland Wednesday evening. Riding his bicycle with a friend along Telegraph Road in East Ventura, he was stuck by a car and killed. They were headed to a night class at Ventura College. When Nick was hit, the driver had already hit two other bicyclists and a car. Adding to the tragedy was the fact that the driver – who has pleaded not guilty to a charge of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated – was only a few blocks from his own house when the accident happened.

Nick Haverland’s death has affected our community more deeply and profoundly than I would have imagined. Everybody has been talking about it and everybody, it seems, feels touched by it. I have lived through a number of tragedies in Ventura – the killing of of 21-year-old Jesse Strobel in Midtown in 1993, for example, and the crash of the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 into the ocean near Anacapa Island in 2000 – but I have never seen an outpouring like this.

Even before the accident scene was cleared, the news about Nick flew around town, mostly by Facebook postings and by texts. The intersection of Telegraph and Mara, a typical suburban landscape near Juanamaria School, quickly became a shrine with flowers and candles and a white “ghost bike” memorial. On Thursday morning when I went to Poinsettia School to talk to fifth graders about what it’s like to be mayor, mostly they wanted to talk about Nick’s accident. Many of them had actually seen it occur, and many more had seen the news helicopters over their house. When Jim and Susan visited the scene a day or two after the accident, a Gold Coast bus made an unscheduled stop. Recognizing Jim and Susan as Nick's parents, the bus driver jumped out and hugged them and all the passengers prayed for them.

As a typical guy, I “under-emoted” in the moment on Wednesday night, not sure what to feel or how to feel it. By Thursday, I was beginning to feel weighted down by grief. And by Friday, when I drove past the scene for the first time, as Mayor I began to wonder how we as a community could possibly find the right way to grieve this loss.

There are a lot of reasons why Nick Haverland’s death hit home with so many people around town. The first, of course, is the Haverland family – a great family that everybody seemed to have a connection to, the kind of family, as I said, that you seem to know fifteen different ways. The second was the public nature of the accident. Nick was struck at quarter to seven on a beautiful May evening when it was still light out, close to Juanamaria School and the Albertson’s shopping center. Lots of people were out and about, and I am astonished at the number of people – and children – who actually witnessed the event or ran to the scene immediately after it happened. And finally, of course, was the nature of the incident – an apparently intoxicated driver who struck three bicyclists and one car in three different incidents in his own neighborhood, and who refused to – or couldn’t – get out of his car when the police confronted him. It is not just Jim and Susan and Griff and their friends who will have to grieve. So will the entire neighborhood and even our entire community.

On Friday I went about my normal mayoral duties – chairing the monthly meeting of the County Transportation Commission in Camarillo, welcoming the state convention of the League of Women Voters to the Crowne Plaza, and attending the Chamber of Commerce’s Business Expo at the Four Points Sheraton. Even so, it didn’t seem like there was anything I could do as Jim and Susan’s friend to ease their pain (or mine, which was obviously nothing compared to theirs but still hurt a lot) and it didn’t seem like there was anything I could do as Mayor to help the community grieve.

Then on Saturday, as I went on my mayoral rounds, I saw some amazing things that reminded me what a remarkable community we have – and how this remarkable community can pull together when people like the Haverlands need it. First I went to the American Cancer Society “Relay For Life” event at Buena High School, where dozens of teams and hundreds of people had congregated for a 24-hour fundraising walk to “fight back” against cancer. This is a national event, but it annually raises more than $200,000 – that’s right, $200,000 – in Ventura alone. Then I went to Barranca Vista Park, where hundreds of families and dozens of vendors were out for the spring “Family Festival”. Then I went to Harbor Cove Beach down at the Harbor, where Ventura County squeaked out a first-ever victory over Amgen in the Corporate Games. And then I went to Jim and Susan’s house.

We complain all the time about things we don’t like here in Ventura – we have too much growth or not enough; there aren’t enough police officers or we pay the police officers too much; there isn’t enough parking downtown or we hate the damned parking meters. But none of that matters very much compared to what we have. Most towns can’t do what we do every day, on a regular basis, in Ventura. Most towns can’t raise $200,000 in one day for to fight cancer. Most towns can’t put on a six-week corporate games event that draws dozens of teams from other cities, costs $700,000 to run, and yet pays for itself. And most towns can’t successfully pull together around even a beloved family like the Haverlands to help the family – and the community – grieve such an enormous loss.

Yet Ventura can. It is this cohesiveness, this love, this sense of hometown-ness even in a city of more than 100,000 people, that makes our town special. As I made my rounds on Saturday, I finally began to feel that, as Mayor, I was doing what I should be doing to help our community grieve – and to honor the memory of Nick, such a wonderful kid and one whom practically everybody in Ventura loved. I was moving through a Saturday in Ventura both typical and extraordinary, participating in life-affirming acts all over town that sometimes seem routine to me but, in truth, are anything but.

When I finally got to Jim and Susan’s house late Saturday afternoon, I was, as always, amazed by their love and their energy. A few other friends were there. They are obviously devastated by their loss and very emotional, yet they remain focused on the positive and truly caring for their friends, who obviously are hurting far less than they are.

One of the reasons I always connected with Jim and Susan is that we were part of a cohort of folks who moved to Ventura back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s for the specific purpose of raising our kids in a town with a high quality of life and a strong sense of community. We mostly didn’t know each other in advance, nor did we know a whole lot about Ventura when we arrived. But we all had the same sense of Ventura: It seemed like a town with a real sense of centeredness, a town that could sustain us, not just financially and socially but emotionally, through good times and bad. And as we connected with each other over the years, we did our best to contribute to this sense of what might be called emotional sustainability.

Yes, we had jobs and ran businesses, mostly right here in town. And, yes, we coached soccer teams and worked on PTO boards and started nonprofits and, in at least one case, ran for the City Council. But we also tried our best to care for each other and our community. I guess you could call this “giving back,” but the truth of the matter is that we never really thought of it that way, because there was really no difference between “giving back” and just living our lives. It was all part of being Venturans.

Late Saturday afternoon, as Susan and I leaned against the refrigerator in the Haverlands’ kitchen – a refrigerator filled with the usual photos and notes and schedules – it dawned on us both that this remarkable townwide quality had emerged even in the most devastating, tragic moment imaginable.

The circumstances of Nick’s death unfortunately meant that Jim and Susan’s grief was not completely private. They had spent several hours at the scene on Telegraph Road Wednesday night with television helicopters roaring overhead, and a photograph of the two of them embracing was published in the Star on Thursday morning (though they were not identified in the photo).

You could interpret this lack of privacy as intrusive in the most private of moments. Yet, as it turned out, these public circumstances allowed Ventura to rally around the Haverlands in a way that they – and I – could never have imagined. It has brought their friends together around them, and it has even brought many people whom they don’t even know into their lives with a love and caring that they never imagined. It has even brought me closer to many people I love – not just Jim and Susan, but also my former wife, the wonderful graphic designer Vicki Torf, and other dear friends like Rosie Ornelas and Steve Svete and Mindy Lawrence and many others who developed close ties over the years to the Haverlands and to each other.

We were right all those years ago when we moved to Ventura. It is a place that can help us and hold us and heal us, not just economically or socially but emotionally. In that sense, it is the most sustainable of cities.

It is the greatest of tragedies, of course, that it took the death of a wonderful young kid like Nick Haverland to remind of us all this. After all, Nick reminded us of it every day just by being himself. And I am still worried about how our community will complete the grieving process. I am worried about the kids at Foothill, who knew so many people involved in the incident. I am worried about the kids at Juanamaria Elementary School, whose families witnessed and heard the incident and assisted our first responders. And I am worried about Jim and Susan and Griff, who will have to live with this tragic loss for the rest of their lives.

But I know our community will continue to come together with the Haverlands to grieve for the family and for themselves. Jim and Susan and Griff are planning a celebration of Nick’s life sometime in the near future. I’m not sure where or when yet, but I will be there, as both friend and Mayor, to help the Haverlands and our community at large in the grieving process – so that we can honor Nick as he deserves to be honored, and we can once again rely upon and renew Ventura as a place capable of sustaining us all.

Every Day Is Phil Marquez Day

For several years, my office was in the back of the Paddy’s building at Main Street and Ventura Avenue. This meant that several times a day, I walked past Phil Marquez’s barber shop – waving, peeking in, and generally speaking finding myself fascinated by this very old and beloved man who still put a pair of hair-cutting scissors into his hands every day no matter what.

One day about a year and a half ago, I was riding my bike to work, and as I rode on the sidewalk past Phil’s shop (possibly a violation of the municipal code, which prohibits riding bikes on the sidewalk downtown), I suddenly encountered a car suddenly appeared in the driveway, headed out of the parking lot toward Main Street.

I tried to stop but I couldn’t stop so quickly, so the bike fell over and I was thrown, bike shorts and all, into the bushes. I stood up ready to be really angry – after all, I may have been riding on the sidewalk in violation of the municipal code, but the car was driving the wrong way in a one-way driveway! I started to yell, and then …

… and then I realized that it was Phil’s granddaughter dropping him off at work. She was driving the wrong way in the driveway so that the passenger’s side door would be right by Phil’s shop, thus minimizing the walk Phil had to make. Phil wasn’t moving very fast at this point; sometimes it would take him two hours to cut a head of hair. A few months later, Phil finally decided to give up cutting hair – after running his barber shop in the same location for 63 years.

How could I be angry? I was only the deputy mayor. He was Phil Marquez.

Last June, when we all celebrated Phil Marquez Day at the Bell Arts Factory, I told this story. Phil’s granddaughter was horrified to realize that she had forced the mayor (then the deputy mayor) to take a tumble, but Phil laughed uproariously – he thought the whole story was very funny. Which made the telling of the story even better. (You can see a picture of Phil being serenaded by a barbershop quartet at this event -- and loving it! -- on flickr.)

Phil died last Tuesday, February 15th, at the age of 95. I think it’s fair to say no one in Ventura was ever more beloved, and no one will ever be missed so much. I’m very proud that in his email summarizing Phil’s life, Moses Mora – our chronicler of life on the Westside – quoted what I said last June: "We can't go on forever proclaiming Phil Marquez Days, so let's just declare every day Phil Marquez Day."

I was so moved by last June’s event that, not long ago, I asked my intern Marisol Luna to see if Phil could sign the poster Moses had created for the event. (Phil's signature was on the poster, but I wanted an original!) Marisol called Phil’s daughter, Barbara Marquez-O’Neil, who warned that – like the cutting of hair in recent years – the signing of the poster might take quite a long time. But Phil did sign it for me.

When I called Barbara the other day to express my condolences, she told me that signing the poster was almost literally the last thing Phil ever did. I’ll get it framed now and keep it in my office forever, to make sure that every day will be Phil Marquez day.

A Rosary for Phil will be held on Thursday, February 24, 2011, at 7 p.m. at the Old Mission in Downtown Ventura. A Memorial Mass will be held the next morning, Friday, February 25, at 10a.m., also at the Old Mission.

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.