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.

Working Together With Our Neighborhoods

Back in the early ‘90s, a group of citizens in the neighborhood then known simply as “The Avenue” got together and decided that their neighborhood had not gotten enough attention over the years. So they formed a neighborhood organization to advocate for their community. They even gave their neighborhood a new name – the Westside – because they believed “The Avenue” had developed too many negative connotations over the years.

Almost 20 years later, the Westside Community Council is still going strong in advocating for the Westside – and over the years City Hall has responded. Most recently, we have been working on a Community Plan for the Westside area that will – after some 15 years of uncertainly – make the rules clear for new development and also identify the priorities for public investment on the Westside (if and when we have the money to make those investments).

And there are six other community councils in Ventura as well – representing Downtown, Midtown, Pierpont, the Harbor, the College District, and East Ventura. These are truly grassroots organizations.

We have great neighborhoods in Ventura, but they’ve taken a beating as we have had to reduce services in the last few years. The Community Councils help to foster neighborhood pride and engage in grassroots activity to make these neighborhoods better. I’m proud to do whatever I can to support our Community Councils and make our neighborhoods better. I meet every couple of months with the chairs of these Councils, and we are planning Ventura’s first-ever Neighborhood Summit this summer.

With the exception of the Downtown Ventura organization – created with the City’s help – these groups were formed by the people who live and work in their neighborhoods and they have crafted their own role.

For example, the Midtown Ventura Community Council often reviews and comments on pending development projects in Midtown, and it was partly because of the Community Council that Community Memorial Hospital’s large expansion project is so neighborhood-oriented and passed with so much neighborhood support.

The Pierpont Community Council has been at the forefront of the thorny sand removal issues that affect the Pierpont, and the College District Community Council was formed in response to many changes in the neighborhood, including spreading homeless issues and the loss of Wright Library. The College District organization has become an important venue for dialogue between Ventura College and surrounding neighborhoods.

None of these organizations receive a penny from the City. We do try to help them as much as possible. For example, Police Department staff often attends Community Council meetings – a vital information exchange about crime and safety issues in the neighborhoods that helps neighbors know how to stay safe and helps the police learn what problems are occurring. Our transportation engineers, parks staff, and other folks often attend the meetings as well to provide information and also stay on top of neighborhood issues.

And our Community Partnerships staff is working with the Community Councils to find private, philanthropic support for what we are calling a Neighborhood Improvements Matching Grant program. This program would allow for the City's various Community Councils to apply for matching grants to fund improvement projects in their districts. This would be a huge step forward in helping our neighborhoods help themselves to become better – and protect the neighborhoods that everyone in town loves.

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.

Stalemate on the North Avenue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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