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.

Cleaning Up the Planning Process -- I Think!

On Monday night (Tuesday morning, actually), the City Council voted 4-3 to approve an item brought forth by Councilmembers Brennan and Summers designed to improve the development review process. The votes in favor were Brennan, Summers, Monahan, and Weir. The votes against were Andrews, Morehouse, and myself.

I didn’t vote against the item because I opposed everything in it. In fact, I supported five of the six items contained in the items. I voted against it because I couldn’s support the sixth item as written. I found it confusing and I thought it called for shift in direction that I couldn’t support. We had lengthy discussion, and it was clear that most of us agreed on the first five items but we were split on the sixth.

However, Councilmember Monahan moved to approve all six items at once – admittedly it was midnight and we were all anxious to go home – and so therefore I had to vote against the entire package because I had concerns about the one item. Because of Mr. Monahan’s motion, we did not have the option of voting in favor of the five and then “agreeing to disagree” on the sixth.

I think that Councilmembers Summer and Brennan and I agree on the direction we should take, so I am hopeful we can work this out when the item comes back to us for further discussion.

For the record, here’s what their item called for:

Direct staff to review the goals below and present a plan for implementation including strategies, feasibility, potential impact and timeline.
a. Creation of a 30-day maximum initial application review to determine completeness.
b. A plan and organizational structure to reduce overall time in the application approval process by 20%.
c. Adopt a procedure to allow applicants to outsource the creation and drafting of Specific Plans for projects in excess of 20 acres and provide for the ability to allow higher fees in exchange for retaining contract planners to assist with the overall work force.
d. Create a work plan for the implementation of the recommended application workflow including conceptual design review and Commission/public participation process as identified by the Commission Task Force. This should include the involvement of current staff and applicants to review the recommended process in comparison to other similar agencies. [This item refers to changes to the development review process proposed by a task force appointed by the council a couple of years ago.
e. Consider the use of a portion of the increased fee income for development to support the addition of one or two staff positions to assist in the implementation of the objectives.
f. Complete a City-wide coding and zoning ordinance to be used in conjunction with the Housing Approval Program (HAP), downtown and retail stregies. This should be completed as quickly as possible to provide clear direction for development and reduce the urgency for other "Plans."

Although I had some concerns about Item c, I was more than willing to vote in favor of Items a-e. The staff did state – with some justification – that they are doing many of these items already, but I saw no harm in clarifying that it is a council priority to get them done.

Item f was the subject of most discussion. On its face, it seems to me that Item f calls us to do a citywide code, something we have said in the past is unnecessary. Many constituents also feared that Item f also meant that we would lower the priority of Community Plans on the Westside and in Midtown and just do codes instead. Without clarification I couldn’t support that item.

To back up just for a moment, everything we are talking about here has to do with how we implement the 2005 General Plan. That General Plan called for an all-infill approach to development, and it states that most new growth will accommodated in a few focus areas in town, specifically the North Avenue, the Westside, Downtown, Midtown, and Wells-Saticoy.

But our General Plan is very general, and we all recognized that we had to create more specific policies and rewrite zoning codes for each of these areas. Part of the problem was that, especially in Midtown and on the Westside, we had done many different plans, workshops, and charrettes over the years – but we had never adopted any of them as actual city policy.

At first we directed the staff to create a new zoning code citywide, but then we realized that this was unnecessary because the vast majority of the city – mostly existing single-family neighborhoods – was not going to change anytime soon. So we directed the staff to write codes only for the focus areas.

Since then, here’s what’s happened:

1. We approved our revised Downtown Specific Plan. This contains both policies and codes for downtown.

2. We have been simultaneously crafting the Saticoy & Wells Community Plan (which contains policies) and processing four Specific Plans (which contain codes) for the Wells-Saticoy area. Admittedly, this has taken a lot longer than we thought.

3. We are currently drafting an interim code for Midtown, with the idea that a Community Plan would come later.

4. The staff put out a request for proposals for the North Avenue Community Plan but has not started work on that project yet.

5. We have not yet tackled the Westside.

So, out of the five focus areas, we’ve completed both policy and code in one; we’re working on both policy and code in a second; we’ve put code ahead of policy in a third; and we haven’t tackled the other two yet.

Frankly, I couldn’t figure out what Item f was seeking to accomplish that we weren’t already doing, other than encouraging the staff to move faster. I didn’t sense that anybody on the council, even Councilmember Summers and Brennan, wanted to either write a citywide code or ditch the community plan idea.

The good news is that, even though we split 4-3 on the vote, I think we are mostly in agreement about what to do. Both the council and the staff agreed – as we have before – that future community plan efforts do not have to “reinvent the wheel”. Especially in Midtown and on the Westside, there are many previous planning efforts to draw upon and therefore we can create a more community plan process that is both responsive to the community and yet more time-efficient. I have a feeling that when the staff comes back to us in six weeks with suggestions on how to implement this policy, that’s what they are going to suggest. So I think it will all work out in the end.

Remember what they say about legislation – that, like sausage, you never want to see it made?

Getting the Parks, Getting the Schools

The City Council returned from our summer recess Monday night (9-10), and took one very important action: We increased our city’s standard for the amount of parkland that residential developers must provide. This action will allow the staff to increase the fees charged to developers who don’t provide parks on-site.

And it lays the groundwork for some important decisions in the Saticoy & Wells Community Plan and the several pending specific plans in that area – most specifically, where do we put parks and schools in Saticoy & Wells and how do we pay for them?

For almost 25 years, our park standard has been 3.5 acres per 1,000 residents. On Monday night we increased that standard to 4.78 acres per 1,000 residents – an increase of about a third.

Some developers provide parks onsite, while others – especially those with smaller projects and smaller parcels of land.—often pay a fee instead. The new park standard will allow the staff to increase the fees as well. On single-family subdivisions of 50 units or fewer, our fee has been about $600 per house in most of the city and about $2,200 per house in Montalvo, Thille, and Saticoy & Wells, where park deficiencies have been identified. The new park standard will allow the staff to increase the fee to about $3,050 per house everywhere in the city. This fee is based on the assumption that parkland costs about $250,000 an acre to buy. (The fee for projects of more than 50 units not uniform citywide but, rather, must be based on an appraisal of the particular property in question.)

To give you an idea of what this means: Up to now, a developer of a 50-unit subdivision in most parts of the city was paying $30,000 in park fees (about enough to purchase one 50x100-foot lot), and a similar project in Thille, Montalvo, and Saticoy & Wells was paying $110,000. All such projects will now pay about $150,000.

The idea behind increasing the fees is not just to raise revenue, but also to encourage developers to provide parks on-site rather than just paying money. This is, frankly, a tricky balance. Small developers will usually opt to pay a fee and the city should encourage this, because we often need bigger parks than small developers can provide. Larger developers are more likely to provide land rather than pay a fee, but if the fee is too low they will buy their way out of their obligation, which raises the question of where the park will actually be located. A higher fee will mean developers are more likely to provide land on-site.

Another issue that was raised Monday night was the question of small parks – mini-parks. Increasingly, we are seeing developers propose subdivisions with many small parks, and they are asking that these parks count toward the park acreage requirement. Many small parks can often be a good thing, but you always have to be careful. Developers sometimes will try to have the city classify small bits of leftover land as “parks,” whether or not they can really be used.

The whole park acreage standard – and the park fees – have important implications for the Saticoy & Wells area. This is currently the only part of the city where lots of subdivisions are pending, and we are trying to deal with broader issues in the Wells & Saticoy Community Plan.

On Monday night, Dan Cormode of the East Ventura Community Council quite rightly pointed out that we might wind up with lots of developer fees earmarked to buy land for parks and schools in Saticoy & Wells – but with no land in Saticoy & Wells to buy, because all the developers have chosen to pay the fees rather than contribute land. (Developer fees for schools are set by the state, but the city and the school district can seek additional land and fees for schools by working together – which we are not doing.)

This is one of the main reasons I advocated for the creation of the Saticoy & Wells Community Plan in the first place. We need to make sure that, as the Saticoy & Wells area gets built out, we have decided where parks, schools, and other community facilities are going to be located – and we know how they are going to be paid for.

Does this mean that our East End developers may have to do more than just pay their fees and build their projects? Probably. More than likely, they are going to have to work together with the city, the school district, and each other to make sure that the land is set aside in Saticoy & Wells for schools and parks, and that money is available to build those facilities. Some developers will be able to pay fees. Some will have to contribute land. In some cases, we may see a combination. For example, Developer A may have to cut the number of houses in his plan in order to accommodate parks and schools – but may be compensated by the city or by Developer B (who’s paying money rather than providing land) for the loss.

Are these tough choices? Sure. Do the developers – or even the city or the school district – like to face up to these tough choices? Not always. But when you’re trying to do the best job you can in building out a community like Saticoy & Wells, these are the kinds of tradeoffs and tough choices that you have to deal with in order to succeed. That’s what community planning is all about.

Cleaning Up The Planning Process

We’re approving projects too fast.
We’re not approving them fast enough.
They’re too dense.
They’re not dense enough.
We’re wasting too much money on planning studies.
We’re not doing enough planning studies.

In the typical week, I hear all these complaints – and many more, equally contradictory – about how our planning process works. And they’re all true.

That is to say, they’re all true sometimes.

The City Council and the staff have spent a lot of time lately trying to sort out what’s going on with our planning and development review processes and how to improve them. After 3½ years on the Council, I wish I could say that we have it all figured it out. We don’t. But – I always seem to say this – we’re trying, and we’re making progress. Let me talk first about the meeting last Monday, where we looked at the planning process, and then the meeting a week ago Monday, where we again talked about Saticoy & Wells.

Last Monday night (May 7), our planning staff presented us with an update on how our planning processes are doing and where the bottlenecks appear to be. I have to say that this was one of the best-thought-out presentations I’ve seen since I’ve been on the Council. I came away it realizing that the problem is not that our planning processes are too long or too short – have too many steps or too few. Rather, the problem, all too often, is that we don’t quite know what we want, and we don’t discipline ourselves up-front to clarify (1) what we want, and (2) whether the project in front of us is giving us what we want.

The basis of the report was a pretty intimidating-looking flow chart that tracked absolutely everything we do in planning – from Advance Planning, where our staff draws up plans; to Current Planning, where we process development projects; to Land Engineering, where final plans are approved after the project itself has been OK’d. Even though the flow chart is complicated, just working it through made me see the process much better.

For example, most projects go to the Design Review Committee for conceptual review and then, later, for detailed design review. This makes sense – except it happens before the project goes to the Planning Commission. So if the Planning Commission raises a significant issue about the size or scale of a project, they are accused of holding up the process, because the applicant has spent a lot of time and money getting to that point. This creates a kind of juggernaut effect for a project – by the time it gets to decision-makers, it’s hard to stop or change significantly. An exception here is the Housing Approval Program, where projects get a combined DRC/Planning Commission pre-screen before detailed design.

Similarly, the flow chart made it clear that there are at least three different points at which historic preservation issues could be considered – at an early conceptual review by the Historic Preservation Committee, during the CEQA process, and at the more typical hearing in front of the HPC late in the process. When I asked the staff how we decide whether and when to use any of these opportunities, they made it clear that they are confused and they want direction from us. OK, message received – thanks to clear presentation.

Even so, I have to say that things in Current Planning have been moving well in recent months. Week after week, it has seemed, some developer has come before either the Planning Commission and the City Council complaining that their project has been in process for three years or five years or something. My point in response is that these projects are now coming forward because the logjam has been broken.

It’s no accident that these projects are coming forward after being delayed. We have better staff leadership determined to move them forward. We are more clear in our direction and projects are closer to what we want and we are approving them. Even developers have a hard time grasping this – listen to us, do what we say, and your project will get approved..

The most recent example was Aldea Hermosa, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. There was a stutter-step in front of the Council, but the Council made its direction clear: Redesign the project so that no lots were less than 40 feet wide. The vote on this was 5-1. This required a redesign that cost the developer 3 houses. The developer tried to meet with each councilmember in an attempt to bring back their previous design – essentially, to get the council to overturn its decision. This didn’t work. When the redesigned project came back five weeks later, and the Council’s concerns had been addressed, the project was approved 7-0 with no discussion. See? Follow our direction and we can move forward.

A week ago Monday (April 30), we had another workshop (jointly with the Planning Commission) on the Saticoy & Wells Community Plan. The intent here was to have a more in-depth discussion about three items that we had flagged a few months before – parks, agricultural buffers, and retail. After talking with the school district, the staff added a fourth topic to the workshop – schools. This whole discussion was a good example of how difficult it can be to draft a good plan up-front – and how important it is to do so.

We’re doing a Community Plan for Saticoy & Wells because there are currently four large projects on the books that would essentially build out the area by adding another 2,000 or so housing units. Each developer was moving forward individually and we wanted them to work together, so that, for example, their neighborhoods could be interconnected. (The “go it alone” mentality of our local developers in, in my opinion, a legacy of our Residential Growth Management Program, which pitted developers against each other for allocations, rather than encouraging them to work together to create better neighborhoods.)

To me, another important reason to do Community Plans is to make sure that we can work together with the developers to make sure that we get the infrastructure and community facilities we need to serve the community – streets, schools, parks, libraries, etc. In the case of Saticoy & Wells, the city had had some discussions about parks with the developers – individually and collectively – but we had not looked at the “big picture” of what the parks system in the area would look like. We concluded that, generally, the parks as proposed met the standard for park space in our General Plan, but we referred some specific issues about parks policy in the Community Plan to the Parks & Recreation Commission, which took these matters up on tonight (Wednesday, May 9th.)

At the same time, the staff met with the school district and came forward with some concerns about schools. To wit: The buildout of Saticoy & Wells would likely generate more than 900 students. The school district says it needs an elementary school and probably also a contribution to a middle school – the closest middle school is Balboa, near the Government Center. And so far, the 4 large development proposals don’t address schools at all.

After the schools issue was brought up, some of the developers complained about a “late hit” – shocked that this issue would be brought up so late in the process. But if schools aren’t deal with pro-actively now, they’ll have to be dealt with in an even more desperate way later. The school district will eventually collect school impact fees, but these won’t be enough to cover the cost of the schools, and the Environmental Impact Report will identify a school deficit. Then the school district and the city will be scrambling to try to make the best of the situation, and the developers will be even further down the line.

So we referred the school issue to the city-school liaison committee – a group consisting of two councilmembers and two school board members – so that the city and the school district can talk with the developers about how best to resolve the issue and provide us with policy recommendations for the Community Plan. The liaison committee is a “Brown Act” committee whose meetings are public and noticed in advance, so any member of the community should be able to attend these meetings.

If this sounds like doing planning inside out, upside down, and backwards, it is. When I took office in late 2003, the four developers will already under way with their plans and had strong expectations of being able to move through the process independent of one another. Yet these major issues – and many others -- had not been addressed.

As a council, we faced three choices. We could have allowed all the projects to go forward separately, which means we never would have gotten the public infrastructure and community facilities we need. We could have put all the developers on hold while we did the plan, which would have sent the message, once again, that we are totally anti-development. Or we could have tried to craft the overall policies for the area that the developers needed to adhere to while at the same time moving the projects forward as best we can. This is what we have done.

The Community Plan process has not been perfect. We’ve had a number of excellent workshops, and both staff and consultants have done excellent work. But in the draft plan up to this point, we haven’t dealt with a lot of core issues – infrastructure and facilities. I think this is partly because, as I said before, we’re “out of practice” with community planning because of the RGMP. (And even when we try to address the issues, we’re not always clear; some council members, our senior staff, and Parks & Rec Commissioners spent a good deal of time early this week trying to interpret exactly what we asked Parks & Rec to do.) On Saticoy & Wells, there’s a certain amount of “muddling through” we are going to have to do to wind up with not only a good set of projects but also a fine community as well. It won’t always be pretty, but we will do it in the end.

But I have to say that I think both the council and the staff is learning. At last Monday’s council meeting, Nelson Hernandez, our Community Development Director, said that in future community plans – beginning with the North Avenue plan, which is next – the staff will prepare a list of all possible aspects of the plan (and their cost) and discuss with the council what the scope should be.

When I ran in 2003, I said over and over again that mistakes were inevitable and instead of being afraid to admit them (as was the case at City Hall at the time, at least in my estimation), we had to be able to acknowledge them and learn from them. We’re doing that now, and the planning and development process is getting better as a result.

Post-Mortem on Aldea Hermosa

Obviously, I was unable to attend last Monday’s council meeting, but I did watch the re-run of the council meeting on TV on Sunday, especially the now-famous debate over the Aldea Hermosa project.

This is the 50-unit project in the Wells-Saticoy that came before the council after lengthy review and recommended approval by the Design Review Committee and the Planning Commission. The council debated the project at length, but council approval of the project broke down over issues that usually wouldn’t take up the council’s time on an individual project – most specifically, how many houses would be one story instead of two, and whether the smallest lots should be 40 feet wide instead of 35.

The council continued the item for five weeks in order to allow a revision the project of the project that would change the lot size (a proposal to limit some units to one story failed). The developer went into a pretty severe tirade and threatened to pull his investments out of Ventura. (http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/ve/article/0,1375,VCS_251_5416560,00.html)

Since I wasn’t at the meeting, I’ll not comment on the merits of the project, but let me talk a bit about the process.

Should the City Council be “designing from the dais” on Monday nights? Should we be devoting a lot of time on a Monday night to questions like, whether the width of lots in a 50-unit project is 35 feet or 40 feet?

Of course not. This is what we have a Planning Commission and a Design Review Committee for. However, this kind of “micro” discussion is an almost inevitable result of the current transitional period we find ourselves in.

We approved a new General Plan in 2005 – and it was very general, containing relatively few specifics about what our development standards should be. We are working on Community Plans (including in Wells-Saticoy) and new Codes with more specific detail as quickly as we can, but in the meantime a number of projects are moving forward through the approval process. In the case of Aldea Hermosa, the developer received 64 RGMP allocations in 2002.

So, to some extent, we are all engaged in an ad-hoc effort to move projects forward while we revise and clarify our development standards. This is understandably a tricky process.

On the one hand, under our system we delegate most of the detailed review and discussion of the specifics of project design to the Design Review Committee and the Planning Commission. If we are necessarily engaged in some ad-hoc decisionmaking in the short run, then we are going to have to trust the DRC and the Planning Commission sometimes. (Believe it or not, most of the time we don’t overturn the DRC and the Planning Commission.)

On the other hand, there may well be important issues that emerge in these projects that we have not debated at the council level – because we are not done with the Community Plans and the codes. For example, when Deputy Mayor Christy Weir tried to get the council to reduce the heights of some houses on the perimeter from two stories to one story, she noted that we had taken similar steps on Citrus Walk (the Hailes Ranch project near the Community Park). Had we done it just that once to allay neighborhood concern? Or had we set a precedent we expected future projects to follow, whether neighbors care or not? Hard to say. But, unfortunately, in guiding applicants, the staff, the DRC, and the Planning Commission must read these tea leaves from us.

Much of the discussion Monday night was, in fact, a really clunky way to have a policy debate about clustering housing in traditional-style neighborhoods. Some of the lot sizes in the Aldea Hermosa project are very small – a tradeoff for a small park inside the tract, among other things. The tradeoffs associated with clustering are a pretty common source of controversy in the world of planning (yes, I saw this same debate going on in Charleston last week!).

In the case of Aldea Hermosa, the staff, the DRC, and the Planning Commission all came to the conclusion that we at the council had already had that policy debate and we had concluded that clustering is a desirable approach. Given the language in the General Plan and our approach in some previous East Ventura projects – including Hailes Ranch and the Hertel-Cabrillo project, which we approved a month ago – I can’t say as I blame them.

In this kind of a transitional environment, I think the best we can hope for is “learning by doing”.

Our staff, our applicants, the Planning Commissioners and the members of the DRC all would do well to watch which the seemingly “micro” issues that we debate to understand what the council consensus is on policy issues that may still be pending. These, then, can be worked into future policy recommendations and project designs.

But we have an obligation as well – to the staff, the applicants, our appointees on the Planning Commission and the DRC, and other neighbors and citizens as well. That obligation is to do more than just “design from the dais” on Monday nights.

If we stumble into a discussion about house heights or lot sizes, we have an obligation to step back and think about whether we’re really debating an unresolved policy issue or just expressing our personal preferences. If it turns out we are debating a policy issue, we have an obligation to frame it that way and send a very clear message – a consensus of the council – as to what the policy should be. And if we do send a message, we also have an obligation to be consistent – and not change our mind next Monday night.

Is Hertel-Cabrillo Smart Growth?

In today's Star, Camille Harris poses three very good questions about whether the Hertel-Cabrillo project represents smart growth. (http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/opinion/article/0,1375,VCS_125_5382526,00.html) These questions deserve thoughtful answers. Here goes.

1. Did this project conform with Ventura's avowed philosophy of smart growth? One of the principles of smart growth is that residents be able to walk to whatever they need, in the interest of keeping cars off the crowded roads as much as possible. It did not appear that these residents can get so much as a quart of milk without driving for it.

Rather than focusing on putting retail into every single residential project that's built, no matter how large or small (which can be a business failure), i think it makes more sense to strengthen our neighborhoods ,especially by creating connections to nearby locations with retail and community amenities.

The Hertel-Cabrillo project is located much closer to stores than most other tracts in East Ventura. It is less than a quarter-mile from the retail center at Citrus and Wells -- well within walking distance. You have to walk down Citrus past the apartments and the vacant lots. This may not be a pleasant walk yet, but as the neighborhood changes over the years it will get better -- especially if the vacant lots are eventually developed for more retail (as, I believe, is called for in the draft Saticoy & Wells Community Plan).

In addition, the Community Plan calls for a pedestrian overpass almost immediately adjacent to the Hertel-Cabrillo project that would connect this project to more retail and more community amenities (including, possibly, a library) to be built on the south side of the freeway. Eventually, residents of this neighborhood will have better pedestrian and bike access to retail and other community amenities than almost anybody else in East Ventura.


2. Did this project conform with the city's avowed support for "inclusive" affordable housing? Lumping underprivileged children together into projects can have a stigmatizing and marginalizing effect, and it prevents their being included in activities seemingly reserved for the economically advantaged. Could Ventura's inclusive affordable housing requirement be stronger?

Actually, this project envisions families of different incomes living together in a much more holistic and inclusive way than any other project we have ever seen in this city. About one-third of new the housing units will be single-family homes available to the general public -- and most of these people will have to have six-figure incomes to qualify for a mortgage. About a third are townhomes that will be sold to middle-income working families -- probably people who make between $50,000 and $70,000 per year. And about a third will be rental apartments made available to people whose jobs pay them less than $50,000, meaning they are pretty much priced out of the ownership market. All these folks will live in the same small neighborhood, which -- as I said before -- will be linked to a larger community that includes folks of all incomes. So I think the Hertel-Cabrillo project actually comes closer to dealing with these issues than the typical housing development.

3. Did the $3 million subsidy the city awarded to the developer on the very next agenda item practically empty the affordable-housing money pot and hand it over to just one developer for one project? Could this possibly be characterized as cronyism?

In this particular case, the city is getting 60 desperately needed affordable rental units at a cost of $50,000 apiece. This is just about the lowest subsidy imaginable for this kind of housing, so from the city's point of view it is a great value. As for the allegation that we are engaging in cronyism by investing this money in one project, let me just say that for several years we have been subject to the opposite criticism -- that we are sitting on the money and refusing to give it out because we don't want affordable housing. What I'm in favor of is investing the city's affordable housing money in projects that will actually be built and make a difference in people's lives.

Thursday at 7 pm instead of Monday at 2 am

I’m writing this Thursday at around 7 pm. Way back on Monday at 2 am, this is about the time that I suggested the City Council should discuss the Hertel-Cabrillo project – or at least tell people why we voted the way we did. Since this probably won’t happen at a council meeting, let me take a few minutes to explain my thinking.

The Hertel-Cabrillo project is a mixed-income project – as approved, it’s 59 market-rate single-family homes, 60 affordable condominiums and 60 low-income rental apartments (18 for farmworkers) on a 24-acre site just east of Wells Road and just north of Highway 126 in the Wells-Saticoy area. It also has a 2½ acre park and a community park right next to the freeway. Though it’s hard up against the growth boundary, it’s surrounded on two sides by pretty intense development – an apartment complex lies to the west – and on the south by the freeway. Though there’s been lots of quibbling over whether it’s more or less dense than it should be, it’s around 7.5 units per acre and this isn’t very different from elsewhere in the vicinity. Among other things, the project required a parking variance to waive a requirement for 45 guest parking spaces. (All units have two off-street spaces.)

On Monday, the council approved this project 7-0, at 2 a.m., with no discussion. In a separate action, also 7-0, the council agreed to provide the project with $3 million in affordable housing funds over five years.

On Monday night between 11:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m, we heard about 30 different speakers who had an opinion on this project. Many were residents of adjoining tracts – including one affordable ownership neighborhood – who stated their concerns mostly in terms of traffic and parking. Some also expressed concern that the configuration of the project – which included many alleys – would cause an increase of crime. A few questioned the location of the park, noting that it’s up against the freeway; it’s located far distant from surrounding neighborhoods; and part of it is really a detention basin. Many of these folks also claimed the Planning Commission had approved the project because it had been kicking around the approval process so long that the whole thing had gotten kind of embarrassing.

There was also a lot of confusion at the Design Review Committee and the Planning Commission over which version of the site plan was being discussed and voted on. At the City Council level, we were presented with two versions – a 184-unit project approved by the Planning Commission and a 179-unit project put forth by the applicant (though clearly discussed with our city staff in advance). We approved the latter project, which knocked out five single-family homes, created a few houses with larger lots, and removed alleys around the perimeter of the project.

Those who supported the project – and there were many of them – said it was an exemplary mixed-income project that provided needed affordable and workforce housing.

The 7-0 vote on both the project and the financing package suggests that we agreed with the proponents. But I don’t want to diminish the concerns of the neighbors. Here’s what I would have said if it hadn’t been 2 am.

There are a lot of things about this project I like. We are clearly going to have to build more mixed-income projects and this is a pretty good start. The site plan cleverly places the low-income rentals in the interior of the project, surrounded by other houses, and places the market-rate single-family units on the outside, adjacent to the surrounding neighborhoods. I thought that the somewhat larger lot sizes in the revised version – along with the removal of alleys around the perimeter of the project – made the project better.

It’s consistent with what we did on the Citrus Walk project, now under construction a along Henderson near the Community Park. There were no affordable units in that project, but relatively low-cost triplexes (meaning around $460,000) were placed in the middle of the project, while single-story houses on large lots were placed on the perimeter, adjacent to existing ranch-style neighborhoods.

On the other hand, I thought the park still looked like a kind of afterthought. It wasn’t in the center of the neighborhood, meaning it was, indeed, far distant from surrounding tracts. And it’s also right next to the freeway – but would it have been better to put houses there instead? I’m no expert on site planning, so I generally leave this stuff to the staff, the DRC, and the Planning Commission.

The question that most engaged me – and that I would have most liked to discuss – was parking. Because there were both pros and cons about parking on this project worth discussing.

The neighbors did an excellent job of highlighting some of the existing parking problems in the neighborhood, which derive largely from the apartment complex just to the west on Citrus Drive. They showed photos of how even the undeveloped part of Citrus Drive – where the project will be built – already has many parked cars. This was an argument against the parking variance.

On the other hand, the way the site plan was designed created an unusually large amount of on-street parking, and this is due in large part to the alley configuration. In the typical subdivision, the only access to off-street parking is from the street, and a typical driveway is as wide as at least two cars. This means that there’s relatively little onstreet parking in a typical subdivision (compared to, say, my street in Midtown, where driveways are narrow and some houses don’t even have driveways). So it’s understandable that most people would think that you shouldn’t count onstreet parking toward a neighborhood’s parking requirement.

But in the case of the Hertel-Cabrillo project, it’s the alley configuration that makes the parking work. Because garages are accessed through alleys, there are no curb cuts on the actual streets. That means there are literally hundreds of parking spaces on the street in the neighborhood. The staff said 200-some; the developer said 300-some. (One of my pet peeves in the last three years is that we need to do a better job of documenting on-street parking resources and then showing how they are going to be used to provide necessary parking.)

Either way, this is a lot of parking. It’s certainly more than would have been produced by a conventional subdivision without a variance, and probably enough to accommodate the parking overflow from the apartment complex. (Again, I would have liked to see a more systematic analysis about all this – I think we need to get more rigorous.)

Even with the onstreet parking, the neighbors had two concerns worth dealing with. The first is the possibility of crime in the alleys. And the second is the possibility that many of these households, no matter what their income, will have 5, 6, 7, 8 cars – meaning that any supply of parking will be inadequate. I think some people would suggest that these are veiled concerns about the affordable and low-income units – the Star story certainly suggested this was the neighbors’ main concern – but I will take the neighbors at their word that it is crime and parking, not the income of their future neighbors, that concern them. (The comments from readers on the Star web site were quite derogatory and racist, but these weren’t from neighbors.)

Alleys have been the subject of great debate in American city planning for 200 years. Staunch supporters say they are a better use of public space and also say that they open up the possibility of carriage-house type units that will make the neighborhood safer and more affordable. Opponents say they breed crime and decay. I think it depends. Eyes on the street definitely help. When I lived downtown on Main Street, the Hemlock Place alley was behind my house – but there were literally dozens of units that faced the alley, including one inhabited by a muscular guy who regularly used his alley patio for topless kickboxing sessions. So it was safe.

There are no carriage houses in the Hertel-Cabrillo project, so we’ll have to rely on the residents and on Cabrillo’s property management skill (more on that below) to deal with that problem. That’s part of the reason why I think eliminating the alleys along the perimeter was a good idea – otherwise those areas could have been orphaned areas claimed by no one.

As far as an excessive number of cars go, we heard many references Monday night to the parking problems in the nearby North Bank Greens neighborhood, where neighbors with two cars have been doing battle with neighbors who have eight cars. Many neighbors to Hertel-Cabrillo expressed an understandable fear that the same thing would occur in the new neighborhood.

Here my fears are partly alleviated by the involvement of Cabrillo Economic Development Corp. Cabrillo has a reputation for being pretty slick on the political front (in his last blast at the council Monday night, at 2 am, Brian Lee Rencher claimed that “the fix was in” for Cabrillo on this project). But Cabrillo also has a good reputation as a property manager, and I believe their management practices will reduce the possibility of alley crime and parking problems.

Cabrillo’s Karen Flock stated Monday night that the company wouldn’t permit tenants with more than two cars into the rental units. That’s a pretty significant contrast to North Bank Greens, an affordable ownership neighborhood with no property manager and no homeowner association. In that sense, North Bank Greens is less like the Hertel-Cabrillo project and more like the adjoining tract (an affordable ownership neighborhood) that is home to many of the concerned citizens we saw Monday night.

So that’s how I view things. We need all kinds of housing for all kinds of people in Ventura, and this project provides that. The site plan isn’t perfect but it has some excellent aspects to it, especially the onstreet parking. The city’s subsidy is $50,000 a unit – an excellent buy. And I have confidence in the property managers.

One final note: I just wanted to thank everybody involved in the public debate over this project for their courtesy and civility. In particular, neighborhood leader Bryce Johnson and developer Ron Hertel had nothing but good words to say about each other in public. I’ve noticed that we’ve become much more civil in our public discourse in Ventura in recent months. I give a lot of credit to Mayor Morehouse, who never fails to remind people to speak kindly and calmly – and also never fails to thank our citizens for maintaining a high tone in public. I look forward to more of the same in the future.

Making Public Policy At 2:15 A.M.

Okay, so it's not easy to sit up there for 7 or 8 hours.

Last night was one of those nights -- we get them around once a year or so.

We convened at 6 pm in closed session to discuss how negotiations are going on a couple of real estate transactions.

Then we convened at 7 pm in the Council chamber. It was "First Monday" -- when we invite anybody who wants to to address the City Council at the beginning of the meeting on whatever we want. We were inundated by parents and teachers who asked us to restore the School Resource Officers (either through a re-run of P6 or some other means). [ See the Star's account at http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/county_news/article/0,1375,VCS_226_5348444,00.html.]

Then we blew through the consent calendar (items that we don't plan to discuss individually) and dealt with Councilmember Brennan's request that we support legislation that would make it more difficult for mobile home park owners to subdivide their parks into condos, which has the effect of eliminating rent control protections. (Agenda items for the meeting can be found at http://www.cityofventura.net/newsmanager/templates/?a=1732&z=43 ... and by the way, today the Board of Supervisors failed to get the requisite four-fifths vote for a more aggressive measure placing a moratorium on mobile home condo converssions [http://www1.venturacountystar.com/vcs/news/article/0,1375,VCS_121_5349321,00.html].

By this time it was well after 9. And we still had two long items left. The first was a neighbor's appeal of a proposed lot split on the cul-de-sac at the end of Mound Avenue -- not a huge issue citywide, but very important to this street. By a unanimous vote, we overturned the Planning Commission and upheld the appeal, turning down the lot split. (In 2005, at a meeting where I was absent, we had turned down a split from one to three lots; this time, we turned down a split from one to two.)

Now we were ready to take on what was clearly the most important item of the evening -- the appeal of the Planning Commission's approval of the so-called "Hertel-Cabrillo" project east of Wells Road just north of Highway 126.

This is a complicated project with a long history. After several failed attempts, it had obtained allocations under the old RGMP process in 2005. A combined effort of Hertel Development and Cabrillo Economic Development Corp., the project calls for about 180 units -- 60 single-family, 60 affordable townhomes for sale, and 60 low-cost apartments for low-income families (including 18 for farmworker families). The debate below, especially at the Planning Commission, had been a confusing blur of different proposals and site plans. People were confused and some were not happy. We had close to 40 speakers lined up. And because it was an appeal, both the developer and the appellant (a group of neighbors represented by the articulate Bryce Johnson) had 10 minutes at the beginning and a 5 minute rebuttal.

Many neighbors came forward to express concern about traffic and overcrowding. When it got to be about 10 after 1 in the morning, I asked Mayor Morehouse how many speakers we had left. The answer? 14 to go.

I suggested we continue the whole thing till Thursday night. Others, especially Councilmember Andrews, expressed the strong view that we should sit tight and, at least, hear public comment. I agreed -- though I was not sure I would absorb any of it. Mayor Morehouse asked the remaining speakers -- all supporters of the project -- to limit their remarks to one minute. Some did and some didn't but anyway they were all done by about 1:35 a.m. At that point I moved that we continue the item to Thursday. The city attorney understandably said we should hear the rebuttals and close the public hearing. We heard the rebuttals -- Bryce Johnson jokingly yielded his time to developer Ron Hertel in an effort to go home sooner -- and then we voted on my motion. I lost 4-3. We then voted on the project. It passed 7-0. with absolutely no discussion. (See the Star article at http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/news/article/0,1375,VCS_121_5349027,00.html and especially read the comments from readers -- many of them derogatory to farmworkers but one accusing us of deliberately stacking the agenda so this came up late at night.)

But we weren't done. We still had to act on a request by Cabrillo to have the city provide $3 million in low-interest loans for the project. This was a no-brainer for me -- $50,000 a unit subsidy for low-income units, a very small number. However, it was a Redevelopment Agency item, which meant that speakers technically had five additional minutes of comment. We had several speakers, including Chamber of Commerce chair Stephanie Becerra and all-around good guy activist Jim White. We also heard from perennial candidate Brian Lee Rencher for the full five minutes, lambasting us for tying up so much of our affordable housing funds on one project in the far East End. (Who knew campaign season had already started?) At about quarter after two we voted on the financing package -- also 7-0 with no discussion. Brian Lee Rencher took advantage of his last few seconds of public comment by lambasting us again, and understandably given the hour he and Mayor Morehouse exchanged a few cross words.

Jim Monahan, who is always adjourning the meeting in memory of some beloved Venturan who has recently died, jokingly suggested that we adjourn the meeting in my memory because clearly I was dying up there.

Why do City Council meetings last until the bars close? Because Council agendas are put together in a kind of mysterious and decentralized way -- the city manager, the city attorney, and each of us all have the power to put things on the agenda. And because we aren't always the best judges of how things are going to go down. In retrospect, it was obvious that this meeting was destined to go to 2 a.m. It was "First Monday" -- and we rarely get to the meat of the agenda before 9 p.m. because so many citizens want to come and talk to us. And each of the two major items -- the lot split and Hertel-Cabrillo -- were sure to take at least 2 hours. (Actually, they each took about 2 1/2 hours.) We probably should have spaced things out over more meetings. But sometimes the crush of work is just so great we want to get through it, even if it takes all night, so we can move on to another crisis the following week, when we hope we can get out of there by midnight. At the end, even the neighbors who didn't like the project just wanted us to vote on it and get out of there. They too wanted to move on.

Actually, by the time Jim Monahan made his joke, I had a second wind. But the question really wasn't whether I had enough stamina to make it through the meeting. (I cancelled my morning appointments and slept till 10 today.) The question was whether we do a disservice to the public by voting without comment on a major and somewhat controversial project at 2 a.m.

I think we do. Dozens of people waited 4, 5, 6 hours to be able to give us their opinion on the Hertel-Cabrillo project. My colleagues believed that we had an obligation to hear them then and there, rather than make them come back, and I see that point. And it's true that there was never a whole lot of doubt as to whether we were going to approve the project. We green-lighted the idea two years ago.

Nevertheless, I think we had an obligation to all those people -- to tell them what we thought about what we said, why we disagreed with them, and why we voted in favor of the project. At a time when we could articulate our thoughts coherently, and at a time when they could hear them coherently. Rather than approve the project without comment at 2:15 a.m.

So I'll try to take the time to do that myself -- probably Thursday at around 7 p.m., which is when I think we should have, so to speak, put this thing to bed.

The Evolving Saticoy & Wells Community Plan

Last Tuesday night -- February 6th -- the City Council and the Planning Commission held a special meeting on the first complete public draft of the Saticoy & Wells Community Plan. (This draft can be found at http://www.cityofventura.net/depts/comm_dev/planning_communities/resources/saticoy/plan.pdf.)
The meeting lasted five hours -- from 7 pm to Midnight. It was the latest in a series of special meetings in January and February on planning issues. It was the longest of these meetings so far and in some ways the rockiest. But we are making progress.

In the end, we ratified the general direction of the plan, but we also asked the staff to return within 60 days so we can clarify our position on a few specific issues, including parks in Saticoy & Wells and what scale of retail we should permit around the Wells-Highway 126 interchange. The Council also backed off of the staff's recommendation to specifically call for placement of a new youth center and library in Old Town Saticoy, as well as specific placement of possible middle and elementary schools in specific locations.

Next Monday night, we will inevitably revisit some of these issues when we hear the neighborhood's appeal of the Hertel-Cabrillo housing project, which is located east of Wells Road just north of Highway 126. (For more details, see http://www.cityofventura.net/newsmanager/articlefiles/1732-item%2013.pdf.)

At the beginning of Tuesday's meeting, Rick Cole, our City Manager, called the whole Saticoy & Wells Community Plan an "awkward straddle". By this he meant the challenge of trying to create a Community Plan for the buildout of Saticoy & Wells at the same time that we are allowing four large development projects to move forward as Specific Plans in the area.

Saticoy & Wells is the focus of a major planning effort for one very simple reason: Most of the remaining undeveloped non-SOAR land in the city is located there. There are about five or six major undeveloped parcels, including the proposed Parklands project and the UC Hansen Trust property, which are located west of Wells between Highway 126 and Telegraph, and three significant parcels in a partially built-out area south of Highway 126 and east of Wells.

One of our neighborhood speakers Tuesday night asked when we decided to "pave over" the Saticoy & Wells area. The answer is that this area was slated for development in the 1989 Comprehensive Plan, and this was ratified in 1995 when the voters approved the SOAR initiative, which specifically permitted development on these parcels (some of which are still in agriculture at this time but not covered by SOAR). The 2005 General Plan calls for the construction of as many as 2,000 houses (out of 8,300 citywide) in this area; pending development proposals would add about 1,000.

A Community Plan is a component of the General Plan that lays out policies for a specific area (in fact, the Saticoy & Wells Community Plan will officially be Chapter 11 of the city's General Plan). A Specific Plan is a more detailed document that includes policies, a development code, and usually specific infrastructure requirements for a specific area as well. A better model -- used in many parts of California -- would have been require all of the landowners out there to participate in a Specific Plan process for Saticoy & Wells, which would have allocated development among the different properties and also specifically identified, sited, and allocated the cost of infrastructure and community facilities.

But developers in Ventura are not accustomed to working together even when their properties are adjacent to one another. This is part of the legacy of the old Residential Growth Management Program, which pitted developers in competition with one another rather than encouraging them to work together. At the time of the last RGMP round in 2005, some of these properties had housing allocations and some did not. When we exempted Specific Plans from the RGMP in late 2005 (before replacing the RGMP with a new system in 2006), all of the Saticoy & Wells developers, quite predictably, submitted their proposals in the form of Specific Plans.

The result of this imperfect process is that we have a bunch of individual Specific Plans rather than one big Specific Plan for the whole area. Instead we have a Community Plan that seeks to set policies that will knit the area together; and we have stuck to our promise to try to devise the Community Plan and process the Specific Plans at the same time, on the assumption that we can measure the Specific Plans against the probable policies in the Community Plan.

Are you confused yet? Me too.

The bulk of the Community Plan puts forth policies that the Specific Plans can be measured against. These policies cover all topics, from land use to transportation to infrastructure. My biggest concern is that these policies are not specific enough. I believe the Community Plan should -- as much as possible -- identify the infrastructure and community facilities we need in Saticoy & Wells, so we can do what a communitywide Specific Plan would have done -- allocate the location and costs of those facilities among the different property owners. At present, we have different developers offering up different things -- open space here, a library there, additional money for whatever community facilities we want -- but we can't see what it all adds up to or what each developer's "fair share" ought to be. There's a difference between having policies that the city can use to determine whether a development project is consistent with (which is what we have now) and having a plan that lays out precisely what should happen so that we can make sure the development projects implement that plan, which is what we should have.

Hence the awkward straddle.

During the five-hour meeting, we debated lots of things. In a moment I'll go back to the one that I think is most illustrative of the pending issues -- parks -- but first let me run through a few other things.

* We debate the planning staff's general recommendation that we make Wells (as well as Telegraph) more pedestrian-oriented. There is a lot of skepticism about whether this is really possible, especially given the truck traffic on Wells, but I think we can probably find some kind of hybrid. (I didn't mention this the other night, but for those portions of Wells that are controlled by Caltrans, we could try to get Caltrans to do what is called a "context-sensitive design" effort, which essentially tries to fit a state highway into a community context.)

* We came down pretty strongly in favor of the idea of creating Los Angeles Avenue all the way to Darling as a truly pedestrian-oriented Main Street alternative to Wells for local traffic. This had a lot of support on the council and is consistent with our idea on Victoria -- that we should create a similar street west of Victoria as the area redevelops.

* We debated a lot about the relationship to Old Town Saticoy. Old Town is the historic core of Saticoy and it is connected to the parcels that we will be processing but it is currently in the county. We as a city seem to be taking a greater sense of responsibility here, which is good; though we have yet to agree on exactly how that sense of responsibility will play out. The staff suggested that both a new library and a youth center be located in Old Town Saticoy, though a majority of the council (with me dissenting, at least on the library) backed off of that as an iron-clad idea. There's also language in the draft plan to work with the county and property owners to pursue annexation, which I favor. But there is some bumpiness to the interim steps. One Old Town property owner asked us to change our policy on water hookups to Old Town so he could develop an infill project under county jurisdictions. We currently require annexation in these situations, though we provided water to the new county yard in Saticoy without demanding annexation. We did not move in toward loosening our water-annexation direction, partly because our view is that if we are going to provide water to infill development, we also want to be able to control the development standards. We are definitely moving toward forcing the annexation issue.

* We generally supported (or at least did not squawk about) the idea of two pedestrian overpasses over 126, one on either side of Wells -- including that would essentially extend Los Avenue. The East Ventura Community Council's comments criticized this idea, calling the ped bridges an unwanted intrusion into neighborhoods, but I was pleased to see that two neighborhood residents spoke in favor of the ped bridges on Tuesday night. One resident said he lives south of the freeway and has to drive his kids to his mother's mobile home north of the freeway.

* We debated but did not resolve the question of the scale of retail on the parcels south of the freeway and east of Wells. In the past, big box ideas such as Wal-Mart and Target have been thrown around for these sites, not least because it is accessible to shoppers from Santa Paula. But we seemed to favor limiting the retail to community-level retail -- i.e., perhaps a supermarket shopping center. The closest supermarkets now are Albertsons
(a new store) at Kimball and Telegraph and Ralphs (an old, small store) at Telephone and Petit.

Now back to parks -- because this is the issue that best exemplifies the awkward straddle.

We have long-established parks standards -- so many acres of parkland per thousand residents, with requirements for smaller neighborhood parks and larger community parks. It's not hard to calculate these standards out for the whole Saticoy & Wells area, but this calculation is not contained or illustrated in the Community Plan. There is a proposed, general open space map in the Community Plan -- basically, depicting what all the different developers have proposed in the way of open space and parks -- and it has a big caveat that it's only illustrative and that the final parks and open space system may be different. This is the difference between a Community Plan and a Specific Plan.

(One big issue is that the Community Plan currently calls for the eventual conversion of the Saticoy Regional Golf Course adjacent to Huntsinger Park -- located in the city but owned by the county -- into some other kind of community-oriented park space. I personally think this is highly unlikely and would hate to assume it for the purposes of calculating park space.)

The actual calculations of the park space and measurement against the standard will take place as part of the Community Plan Environmental Impact Report -- not likely to come to us till the fall. But the Parklands project -- which will almost certainly be the first Specific Plan to come before us, sometime this spring -- calls for a series of small park spaces throughout the project, consistent with New Urbanist philosophy. (You can see the plan for Parklands on the Moule & Polyzoides web site at http://www.mparchitects.com/projects-neighborhoods.html. Just click on Parklands and then on Plan.) Some folks say that these spaces shouldn't count toward meeting the parks standard.

You can see where this is going. What if we approve the Parklands project with its current parks configuration, as we will be under tremendous pressure to do this spring; only to learn later on, in the EIR, that the overall parks standard will not be met by the assumed development in the Community Plan (including Parklands)? This would mean that we will have to load the parks burden onto the other developments, mostly probably the adjacent Hansen Trust property, because Parklands is already out of the gate. Or else back off of our standards at least insofar as Saticoy & Wells is concerned and wrap our policies not around what we need, but around what these developers are offering us.

Principal Planner Dave Ward said the staff's initial assessment is that these spaces should count, and that based on this Parklands will likely meet the standard. This is fair enough, but it depends on a particular interpretation of the parks standard that the Planning Commission and the City Council may or may not agree with.

You could apply this same reasoning to any other public facilities -- libraries, community centers, roads, even the ped bridges. What I suggested -- and the council agreed with this -- was to address this question head-on. We directed the staff to come back to us within two months with a policy discussion on the question of how to count and distribute parks in the Saticoy & Wells area. Better to address this one at the Community Plan level than back ourselves into a corner in the individual project reviews.

There is no perfect way out of the awkward straddle, but this is a step forward. I only wish we could do this with all the infrastructure and public facility issues, but that's not likely given our previous direction to move forward on the Specific Plans (which we reaffirmed Tuesday night). The staff will come back with the parks issues, the retail question, and one or two other issues no later than April -- ahead of the Parklands Specific Plan, which should come to the Planning Commission in May.

Sorting Things Out in Wells-Saticoy

After our special workshop meeting with the Planning Commission regarding Wells-Saticoy back on November 15, Mayor Morehouse and I thought there was some confusion regarding how the staff should proceed. After all, we seemed (as usual!) to be asking our planning staff for everything at once -- do the Community Plan, process all the Specific Plans, and do everything perfectly and all at the same time. The basic problem, however, was that the Community Plan schedule had slid -- it won't be adopted till late in 2007 -- which meant the Specific Plans proposed by individual developers would move forward far in advance of the Community Plan. So we put an item on last night's agenda asking our colleagues on the council to clarify everything.

We were a bit surprised at how confused everyone was by our claim that there was confusion! Most of the developers said there was no confusion at all -- the Specific Plans should move forwared as fast as possible. Nevertheless, I had a basic concern, which went like this:

We have instructed the staff to move both the Community Plan and the landowner Specific Plans forward simultaneously. The Draft Community Plan will be released in January and probably won't be adopted until September or so because of CEQA review and so forth. But the individual Specific Plans are likely to come to us much sooner -- the first one being Parklands, which could come to us as soon as March. How can we adopt a Specific Plan and make sure it fits into the Community Plan if the Community Plan itself isn't adopted?

The planning staff assured us that they were integrating everything to make sure the Specific Plans and the Community Plan fit together. This sounds great, but what if the Planning Commission and the Council don't really like the draft Community Plan that is being integrated with the Specific Plans?

As you might expect, we went round and round on this for three hours. Eventually, however, we came up with this solution: We will have a joint workshop with the Planning Commission in February, at which we will provide "policy direction" on the draft Community Plan. Translation: In February we'll give an informal thumbs-up or thumbs-down to the basic policy ideas in the Community Plan, then use those policy ideas as a yardstick against which to measure the Specific Plans if they come through the pipeline faster than the Community Plan.

PS -- Even though everybody calls it "Wells-Saticoy," the official name is the "Saticoy & Wells Community Plan." Here's the link for more info on the city web site: http://www.ci.ventura.ca.us/depts/comm_dev/planning_communities/wells-saticoy.asp