Safe Housing in Ventura

Yesterday I attended the Safe Housing Collaborative's open house and workshop at Cabrillo Middle School. Safe housing and code enforcement has been a significant issue here in Ventura over the last year or two -- not surprising considering we are an older city with an older housing stock.

The meeting yesterday was terrific. I would say about 80 people showed up. The Safe Housing Collaborative -- a City Council-appointed group chaired by Jill Martinez -- did a terrific job of pulling things together and organizing the event. At the workshop, the participants were broken down into small tables and they discussed housing and code enforcement issues at length.

I'm looking forward to hearing what the Safe Housing Collaborative took away from the day. There were a lot of comments -- some angry, but most constructive. I tried to move from table to table to get a broad understanding of what people were saying, and here's what I heard most frequently:

1. Our permit fees are too high. (We have been increasing some fees in order to ensure that taxpayers don't subsidize building fees and code enforcement fines.)

2. To bring costs down, we should allow permit applicants or contractors to "self-certify" that the code has been met. (This is one of several options we've been discussing.)

3. We should focus on safety issues and not worry so much about other things that are technically substandard. ("Substandard" is defined in the state code and is pretty expansive.)

4. Our building inspectors and code enforcement officers sometimes have an attitude and/or don't demonstrate evenhandedness. (As I have no personal experience with this, I don't know if this is true or not.)

Anyway, these were the four things I heard pretty consistently.

You can get involved in the Safe Housing Collaborative discussion by joining the Safe Housing Ventura Yahoo group.

Will Ventura Pay For Bell's Bad Deeds?

The Bell compensation scandal is coming “home to roost” in lots of ways – but I’d like to talk about one in particular: The question of whether Ventura will get dragged into the Bell situation – and be required to foot part of the bill for Bell’s spiked pensions.

The latest issue is not how much Bell’s overpaid top employees will make, but who foots the bill. Ventura may be on the hook to pay a good portion of Bell Police Chief Randy Adams’s vastly increased pension because Adams spent 20 years working for the Ventura Police Department. We may be in the same situation with Angela Spaccia, Bell’s assistant city manager, who also worked for Ventura – but not for nearly as many years. (A bill now pending in the state legislature may get us off the hook, however.)

Adams doubled his annual pension – from something like $200,000 to $400,000 – by working at a very high salary in Bell for one year. But under the rules governing the California Public Employee Retirement System, previous employers are apparently on the hook for a pro-rata share of Adams’ pension. Adams worked in Ventura longer than anywhere else, so under one interpretation of PERS rules, we’ll have to pay about 60% of Adams’ pension spike.

This is ridiculous, of course. An irresponsible city council 80 miles away makes a sweetheart deal with a guy who left our employ 15 years ago and all of a sudden we’re on the hook for many tens of thousand of dollars a year. PERS has put Adams' pension on hold for now (along with Spaccia’s and Bell City Manager Richard Rizzo’s) while Attorney General Jerry Brown investigates the situation. We have joined with Simi Valley and Glendale, Adams’s other previous employers, in fighting against the increased price of Adams’ pension – and we’re committed to continuing the fight.

The whole Bell situation, however, has begun to shine a light on PERS’s policies regarding who actually pays for pensions, which have traditionally been anything but transparent. In many ways, these policies make sense. But it may be time for a change, especially if the good times of skyrocketing stock market and real estate values that we have experienced over the last 20 years have come to an end.

PERS is the largest pension system in the world. It provides pensions for over 1 million people and has assets worth more than $200 billion, including huge investments in both stocks and real estate. PERS tries to pay as much of its pension costs from return on investment as possible, but if investment returns fall short, the member agencies – such as Ventura – must pay the difference.

Conceptually, then, here’s what happens:

-- We give money to PERS for every employees’ pension.

-- PERS invests that money and gets a return.

-- If that’s not enough to cover pensions for our employees (which are of course guaranteed at a certain level – that’s the “defined benefit” approach), PERS asks us for more money to cover the difference.

Right now, the city’s retirement assets at PERS total something like $360 million, which is about 85% of the amount of money required to cover the pension costs, according to PERS’ projections.

We don’t, however, receive an itemized bill from PERS that says, here’s how much you have to sock away for each current employee’s pension and here’s how much additional you have to pay because we missed our goals for investment return. So, for example, there will be no line item for “Paying Randy Adams’ pension because of what Bell did”.

Instead PERS calculates all of our obligations and translates that into a formula – expressed as the percentage of overall employee compensation required to cover the PERS bill. I think this number is currently something like 40% for public safety employees and 28% for non-safety employees.

This sounds like a lot. But remember, this isn’t just the amount of money we’re socking away for current employees. It also includes whatever we must pay to cover the cost of retiree pensions if PERS misses its investment targets (which obviously it has been doing lately). And we recently crossed an important threshold – we now have more retirees than current employees.

PERS does the calculation this way because, like Social Security, it is not an investment fund where you park your money and hope for a return. Rather, it is an enormous investment pool that seeks to spread risk as much as possible – usually the risk of low stock market returns but, as we have now seen, the risk of elected officials acting irresponsibly as well. PERS spreads risk in many ways. It spreads investment risk over hundreds of agencies. It spreads the risk of unusually high pensions, as we now know, among all of that retiree’s employers. Among smaller cities, PERS spreads this same risk among many cities. Bell City Manager Rizzo’s pension (reputed to be in excess of $600,000 a year) will be borne in part by 140 smaller cities in the PERS system, including Bell. (Apparently, Adams’ pension will not be covered by this small-city pool because he worked mostly for bigger cities).

In addition, PERS spreads the risk of low investment returns out over time through a process called “smoothing”. If PERS investment returns do not meet the targets – as has been the case the last couple of years – obviously PERS’s member agencies have to pay more money to cover pension costs. Instead of sending us that increased bill all at once, however, PERS spreads the increase out over time so we don’t feel the blow all at once.

Usually this is not a big problem, because most cities have pay scales that are more or less in line with one another. (I would guess that virtually all public sector salaries in California are within plus-or-minus 20% for the equivalent job.) But Bell’s misdeeds throw this equilibrium out of whack, which is why I think we hang tough on not paying the pensions of Randy Adams and Angie Spaccia.

We Really Don't Do It For The Money

In the wake of the City of Bell compensation scandal, I suggested that the best way for public officials to be accountable to the voters on compensation is simply to reveal everything in public. I began my professional life as a journalist and I know that “sunshine” is often the best remedy for back-room deals.

Many others, including Gov. Schwarzenegger and the League of California Cities, have reached the same conclusion. And so has our city. I’m proud to say that Ventura has now posted an entire package of material about our own city compensation online. Much of this information was already public – we approve our salary schedules, our union contracts, and our contracts with the city manager and city attorney in public session – but it wasn’t readily available. Now it is. So please take a look if you’d like. As I say, sunshine is often the best medicine.

Given the controversy in Bell – where City Councilmembers made upwards of $100,000 per year by serving on various commissions that did nothing – many people have been asking how much we on the City Council make. The answer is simple: As mayor, I bring home about $12,000 per year, all in. That’s down about $2,400 from the last fiscal year. And that’s a lot less than what our colleagues in the other large Ventura County cities (Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Oxnard, and Camarillo) make. It’s a little hard to compare apples-to-apples, but all of them seem to make somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 per year.

Here’s how it breaks down:

-- The Mayor makes $700 a month, or $8,400 per year. This is established in the City Charter and it has been the same for about 40 years. (Councilmembers make $600.) These amounts can’t be changed without a vote to change the charter.

-- All councilmembers also get a $100 per month local travel allowance. This used to be $300 for the mayor and $200 for councilmembers, but we cut it back to $100 starting on July 1 to help meet the City Council’s budget reduction goal of 10%.

-- I am on two boards for which I receive a stipend. Both have to do with transportation – the Ventura County Transportation Commission and Gold Coast Transit. For each, I receive $100 per meeting and there are 10-11 meetings per year of each, so that’s another $2,000-$2,200 per year.

I’m also on the county Library Services Commission, but there’s no stipend associated with that (just a lot of headache!). And although some cities compensate their councilmembers additionally for serving as Redevelopment Agency commissioners and so forth, we get no additional compensation for things like that.

So that’s about $12,000. As for travel beyond the $100 per month for local travel, the council’s overall travel budget for travel outside of Ventura County is $17,500, which is about half of what it was three years ago. Each councilmember gets $2,750 and can choose their travel, though they can trade back and forth if they want.

Councilmembers also participate in either Social Security or the California Public Employment Retirement System, whichever they choose. In either case, the city’s share of the contribution is a pittance. And we are permitted to participate in the city’s health insurance program, but we must pay 100% of the cost. I choose to participate in the dental and vision insurance programs at my own expense, but I get medical insurance through my day job.

We recently checked around with the other cities in the County to see how we stack up. We were actually a little surprised to discover how poorly we are compensated compared to our peers.

In most larger cities in Ventura County, the Mayor and City Councilmembers get paid between $1,000 and $1,750 per month -- essentially, double to triple what we get. In almost all these cities, they also get additional compensation – things like city-paid medical insurance that they can cash out or flexible spending accounts, bigger travel allowances, and sometimes even contributions to a 457 retirement program (the public-sector equivalent of a 401k) or a deferred compensation program. As I mentioned above, as near as I can figure it’s between $20,000 and $30,000 per year, compared to $10,000 to $12,000 per year for us in Ventura.

I won’t lie: I certainly wish we made more money. In addition to being mayor, I hold down a full-time job (which, fortunately, I also love). I think fair compensation for a councilmembers would be somewhere around $40,000 a year, which is about what our colleagues in Santa Barbara make.

But I’m not complaining. I knew what the pay was when I signed up for this job and I have certainly never asked for or expected more than that. I don’t know about Bell, but here in Ventura the mayor and the city council clearly don’t do it for the money.

The Fallout From Bell

The controversy over high salaries of both staff and councilmembers in the City of Bell -- a controversy involving two former City of Ventura -- continues to reverberate. The staff members have resigned, the councilmembers have cut their pay 90%, and the state is investigating both the salaries themselves and the pension consequences they will have.

How could this happen? How can we avoid it happening in Ventura and other communities near us?

I'm pretty familiar with the cities in the Bell area from my past life as a journalist, so you can read a long blog I wrote here about what happened there and how we can be vigilant in making sure it doesn't happen again.

Shop Ventura

Everybody should buy local. It's good for local businesses, it increases local tax revenue, and it makes people feel good about their community. Here in Ventura, we're working on putting together a comprehensive "buy local" campaign. There are many buy local campaigns already in place, and we're working with them, with the Chamber of Commerce, the Downtown Ventura Organization, and other groups. But there are many approaches to "buy local," and we want to make sure we get it right.

During the current recession, there's been a revival of "buy local" campaigns all over the country, especially as sales of big-ticket, big-tax items such as automobiles have been on the decline. Some cities have simply tried to raise awareness. If you shop in the next town, you're paying the salaries of their police officers, not ours. Others have taken more aggressive steps, giving gift cards or rebates for local car purchases. Yet there's one common theme: As retail sales has gone into steep decline in the last few years, jurisdictions nationwide have realized that they can't take sales tax for granted.

For the past 30 years, the favored approach of California cities to pursuing more sales tax has been to attract more retailers--often with deep subsidies. In some cases, property tax increment financing was used to subsidize auto dealerships and shopping malls, with the hope of generating a sales-tax payoff. In other cases, cities simply split the sales tax increases with the retailers.

The recent recession has rendered these models outdated, at least for the moment. No increment in property taxes has occurred because property values have been falling, and there has been no increase in sales tax to share.

Nevertheless, some localities continue to subsidize their big retailers to keep them afloat. In May, the Long Beach, Calif., City Council approved a loan to legendary Ford dealer Cal Worthington of $600,000 to keep him going--and stay in town. Other cities may face similarly difficult choices as the auto manufacturing industry contracts.

Other localities have taken a different but equally aggressive approach. Some cities have simply set aside a slug of money to give rebates to people who buy-in their town-big-ticket items like cars. Others have worked with their retailers to offer gift cards: Buy a car, get a gift card worth several hundred dollars for other retailers in town.

In general, these buy local campaigns--or as one wag has called them, "bribe local" campaigns--have had the same effect as the Obama administration's Cash For Clunkers program: A brief boom in sales, followed by a crash back to previous levels when the program ended.

Here in Ventura, we have come to realize that a buy local campaign that's truly effective is a sustained effort, not one based on gimmicks. This is hard to calibrate with retail thinking, since retailers are always focused, understandably, on the short term and often use gimmicks to boost sales. But all the evidence points to the idea that people will stop leaving town to buy things when two things happen: first, when the stuff they want to buy is available in their town; and second, when they realize that there's a relationship between where they buy stuff and how many police officers and firefighters their city can afford.

With the current retail market in flux, it's a little hard to know just exactly what stuff people are going to want to buy in the future (will they be buying cars or not). Therefore it is hard to know which retailers to go after. But the other half of it is easy: Rather than using short-term gimmicks, cities should use long-term public education efforts to ensure that their residents know where their sales tax dollars go--even when it means pointing to another city.

If you're interested in helping us with our buy local campaign, please contact Eric Wallner at ewallner@cityofventura.net.

The Cliffhanger Budget

Last week, the City Council approved the 2010-11 budget by a vote of 6-0 with Councilmember Weir absent because of a longstanding commitment. It’s not a budget any of us are happy with or proud of.

In order to close yet another multimillion-dollar deficit, we voted in favor of significantly reducing the number of police officers and firefighters – this will result in the “closing” of Fire Station 4, at least for now – the possible closure of the Downtown Senior Recreation Center unless we can close a deal for somebody else to take over the building, the elimination of more than 40 positions citywide, further reductions in park and streetscape maintenance, and a general thinning of the ranks for the second year in a row.

Plain and simple, this is a cliffhanger budget, designed to help us squeeze through the third fiscal year in a row where revenue has declined, and still hang on to the basic infrastructure of our city services. I hope it’s the most draconian budget I ever have to vote on.

Most of the attention in the last few weeks, of course, was focused on the question of whether we would continue to staff Fire Station No. 4, on Telephone Road near Montgomery, which City Manager Rick Cole and Fire Chief Kevin Rennie suggested was the station least likely to have a significant impact on our fire department response times if it were closed. Both the firefighters union and many of Station 4’s neighbors took us to task on that idea, saying it stretches the Fire Department too thin. The fact of the matter is that this budget stretches everything very thin. This includes not just the Fire Department but the Police Department as well, which won’t lose any beat cops but will see a reduction in all kinds of support services – detectives, the graffiti team – that help to keep our community safe.

At this point, it is not too much of a mystery to most people why we are having to make these cuts. We have lost more than $15 million in revenue in the last 2½ years. Our General Fund revenue is back down to the 2003 levels; our sales tax revenue has dipped down to the level we saw in around 1999. Property tax is stagnant and beginning to go down.

Just as there was last year, this year there was considerable interplay between our proposed budget on the one hand and our labor negotiations on the other. The reason is not surprising: When revenue is going down there are only a few ways to reduce expenses and most of them of them affect our employees. The options usually go like this:

1. “Go out of business” in some areas by simply ceasing to perform some low-priority functions, which usually means eliminating positions.

2. Reduce levels of service in at least some areas – if not all of them – another step that usually involves eliminating positions.

3. Reduce employee compensation.

And the hard truth of the matter is that there’s usually a tradeoff here. Either we reduce the number of positions – some vacant positions and some layoffs – or else everybody takes a pay cut.

Last year, we did all three things. For example, we no longer fund any public art out of the General Fund; and all of our bargaining units agreed to a 5% cut in 2009-10, much of which was taken in the form of things like less vacation. (We were one of the few cities in the state to successfully negotiate such a cut.)

This year, it has been harder to do anything of these things in a way that doesn’t really hurt. There are few low-priority activities that we have not ceased doing. Cuts in service are beginning to hurt because we have cut the back offices all we can. Most significant, it has been more difficult this year for us to reach agreement with our labor unions for pay cuts. We are asking for more than we did before – short-term and long-term – and they are pushing back.

Since we haven’t successfully negotiated any pay cuts, we didn’t put any savings from those pay cuts into the budget. We are currently in negotiations with the police union and with SEIU Local 721, which represents all of our non-public-safety workers. These contracts expire on July 1.

We also engaged in a lot of talks with the firefighers union, even though their contract doesn’t expire until December, because they were interested in keeping Station 4 open. (The real cost savings in Station 4 is not “closing” the station; it’s the $1.2 million in savings that comes from eliminating 9 of our 66 firefighter positions.)

The firefighters stuck with us, and came up with many creative ideas, and we made some progress. In the end, however, the reductions they offered were not enough to reopen Station 4; and the Council was unwilling to accept one of the conditions the firefighters asked for in return – a guaranteed number of firefighters on duty at any given time. This would be an unprecedented step for the city to take. No city union contract currently contains guaranteed staffing for any department. If we accepted this condition, we would essentially be earmarking a certain percentage of the budget for the firefighters – exactly the same kind of earmark that has made it impossible for the state to balance its budget year after year.

So in the end, we were unable to reach a deal with the firefighters and we adopted the budget without any wage concessions. On July 1, both our police force and our fire department will be reduced. Fire Station 4 will go unstaffed most of the time for now. We will further reduce park and landscape maintenance and we will shrink in many other ways as well.

I said at the beginning that this is not a budget to be proud of, and that’s certainly true considering service cuts it contains. But one thing I think we should be proud of here in Ventura is that, unlike so many other public agencies, we are facing the issues head-on and we’re not papering them over.

We’re balancing our budget, just as our City Charter requires, and we’re doing it honestly, even if honesty comes with pain.

We’re not using reserves or other “one-time money” to keep things going.

We’re not pretending we’re going to get more revenue than we are.

We’re not – as some cities are doing – reaching agreement with our labor unions by promising them raises in three or four years, when we have no idea what the future will bring.

But that doesn’t mean we will stop trying to figure out ways to restore the services we have lost. I view the “closure” of Station 4 as temporary – though I can’t tell you whether temporary means six months or five years.

Nor will we stop looking at ways to restrain future spending. We are going to have to restrain spending to accomplish three goals: (1) ensure our long-term solvency; (2) maintain our ability to provide services to our constituents; and (3) maintain our ability to meet our financial commitments to our loyal and hard-working employees. We will continue to negotiate with our labor unions for short-term pay cuts, which could help restore some service cuts in the short-term. We will also continue to work collaboratively with our unions on long-term pension reform.
But all this is not enough. We cannot achieve all these goals unless we also reinvent the way we deliver public services.

What do I mean by reinvention? Mostly what I mean is questioning how we do things. All too often in government, we desperately scramble to try to keep doing things the same way as we have always done them – without thinking about whether the current system is cost-effective, or even effective at all. Instead of trying to figure out how to maintain the current infrastructure as it exists, let’s focus instead on what the goal is.

So, for example, all through the debate about the Fire Department budget, the focus has been on how to keep Fire Station No. 4 open – a perspective that has been driven largely by the vocal involvement of the firefighters union and the people who live near Station 4. To me, however, the question is not how to keep Station 4 open, but how to make sure that our firefighter/paramedics can be at your home or your business, with the right equipment, when you need them. Once you make that shift, it liberates you to think differently about what the city does and how we do it.

In fact, we already stretch our resources in public safety by moving people and equipment around on an hour-by-hour basis. We think that if Station No. 4 is open, three firefighters are located there 24/7 waiting for your call. In fact, the Battalion Chief on duty is always redeploying our fire engines geographically depending on the circumstances.

So, if you're having a heart attack and call 911, Engine No. 4 may actually be sitting in Station No. 4. But, depending on what's going on, Engine No. 4 could be at a structure fire up in the hills, or at the training facility at Seaward and Allessandro, or sitting on Station 1 on the Avenue, backing up because Engine No. 1 is engaged somewhere. (It is typical practice in the Fire Department to move equipment around so that Stations 1 (Avenue), 2 (Seaward), and 3 (Buena) are always backed up, because these areas have the highest volume of calls.) In any of these circumstances, your call would be responded to by a different engine, including possibly the county engine in Saticoy. I cannot tell you how frequently this occurs now, but it's an everyday occurrence.

Similarly, after July 1, we will not have a crew permanently located at Fire Station 4, but that does not mean it will always be empty. In all probability, sometimes a crew (city or county) will be present there on occasion, again depending on how our Battalion Chief chooses to deploy resources.

So, already, the way we deploy are resources are very dynamic, even though we think they are static. But we have to move beyond the question of deployment to deeper questions of efficiency and effectiveness. If the job of most firefighters these days is to be paramedics, does every firefighter have to be attached to a fire station in a stationary location – or even to a fire engine that contains all kind of equipment not needed to rescue you while you’re having a heart attack? Reinventing things like fire and paramedic service takes time, effort, and commitment. And it’s an uphill battle against the natural inclination of practically everybody – constituents, politicians, and employees alike – to protect the status quo.

But let’s face it: We’ve spent the last three years cutting wages, cutting jobs, and cutting services. Now we’re at the bottom. It’s time to stop cutting and start reinventing

Trains, Surfing, Baptisms, Soccer -- Spring Has Arrived in Ventura

Spring always makes you feel better. And here in Ventura – where the winter can be wet and chilly, and the summer can be foggy – spring usually means great weather. It’s warm and sunny, and if we’ve had some late rain, the hills are still green.

Because spring also means rebirth, it’s usually a time when people are out and about – doing things that enrich our community and remind us that we life in a great place. And that was certainly the case this Saturday – from morning till night.

My day began at the Ventura County Fairgrounds, where I picked up the 9:35 a.m. Amtrak train to Santa Barbara for our regional National Train Day celebration. I was joined by a number of other public transit advocates, including K.K. Holland of ASERT, our local public transit advocacy group, Claudia Armann of the McCune Foundation and her son, my colleague Christy Weir and two of her grandchildren, and City Manager Rick Cole and his kids. We were met up in Carpinteria by a large contingent from Santa Barbara and Goleta and then went on to the Santa Barbara train depot, where a celebration of rail transit had been put together by the Coalition for Sustainable Transportatio.

It was a beautiful morning, and of course there is no more beautiful commute in the world than Ventura to Santa Barbara. But that doesn’t change the fact that there are several thousand commuters on that corridor every weekday morning from here to there.

Most of them are in their cars on the jammed Highway 101. A few hundred of them take the Coastal Express bus, which provides 20-minute headways in beautiful coaches at rush hour.

But hardly any of them take the train – the one form of transportation that can get commuters out of the traffic congestion on Highway 101. That’s because there are only five Pacific Surfliner trains a day between Ventura and Santa Barbara – and they’re not timed for commuters. In fact, that 9:35 a.m. train is the very first one of the day. As a member of the Ventura County Transportation Commission, I’ve been working with my colleagues to try to change the Amtrak schedule, but it’s not easy.

After a pleasant Coastal Express bus trip southbound along Highway 101, I was back in Ventura by 12:30. But it was such a beautiful day I couldn’t imagine going home. So I changed into my gym clothes and went for a run along the Promenade. Frankly, I’ve been afraid to go running since I have developed eye problems – especially because I now have blind spots along the bottom of my vision and often trip over things. But the day was so beautiful, I couldn’t resist. And everything went fine. I stayed upright the entire time.

But it was still so beautiful I couldn’t go home. So I bought a hot dog and a soda from the vendor on the beach in front of the craft fair and the Crowne Plaza. Not exactly one of my “locavore” meals, nor a particularly healthy one, but on such a beautiful day it was certainly one of the most enjoyable lunches I’ve had in some time.

Wandering around downtown, I couldn’t believe all the people and things I ran into that clearly indicated spring had arrived.

At Surfers Point, they were just giving away the awards for the surf competition in our Corporate Games , which annually attracts hundreds of companies to compete.

Strolling past Rocket Fizz, on the corner of Santa Clara and Oak, I ran into Marcos Vargas, the head of our local social equity group, CAUSE (and my UCLA urban planning classmate), taking his girls for a visit to the store – but they said they were just going to look at all the candy and sodas. Yeah, right.

In a parking lot at the corner of California and Thompson, I ran into a huge throng of kids – with a few adults thrown in – congregating to head out for the beach. Most of the kids had blue shirts on, but a few had red shirts on. It turned out that this was a group from Eastminster Presbyterian Church on Telephone Road. The red-shirted kids were getting baptized and the blue-shirted kids were part of the “river” in which they would be dunked at the ocean. Eastminster may be in East Ventura, but Downtown and the beach is important to them, as it is to everybody in town.

At the Museum of Ventura County’s temporary exhibit space on California Street, I checked out a juried exhibit of quilts. By the way, if you haven’t stopped by their Main Street location, you should take a look at how their expansion – the first in nearly 40 years – is coming along. It’s going to be a terrific addition to our community when it’s done. And thank goodness they’re keeping construction workers busy during this real estate bust!




Strolling down Main Street, I found the sidewalks crowded and all the restaurants busy. Since I still didn’t feel like going home, I stopped off at Palermo, where my gelato was lovingly scooped out by owner Rick Stewart’s father, Dick.

And although I spent a lot of my day using trains and buses and my feet, I couldn't help but enjoy the fact that a lot of folks have gotten their classic cars out now that it's spring, and are driving them around.

But the best part of the day was yet to come – and that was the home opener of our national champion Ventura County Fusion soccer team.

A lot of smaller cities have minor-league baseball teams. But we are lucky to have the Fusion -- which belongs to Premiere Development League, a kind of “minor league” for soccer players ages 18-23, many of whom go on to play for the L.A. Galaxy and other major teams. Last August, the Fusion won the league title at Buena High by defeating the Chicago Fire before 3,500 people – and a national television audience on Fox Soccer Channel.

Soccer is a great sport to watch in person, and the Fusion players are really good. They're from all over the world, but a lot of them are also local. For example, former Ventura High star Mike Enfield -- who played two years with the Galaxy and then in Australia -- is making a comeback with the team.

In case you missed it, the Star did a big story on the Fusion Saturday. And the Fusion is having a big impact on our community -- more than just a soccer game every once in a while. There's a women's team, and more than 20 youth teams associated with the Fusion. And the energetic general manager, Ranbir Shergill, is aggressively bringing over teams from Europe and elsewhere to train here. The result? Some 1,200 room nights per year sold at the Crowne Plaza. The Fusion is clearly part of our economic development strategy.

Before the game against the Ogden Outlaws began, I had the privilege of presenting a game ball from the championship game to Graham Smith , who coached the Fusion for the last three years. Then I was both humbled and surprised to be presented with another championship game ball -- signed by all the Fusion players. It's in the Mayor's Office now if you want to come and take a look at it.



By the way, the Fusion dispatched the Outlaws, 3-0.

At the end of my Saturday all over town, I couldn’t help but think that we are nearing the end of the long winter we have been experiencing here in Ventura and around the nation. Business is picking up a little for everybody. People I know who’ve been looking for jobs are beginning to find them; and businesses that have been teetering on the edge are beginning to stabilize. It’ll be a while before things turn around at the City, of course, because we’re highly dependent on the retail and property markets for our tax revenue. We’re going to have to make some very difficult cuts in the coming budget year, and it won’t be pretty. But we will find a way to get through it and move on to better times. After Saturday, I couldn’t help but be optimistic about that.

PS: This is my 100th blog as a member of the City Council, dating back to December 2006, when I wrote about the Wells-Saticoy Community Plan. I originally started blogging just to let you all know why I vote the way I do on Monday nights. But I have a really good time writing about all kinds of things in Ventura and staying in touch with you. Please feel free to comment or email me as much as you want.