At The Library Crossroads

Tonight, the Ventura City Council took an important step toward resolving our longstanding library issues. It's either a baby step toward pulling out of the Ventura County Library system, or a big step toward living with the library service we currently have. I don't know which.

The occasion was a joint meeting with the Library Advisory Commission where we were scheduled to discuss the possibility of embarking on a new strategic plan for the library. But the tenor of the meeting was colored by Camarillo's decision last night to withdraw from the county library system and contract with LSSI, a private company, for library services. (Moorpark made the same jump a couple of years ago.) Some library activists have been unhappy, to say the least, since H.P. Wright Library closed almost a year ago; and they have been agitating for us to withdraw and contract with LSSI as well. A majority of the City Council has stood behind the county library system so far. Would we jump to LSSI? That was the mystery.

In the end, we voted -- uanimously -- to take our first step toward considering the possibility of following suit. If that sounds tentative, it is. Technically, here's what we voted to do, and like I say it's going to sound really tentative:

We voted to agendize an item in the near future the possibility of giving the county the requisite six-month notice for withdrawing from the system this year (meaning July 1, 2011), and we directed the staff to come up with a proposal to put library operations out to bid. The idea is to set up the possibility of withdrawing, seek bids for library operations, and see what we get.

We also directed the Library Advisory Commission to design a strategic planning process that will assist the community in deciding what vision of library service we want to pursue in Ventura in the future. (There was a lot of concern about the overall cost of this effort, so we stipulated that it should be relatively speedy and inexpensive. At the suggestion of Linda Kapala, the library at Foothill High School and a big advocate of reopening Wright, I agreed to see whether graduate students at USC's public policy school, where I teach part-time, could help-out.)

But the main event was the possible withdrawal from the county library system. This was proposed by Councilmember Neal Andrews and seconded by Councilmember Jim Monahan, who opposed closing Wright. Neal in particular has always been in favor of putting more pressure on the county as a way to maintain good library service. My initial instinct was to vote against this motion -- I even said so in the meeting -- but upon reflection I changed my mine, right there in the middle of the meeting. Here's my reasoning.

A lot of people have been wondering whether the county library system can survive without Camarillo. (Presently, it consists of two other larger cities, Ventura and Simi Valley, as well as unincorporated areas and three smaller cities, Fillmore, Ojai, and Port Hueneme.)

As I said tonight, I think that in the short run we will be able to maintain our current level of service. (Although Wright is closed, Avenue Library is open partly thanks to federal funds, and E.P. Foster Library will open Sundays starting this weekend. In fact, there's a big celebration of Foster as part of the ArtWalk this Sunday, starting at 1 p.m.) However, I am not sure we will be able to maintain this same level of service in the coming years -- especially since the county is predicting a 50% increase in pension costs in the next five years.

So I think it makes sense to begin looking at alternatives for operating our libraries. I could wait a year to do this, because as I said I think we're okay for now, but I as happy to go along with the council consensus to move now.

The key for me was the idea of issuing an RFP. A lot of Wright advocates around town have simply been saying that we should pull out of the system and contract with LSSI. But I'm concerned about that -- and I became more concerned after I read the contract between Camarillo and LSSI today.

Whenever cities issue big contracts, they almost always go through a competitive bid. But Camarillo did not do that for library services. Instead, Camarillo negotiated privately on what is called a "sole-source" (i.e., non-competitive) basis with LSSI. This is understandable, especially when you consider that LSSI is the only company that provides library services to municipalities and the company is highly motivated to offer a good price in order to break into the Ventura County market.

Yet this unusual private negotiation process has resulted in pros and cons for Camarillo. The pros are obviously. They're going to get the same amount of service (65 hours a week) for less money -- $1.5 million a year for operations, plus about $500,000 a year to buy materials. (This is a net gain of about $700,000 a year for Camarillo.) LSSI is a large company that has buying power with book producers and so can command good prices, so the materials budget may actually stretch farther.

Yet Camarillo also gave up important things in the LSSI deal -- things I am not sure I want to give up. The county library system maintains the library buildings and I saw nothing in the contract that suggests LSSI is going to take over that responsibility, so that's possibly an increased cost to the city. LSSI promises to provide adequate staffing, but the contract stipulates that all staffing decisions ultimately belong to LSSI. That means LSSI could cut the number of librarians and simply inform the City, rather than seek permission to do so. (I have heard that LSSI has done this in some cases, but I do not know whether this is true.) Also, LSSI retains the power to categorize its library management techniques as proprietary and therefore confidential, meaning the City can't reveal or use what it knows about those techniques without LSSI's permission. The bottom line is that LSSI is a private company. You contract for a service and you get it; but you don't get to know much about the ins and outs of how that service gets provided.

I don't think this kind of privately negotiated deal would fly in Ventura. That's why I think the RFP process is a good way to figure out what the possibilities are. We can specify what service we are interested in -- Avenue, Foster, reopening Wright, bookmobiles, book kiosks, etc. -- and see what the prices are. We could even ask for ideas -- give us an innovative way to provide library service to East Ventura and cost it out. We will know what other costs will fall on our shoulders (and clearly the cost of materials and building maintenance will be our responsibility). We can specify in the RFP anything else that's important to us -- a certain number of librarians, for example, or compliance with the city's Living Wage Ordinance, which requires city contractors to pay a certain per-hour wage plus health insurance.

And then anybody can bid on what we want. LSSI can bid and we will see if they can meet our terms if those terms deviate from LSSI's typical contract (living wage, minimum staffing, etc). The county library system will bid and we can see if they can provide a low enough price. (Having existing departments bid against private companies to provide public services is a growing trend.) Other libraries could bid if they wanted to -- Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Ventura College. And, of course, our city Department of Parks, Recreation, and Community Partnerships could bid as well (maybe in collaboration with laid-off Camarillo librarians? Who knows?)

In the end we might contract with LSSI or some other entity. Or we might not like any of the bids and decide that staying as part of the county system is well worth it. But the point is that we will have tested the market to see what's out there. At this point, I think that's worth it.

Ventura's Big Read: To Kill A Mockingbird

Today begins the annual Ventura Big Read -- a month-long celebration of reading where everybody in town reads the same book, discusses it, and participates in many, many events surrounding the book's themes. The Big Read is coordinated countywide by the Ventura County Library Services Agency.

Last year's Big Read book was Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya. This year's book is To Kill A Mockingbird, the classic story of crime, race, and justice in a small Southern town during the depression, written by Harper Lee and published 50 years ago this year. The kickoff event for The Big Read will take place today at 5:30 at the former Elks Lodge on the corner of Main and Ash.

As an author, I have to say that few books have had such an enormous impact on me as To Kill A Mockingbird. By now everybody knows the story of author Harper Lee, who based the book on her experiences growing up in Alabama during the Depression, and based the supporting character of Dill on her chlidhood friend Truman Capote (whom she later helped research In Cold Blood.)

To Kill A Mockingbird is a deeply affecting story about how people lived in such a segregated society, and how all of them are trapped in the mores of the society without any prospect of release. This is not only true of Tom, the African-American man unjustly accused of raping a white woman; but also Tom's accusers, the townspeople, the shy Boo Radley and even Atticus Finch himself -- the lawyer who is the father of the young narrator Scout and Tom's defender in court. Only the children, inlcuding Scout, can see past their own prejudices and understand what is really happening. It is a short book, one of the most beautifully written books I have ever read, and one with a plot "payoff" both haunting and rewarding. (Harper Lee has never written another book, but as an author I think I understand. It is an almost perfect novel, and what would be the point of writing more?)

Recently, the best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in The New Yorker about the book -- a kind of revisionist approach in which he argued that Atticus is not really so much of a hero as the book makes him out to be. After all, Gladwell points out, Atticus doesn't challenge the unfair system that keeps Tom down; he simply operates within it. Gladwell seems to be making the argument that Atticus is overrated and so is the book.

Gladwell's right, of course; Atticus is bound up in the mores of his time and place, just and unjust, as much as anybody else. But I think that's what makes the book such an important one. To Kill A Mockingbird reminds us that none of us is perfect, not even the noble Atticus Finch; we all must operate within the context of what's possible in the time and place we live; and this humanity is what drives both the good and the bad within us. As a reader and an author, I have always appreciated this suble insight in To Kill A Mockingbird; and I hope it is not diminishing the book to say that as a politician I appreciate the book's qualities as well.

I hope you read To Kill A Mockingbird this month and participate in the Big Read events.

State of the City 2010: Prosperity and Sustainability

Mayor Bill Fulton

Ventura State of the City Address

Feb. 1, 2010



Mayor Fulton:

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



n Creating and sustaining an enduring prosperity;



n Sustaining the environment that supports us; and



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Acknowledgments

Jeff Green, CEO, The Trade Desk

Harry Lin, CEO, Lottay.com

Frank Foster, Managing Partner, DFJ Frontier

John and Dan Peate, Principals, Peate Ventures



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



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



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



Acknowledgment:

Gary Wilde, CEO, Community Memorial Health System



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



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



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



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

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



Acknowledgment:

Ramiro Sanchez, Executive Vice President, Ventura College

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



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



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



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



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

Acknowledgments:

Randy Hinton, Outgoing Chair, Chamber of Commerce

Dave Armstrong, chair, Downtown Ventura Organization

Doug Wood, General Manager, Crowne Plaza Ventura Beach



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



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



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



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



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



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



Acknowledgment:

Paul Jenkin, Environmental Director, Surfrider Foundation



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

Acknowledgment:

Ron Calkins, Director, City of Ventura Public Works Department



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



Acknowledgment:

Pedro Lopez-Baldrich, General Counsel, Patagonia



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Acknowledgment:

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



Acknowledgment:

Kevin Rennie, Chief, City of Ventura Fire Department



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

Managing Parking Downtown

Tonight the City Council took one of the final steps toward installing a system of paid parking on certain blocks downtown. By a vote of 5-2 (with Councilmembers Monahan and Andrews dissenting, as they usually do on this issue), the Council voted to purchase 62 pay stations that will be installed on Main Street, California Street, and a few other sidestreets downtown where almost all parking spaces are in use almost all the time.

Even though this was mostly a procedural items (we approved the concept of paid parking almost three years ago), it got a lot of publicity around town today because the Star chose to highlight it in an advance story titled "Ventura Poised To Charge For Downtown Parking Spaces". The online responses were not universally negative -- many people praised the idea -- but the range of reasons why people thought paid parking is a bad idea was pretty amusing. One person said that paid parking can't be sustained because downtown is doing so poorly; another person said that paid parking shouldn't be instituted because downtown is doing so well.

There's no question that paying for parking anywhere in Ventura is a big adjustment from what we're accustomed to, so it's understandable that a lot of people don't like the idea. But I think it's important to put the paid parking downtown in context. We're not charging for parking everywhere. In fact, the parking garage and all the public parking lots and the vast majority of onstreet parking spaces will be completely free of charge. We're charging at certain very high-usage downtown locations as part of a larger system of managing parking. In addition to paid parking, we're also using time limits on parking as well as residential permit parking as a way to manage the entire system. (See map.) This also requires better management of parking lots -- such as the one at Foster Library, which will be undergoing some changes.

Here's the idea: Some onstreet spaces downtown are in use 95-100% of the time -- especially along Main Street -- and so some people who come along looking for a space never find one. Meanwhile, other areas downtown are not anywhere near full. By creating a system of paid parking, time limits, and residential permit parking, we can free up spaces along Main Street and elsewhere for people who are only going to be there a short time (or are willing to pay money to park there), while encouraging other folks to park in the lots and garages, which are free.

The number of spaces that will have paid parking is small. There are about 7,000 parking spaces downtown, including about 4,000 public spaces. Of those, about 2,000 are in the garage and in lots and about 2,000 are on the street. The paid parking will apply to 431 spaces -- 280 on Main Street and the rest on the side streets. (I had previously said 280 altogether, but I was wrong.) If you choose to park in a paid space, you can pay with a credit card if you want and the system automatically tracks which stall your car is in, so you don't have to return to your car to put a piece of paper on the dashboard, as you do at the beach. If you find youself way down at the other end of the street and you're running out of time, just go to the nearest pay station and add more money.

One of the big fears is that people won't want to pay the parking fee, so they won't park in the spaces, and businesses downtown will suffer. But the paid parking system we're buying allows us to adjust the parking fee to meet the market demand. Our goal is to have, on average, 85% of the parking spaces used, with 15% vacant. (This is, of course, slightly lower than the situation now.) If we institute paid parking at $1 an hour (which is probably where we'll start) and use goes down to only 50% or 60%, then it's easy -- because it's a computerized system -- to lower the price until the usage goes up. If usage is too high -- 95-100%, which means no spaces are available -- then we can raise the price. In other words, we can respond to the market by changing the price, just as a private business would.

Although this kind of system is new to Ventura, it's pretty common throughout Southern California these days. You may have seen this kind of system in Glendale; I've used it in downtown Riverside. It definitely takes some getting used to -- no doubt about it. But once it is in place, we should be able to manage parking much better than now; and you'll have the choice of paying to park in an extremely convenient location or walking a little bit to park for free.

The money that's generated from the parking system will also help downtown. The money will go into a fund for downtown projects -- anything from picking up trash to steamcleaning sidewalks or even to help pay for an additional parking garage. Throughout Southern California, these parking revenues have helped make downtowns more attractive, not less.

Of course, if we charge for parking on the street in high-volume locations, then we have to manage offstreet parking better as well. So, for example, at Foster Library, we are working with the library agency to free up more parking spaces for library patrons. By getting some library employees to park all day in the upper lot, we're going to increase the number of spaces for patrons in the lot behind the library from 11 to 22, and the number of spaces for persons with disabilities from 2 to 4.

Wright's Final Hours

Back in 1997, when my book The Reluctant Metropolis was published, I arranged to do a book reading and signing at the Ventura Bookstore on Main Street downtown. We did the book reading upstairs in the Odd Fellows Hall and then sold the books downstairs in the cozy confines of the bookstore itself. I loved that bookstore. It had been around for decades, and for most of that time it was about the only place you could go in Ventura to purchase a brand-new, just-published book. The shelves and aisles were crowded, and the selection of books was somehow simultaneously quirky and very solid, just like the owner, Ed Elrod – a local guy who knew everybody in town.

The Ventura Bookstore is long gone now. (The space is now occupied by Heart’s Delight Clothiers.) It closed down soon after Barnes & Noble opened up out on Telephone Road. Ed Elrod joined other independent booksellers around the country in suing Barnes & Noble and Borders for driving small bookstores like Ventura Bookstore out of business – a lawsuit they predictably elost. Few people remember the Ventura Bookstore today, but I do. I still miss it. Barnes & Noble is great – it has way more books and a much better atmosphere, which in a way is better for Ventura, and it is teeming with people 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. But somehow it doesn’t replace the Ventura Bookstore or the wonderful feeling of having a great bookstore right on Main Street downtown.

I got to thinking about the Ventura Bookstore tonight when I joined a group of about 40 or so people at Wright Library to grieve over the library’s closing. It was a very sad moment, because Wright is justly recognized as a great neighborhood institution for the people who live near Ventura College and all the students who go to school near there. (Half of the students in Ventura Unified go to school within a mile of Wright.) No matter what libraries evolve into in the future in Ventura, nothing will ever fill Wright’s place.

For the last hour or two before the 8 p.m. closing, folks milled around, talking and checking out books. Some were library advocates who have come to accept the loss of Wright; others were angry patrons who wanted to participate in a night-long vigil. After closing time, Library Director Jackie Griffin said the staff had to go home and asked people to leave. Many of the lights were turned off. Some people left, and a group of perhaps 20 remained. They began to chant, “Keep Wright Open,” and continued to do so for maybe 10 or 15 minutes. Then Debbie Giles, one of our most wonderful longtime community activists, asked the folks if they would like to speak their thoughts or ask questions.

For the next two hours, Jackie Griffin and I talked with these folks, answering questions and engaging in a dialogue with them. Little by little the crowd thinned out, but 10 or 15 people stayed till well past 10 o’clock to talk. Sometimes people yelled at me; once or twice I lost my cool and yelled back. Many people made it extremely clear that they don’t trust the City Council and a few clearly believe that somehow or other money has been mismanaged or Wright has been cheated by the county system. I don’t believe these things but I understand they are part of grieving a loss.

As time went on, however, we talked more and more about different ways that we might be able to raise enough money to maintain our current level of library service; or other ideas dealing with Wright or and our library system in town. Over time, this became, for me, a truly remarkable experience. It’s exactly the kind of conversation we on the City Council should have with our constituents every day – close up, emotional, intense, one-on-one. It was exhausting, but wonderful. It’s the kind of “town hall” discussion I believe we on the council must engage in more often.

The bottom line, of course, was that everybody in the room wanted me to tell them I would find a way to keep the library open. And, of course, I was unable to make them happy. During the course of the evening, three ideas emerged.

First, to use some of the $500,000 or so in funds set aside for a new library to operate Wright in the next year or two.

Second, to alternate days at Wright and Foster indefinitely.

Third, to “mothball” Wright rather than dismantle it and put a parcel tax exclusively for libraries on the ballot in June.

The first two ideas are clearly the most serious ideas to consider if the goal is to keep Wright open at any cost. As to the first one, the council’s policy throughout this financial crisis has been not to use “one-time” money for operating purposes. I believe that’s simply trading tomorrow for today, and it doesn’t solve the problem of not having a financially sustainable library program in the city (No one – not even the two council members who voted against my motion last week – proposed this solution publicly at our meeting.) As to the second, I never liked the idea and I believe that Jackie is right when she says that it may be okay temporarily but it’s not operationally sustainable in the long run.

As to mothballing Wright and running a parcel tax, I’m certainly open to the idea. But it would require a lot of work on the part of a lot of people and I don’t think it would pass. Nevertheless, I look forward to talking with library advocates and patrons about the idea in the weeks ahead.

But I think there is far, far more to the future of libraries in this town than wrestling with the Wright question. Last week at the City Council, the motion I made – and passed by the council – contained several pieces to it. All are important to bear in mind as we move forward. They include the following:

-- To accelerate our existing process of long-term strategic planning for library service in the city. Our library strategic planning task force faces one major decision that has an enormous ripple effect: Should we focus on one large central library, as Camarillo has, or many small libraries serving individual neighborhoods? I believe that if we choose the latter, we will probably – for cost reasons – have to consolidate our libraries with other neighborhood-level services (parks, rec programs, senior and youth programs), which means we’ll have to reinvent the libraries themselves so they can be smaller and still effective.

-- Explore with the library agency unconventional ways to bring library service to East Ventura. This may mean a bookmobile, but it may also mean promoting online alternatives and very localized library systems – for example, ordering a book online through the library agency and then “checking it out” at a kiosk in your neighborhood. Technologically, we’re totally capable of this now.

-- Work with Ventura College on providing library services through the college as well. This could mean things like, publicizing those services the college library does provide that are of value to the community (for example, certain research materials and computers) and seeing whether any services that were provided at Wright (for example, large-print books for senior citizens) could be provided at the college library.

-- Negotiating with the college for ongoing use of the building. Even if the college does take over the Wright Library building, I think it might be possible for the community to still use it for certain things – meetings and events, for example, or maybe even a homework center after school for all the high school kids who go to school nearby. Or perhaps we could provide a pick up and dropoff spot for books ordered by library patrons on line.

These are just a few ideas. As we work through this transition, there will be many others. Just as an example: I am concerned that the Vivian Distin Garden, named for Johnny Cash’s first wife and Roseann Cash’s mother, a longtime Ventura resident, may not survive on the Wright property. But that’s a community asset too.

Over the next few weeks and months, all of us will grieve in our own way. Since it first became apparent that Wright is likely to close, I have visited the library many times – often at night or on Sundays, when it is closed, so I can contemplate what it means to me. I remember all the times my mother volunteered there – and even the July 4th when the librarians let Mom and me join them in their own special area on the Wright property to watch the fireworks. I remember taking my daughter, now 19, to the children’s area when she was two or three – and meeting her after school at Wright when she was in high school. And I remember all the times I spent there reading books, magazines, and newspapers. Someday, different libraries – or even different types of libraries – will be available to all of us. But, as with the Ventura Bookstore, nothing will ever take Wright’s place.

Wright Library: Much To Grieve, But Much To Be Thankful For

As many of you have probably already read, this morning even the Star came up short in its quest to find a way to keep Wright Library open. After running through all the possible ways we in Ventura might come up with the funds to keep Wright open, the Star’s last “Hail Mary” pitch was to put on a Kevin Costner benefit concert.

The Star is not alone in wanting to wave a magic wand to solve Ventura’s library problem. Over the past couple of weeks, I have received and read an extraordinary range of communications about the possible closure of Wright Library. Most people who have contacted me directly have simply expressed great disappointment that the library might close. Many have asked – as the Star did today – why we can’t wave some magic wand to keep the library open. Some have engaged in an almost obsessive analysis of every last dollar in the library budget to prove that Ventura is being short-changed. And a few have accused me of being part of a conspiracy to close the library.

All of these viewpoints are understandable as we work through our collective grief at the closing of a beloved institution. The last thing I want to do is close Wright Library, especially with five pre-paid years left on the lease with Ventura College. As many of you are aware, it has been a part of my family’s life for decades. My daughter -- now in college – grew up there from the time she was a toddler until she graduated from Foothill Technology High School across the street. My mother is still remembered lovingly by the Wright staff as a dedicated volunteer.

Unfortunately, for 15 years as we have struggled to keep Wright open, we have not reached a community consensus on how to deal with the most basic problem: If we are going to maintain our current level of library service, we will have to provide more money from our community to do so. Again and again, our community has expressed a strong wish to keep Wright open. Unlike many of our surrounding communities, however, Venturans have chosen not provide the augmented funding needed to keep it open.

And so now, with libraries as with so many other public services, we face a difficult choice. We have to live within our means. That means cutting back our library service to a level that will be financially sustainable for the next few years while we determine how to create a solid long-term foundation for excellent library service in the future.

Even though the underlying facts are grim, as Thanksgiving approaches I believe we have an awful lot to be thankful for on the library front in Ventura. Even if Wright closes as scheduled next week, we as a community are endowed with great gifts that can help maintain library service for now and create great libraries in the future.

First, we should be thankful for all of the people and organizations that have allowed us to have more than 40 years of continuous library service at Day and Telegraph.

Over the years, our community has benefited from the remarkable generosity of others in building and maintaining Wright. We must have everlasting thanks to Helen P. Wright herself and to Ventura College, which has agreed to forego the use of their property for more than 40 years so that Wright could be available to the public. In our thanks, we must also remember the remarkable efforts of the San Buenaventura Friends of the Library, not only for their heroic efforts in keeping Wright open this year but for their dedication day in and day out to ensure that all our Ventura libraries have enough money for new books. I’m thankful for the Ventura Auto Dealers Association, which provided almost $70,000 to bail Wright out one year; and my colleagues and predecessors on the City Council, who committed $50,000 to $100,000 several times (during a better economy) to do the same. Finally, I’m thankful for my colleagues on the County Library Services Commission, who agreed for more than a decade to provide subsidies from countywide and state funds so we could keep Wright open.

But now, tax revenue for the city, the county, the library system, and the state are all in decline and will continue to go down for the foreseeable future; all these government agencies are cutting back on everything from salaries to paper clips. Private donors such as the car dealers are struggling to stay in business, and the faithful Friends – after raising an amazing $100,000 in five months – are tapped out and exhausted.

Second, we should be thankful that we have E.P. Foster Library to fall back on – and we should be especially thankful that the City and private donors paid for a major renovation and expansion only ten years ago.

Yes, Wright is more centrally located than Foster, and parking is easier there. But the fact is that it is a third the size of Foster. Foster may not be in a convenient location for many people, but it is the only building we currently have that is capable of serving as a large, central library.

I don’t favor the alternating days idea. It was confusing and frustrating the last time we tried it, back in the early ‘90s. We will have two locations, which is more convenient for patrons, but many of our materials are unavailable to the patrons at any given time. And because we still have to operate both buildings, it doesn’t save that much money.

That means we have to consolidate library service in one location – at either Wright of Foster.

Close Wright in order to consolidate at Foster, and we can easily move all the materials, personnel, and programs (including the popular Paws for Reading) to Foster. We lose a convenient location, but we retain the guts of our library service. We have a solid foundation to build on in the future.

But close Foster in order to consolidate at Wright, and we lose most of the library materials located here in Ventura. Because Wright is not big enough to accommodate more materials, most of the books accumulated over many generations here in Ventura will be distributed to libraries in other cities. We lose dozens of computers that are in use from morning till night every day – a vital resource for our community at a time when so many people are looking for jobs. We lose the genealogy room. We lose the guts of our library service here in Ventura – and it will be almost impossible to rebuild it, ever.

So we should be thankful that our predecessors on the City Council, at the library agency, and at the Friends of the Library had the foresight, a decade ago, to expend more than $2 million in tax funds and private donations to renovate and expand Foster. A dozen years ago, when I was first appointed to the city’s Library Advisory Commission, many people wanted Foster torn down. It was old, cramped, poorly ventilated, and uncomfortable. But the second floor was opened up for public library use for the first time ever, and the entire building was renovated.. Now, we are able to consolidate our library service in a building that is in good shape – airy, comfortable, spacious. It’s far from perfect – it’s not a fabulous building, like Camarillo’s new library or even Oxnard’s downtown library – but we are lucky to have such a well-renovated library to fall back on in these hard times. The choices would be far more grim if Foster’s renovation had not occurred a decade ago.

Third, we should be thankful that Ventura’s libraries have dedicated funding of about $2 million a year that can’t be used for anything else.

The $2 million total is not nearly as much as we would like, obviously. But it’s $2 million that goes straight to the library agency for use in Ventura, derived from the property taxes that people in the Ventura area pay each year. This money can’t be diverted by the city or the county to any other use.

To my mind, what this means is that, if we consolidate library service at Foster, we have temporarily fallen back to a fiscally sustainable level of library service. Our libraries will have taken an enormous hit. But we will be in the position of saying that we are now living within our means, and no further service cuts are acceptable.

And fourth, we should be thankful for Ventura’s library advocates – strong, passionate, and giving – because we are going to need their brains, their passion, and their effort going forward.

The whole battle to keep Wright open has reminded us that Ventura is endowed with creative, passionate, and committed library advocates. This is our greatest community asset as we move forward and try to shape a strong future for libraries in our community.

The truth is that libraries are in transition, and we cannot be sure what they will look like – or precisely how they will deliver library services – in the future. Increasingly, the role of providing library services is divorced from the physical location of the library. So as we move forward we have to figure out how best to provide services in a cost-effective manner, and what type of physical locations are required for libraries and other community services.

Even as our library system has struggled with budget cuts, we have made tremendous strides in providing library services online. With a library card from your own computer, you can already access many databases that would be too expensive for individuals, and even download e-books and audio books. Soon, you might even be able to load your Kindle with an e-book at a library kiosk anywhere in town – just like going to the ATM.

But libraries are still important as community gathering places too. That’s why the loss of Wright is so huge to the surrounding neighborhood. As we move forward as a community, we will also have to make some decisions about the physical location of libraries. Should there by just one big one, as there is in Camarillo? Should we have many small libraries? Can we afford many small libraries – or should we combine library service with senior services, youth services, and many other possible services on a neighborhood level for cost-effectiveness?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I do know we will need all the brains, all the dedication, and all the passion we can must in the months and years ahead to figure out. And so the last thing that I am thankful for is the dedication and creativity of the people serving right now on our city’s library task force, who are charged with figuring out what the future of Ventura’s libraries will look like. If you want to know move about task force, you can contact Peter Brown at pbrown@ci.ventura.ca.us.

There is much to grieve over in the likely closure of Wright Library. But there is much to be thankful for in this community that has always been so dedicated to libraries – and, I’m sure, will continue to be in the future.

The Message From Last Tuesday

We have to try harder to live within our means. We know it will be painful. We’re trusting you – very cautiously trusting you – to make this work. And we’ll be watching you very closely.

As one of your elected representatives, that’s what I’m taking away from last Tuesday’s election results. I’m committed to taking this message from the voters seriously. All of us on the City Council must work hard to earn the trust of the voters every day. This is always true, but it’s even more urgent now. So over the next few months I hope to be out there in the community more than ever – at neighborhood meetings, service club luncheons, church services, and so forth – to listen to what you have to say.

Measure A, the sales tax measure, was soundly defeated – about 56%-44%. Although three of the four incumbents were re-elected, in general incumbent vote totals were down substantially from last time. Even the big winner of the night – former police chief Mike Tracy, who finished first – was not a runaway victor. Clearly, the voters have decided to put us on a short leash. (The county has yet to count several thousand votes, but I don’t see the outcome changing as a result.)

It would be easy for us, your elected representatives on the City Council, to chalk a lot of these things up to some factor beyond our control, and in so doing escape blame. The economy is in terrible shape. People are in a “Vote No” mood. There was a huge field of candidates. Turnout was very low, as it often is in these off-year city elections.

All of these statements are true, and each one of them played a role in how the election turned out. But we on the City Council cannot wish away the most important message from this election: We will have to work hard to re-establish as strong and trusting relationship with the voters who turned out last Tuesday.

The short-term will be painful. There is no magic bullet here.

We have already made a lot of cuts – eliminating 40 positions, cutting 10% of the payroll, reducing the budget by $11 million – but there will be lots more cuts to come. In the campaign for Measure A, the sales tax measure, we tried to be up-front about the fact that if the measure did not pass, we would be forced to close Wright Library immediately, eliminate our innovative roving fire engine Medic Engine 10, cut back on park maintenance, and possibly reduce our staff in both the police and fire departments. Now we will have little choice but make these cuts – and make them within the next couple of weeks.

Nobody will like this, least of all those of us you have elected to the City Council. But the results of the election suggest to me that there is a community consensus that this is how we should proceed in the short run.

In the longer term, hard times do provide us with an opportunity to rethink what we as a city government do and how we do it. We’re already done a lot of this, but we’re going to have to do a lot. And we on the City Council can’t do all this rethinking. We need your help in figuring out what to do.

Again, there is no magic bullet – no one thing that will solve all the problems, restore prosperity, suddenly free up the money we need to pay for all the things we want. There is, instead, more hard work ahead on everybody’s part – yours and ours. It will take a million little steps to get where we need to go. Obviously, we at City Hall must restrain spending as much as we can – and we must pursue responsible business growth as a way of increasing our tax revenue without increasing our tax rates. I’m committed to both those things, as I stated last summer when I wrote a blog laying out five points contained in what I called “The Ventura Covenant” (just scroll down to find it).

Voters shot down both Measure B (the height restriction) and Measure C (the big-box retail restriction) on Tuesday. A lot of this might have been because of the “Just Vote No” mood. But some of it may have been in response to arguments from the “No” side that we in Ventura need to foster business growth and these restrictions would have made it more difficult to do so. I think it’s important to bear in mind that the defeat of these initiatives will not magically solve our problems either.

We need appropriate infill development, as both sides of the Measure B campaign readily acknowledged, but given the state of the real estate business we’re not going to get much of it anytime soon no matter what we do. We need healthy retail growth as well, but the presence or absence of one Wal-Mart is not going to magically give us the money we need to restore our city’s basic services, nor cut the need for those services in a significant way. (Measure A would have raised about 10-15 times as much sales tax revenue per year as the pending Wal-Mart on Victoria will do.) And the retail economy is undergoing fundamental restructuring anyway. All of us are becoming much more cautious about how we spend our money. We are seeing more retail businesses go under, whether they are big chains or small mom-and-pops. Once again, no magic bullet.

So we’ll all have to work together to figure out how to use whatever emerging opportunities are available to us to restore our prosperity and, with it, our tax revenue. And we’ll have to make some hard long-term choices about what our city government can do. In some cases, we may be able to redesign the way we deliver services to the public so that they are both more cost-effective and more responsive to community needs. I think there’s some potential there, and I’m looking forward to working on it. But in other cases, we may simply decide that the city shouldn’t be in the business of doing certain things. Either others in the community will have to keep them going; or we may decide that will have to do without.

So that’s the challenge. It’s a challenge all of us in Ventura must address together. Obviously, without your trust, we can’t do a good job of operating a city government. But without your help, your ideas, your energy, we can’t successfully rebuild, restore, or redesign anything. The 7 of us on the City Council are your elected representatives, and therefore we are the lightning rods for your attention and, often, your discontent. But it will take more than 7 people to move Ventura forward. It will take 108,000 people. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with all of you as we take on the challenge.

One last thing about the City Council race: As I’m sure you know by now, the voters elected Mike Tracy and chose not to re-elect Ed Summers. I’m really looking forward to working with Mike. He’s a terrific guy who knows our community really well, and I think he’ll bring a lot of common-sense leadership to the council. But I’m very sad to lose Ed from the council.

Most of you know that Ed has been a great community leader for many years, and I believe that during his four years on the Council, we accomplished some important things with Ed’s help and leadership. I have especially valued his leadership and advice on business and economic issues. Many of the steps we took on economic development with Ed’s leadership will have a long-term payoff that will help us maintain both prosperity and a great quality of life. We will be thanking Ed for many years to come, but I wanted to take a moment here to say: Thanks, Ed, for all you have done – and, I hope, all you will continue to do – to make Ventura a great place to live.

Should We Put A Sales Tax On The Ballot This Fall?

Monday night (June 8th), the City Council will once again discuss the possibility of putting a sales tax on the ballot in November. I still don’t expect us to pull the trigger on this yet, but it’s looking more and more likely that we’ll do it.

At first blush this might seem like a crazy thing to do. After all, we’re in the middle of the worst recession in decades. Nobody wants to pay more taxes. And people are skeptical of government spending – the state measures all got creamed a couple of weeks ago.

But here’s the reality: We’ve already cut more than $11 million from our budget – that’s well north of 10%. We’ve eliminated more than 40 jobs. We’re dipping into reserves already to maintain current levels of police and fire services. Wright Library is at risk to be closed – perhaps permanently. We’re cutting way back on maintaining our parks.

And we’re not done yet. The state is threatening to “borrow” close to $3 million in property tax from us, and we might also lose our gas tax money, which is the major source of funds for paving streets.

The news from Sacramento will continue to get worse and many of our revenue sources will continue to be placed at risk. So I think it comes down to this: We can find more local revenue sources and control our own destiny or we can put ourselves at the mercy of Sacramento. That’s not a tough choice to me.

Of course, there are lots of ways to raise revenue besides raising taxes, and we must pursue them aggressively. But none of them will generate lots more money in the short run, and none of them will generate the amount of money we need to maintain our vital services.

Last spring, our blue-ribbon citizen committee recommended a four-year sunset on the sales tax. This makes sense to me. It will get us through this tough economic time, and it will also ensure accountability because a majority of the City Council will serve the same term.

In addition, I think we need to make a sales-tax ballot measure part of a broader effort to maintain our solvency, our public services, and our quality of life in a tough economy – especially if it sunsets in four years. Therefore, I believe that if the City Council places the sales tax on the ballot, we should do so as part of a larger strategy that contains five points:

1. Spend additional tax revenue only on vital services

We know what the core services are to our community. They’re things like police protection, fire and emergency medical response service, libraries, paving the streets, and keeping our water and beaches clean. If we put a sales tax on the ballot that requires only a simple majority vote to adopt it, the money can’t be earmarked in a legally binding way. But my colleagues and I can – and should -- commit ourselves to spending the money only on these vital public services.


2. Increase tax revenue without increasing tax rates

Practically speaking, this means bringing in more retail stores that generate more sales tax – as well as some other development projects (such as industrial and office development as well as high-end housing) that produce more tax revenue than expenses. This is a long-term effort that will require a lot of work on a lot of fronts, because there is no magic bullet here. (Wal-Mart, for example, would likely generate a net increase of between $500,000 and $700,000 in sales tax – a healthy chunk but a drop in the bucket compared to $11 million in cuts.) We must follow through on all of our action items from the Economic Development Summit in May; we must target and aggressively pursue the retailers we want; and we must continue to clean up our planning process so that projects we want can be approved more quickly.


3. Increase revenue from other sources besides taxes

The city provides a wide variety of services to applicants or individuals who benefit directly from those services – for example, somebody who wants to add a room to their house or somebody who takes a recreation program – as well as services that mostly benefit one group of people (for example, hillside weed abatement). In the last couple of years, we have moved more and more toward “full cost recovery” for these services – that is, having those who benefit pay rather than all the taxpayers. I agree with Councilmember Andrews that we must make a conscious effort to decide which of these services we believe should be paid for by those who benefit, and which should be subsidized by the city’s General Fund.

This can be a controversial exercise. Every time we propose creating or increasing fees for those who benefit, that constituency turns out in opposition to it, so we often back off. But that means we spend more money on those services out of the General Fund – leaving less for police, fire, libraries, potholes, and the rest.


4. Restrain future cost increases

Since we can’t count on the same level of economic growth over the next few years that we have seen in the past, we are going to have to work toward restraining future cost increases in all areas. We’ve already done this in many ways, ranging from eliminating positions to contracting out tree-trimming. We may have to do more. And the big unknown in this arena is our employee pensions. When the stock market drops – like now -- the city has to pay more money to cover the pensions of retired employees. Some of my colleagues would like to address the question of pension reform (for future employees only) now. I agree that the pension question is an important one that we must start looking at.


5. Save for a rainy day

Some 15 years ago, our predecessors wisely set up a reserve fund equal to 25% of the General Fund – enough to run the city for three months in the event of a natural disaster. Since then, we have maintained the same amount in reserves -- $12 million – but we have not increased that reserve proportionately with the General Fund. Right now that’s about 15% of the General Fund. We should consider retaining a bigger reserve fund – permanently held at between 15% and 25%. This could be simply a council policy or we could put it on the ballot as a charter amendment. We would also have to decide what the rainy day fund is for – just natural disasters or financial crises as well?

I am not sure how tomorrow’s council discussion will go. But this is what I would like to see, and I will work toward a consensus along these lines.

Recession In the Pocketbook, Depression In the Soul

To the extent that a politician ever gets a day off, mine is Saturday. Every week is a tough slog these days; in addition to the bruising council schedule, my day job is also demanding, and I often travel elsewhere in California late in the week.

This week I got back to Ventura at 8:30 Friday night after being gone since 5 o'clock Tuesday morning. I waslooking forward to my typical “day off” on Saturday – a trip to the Farmers Market, the dry cleaners, Target, Trader Joe’s. A day to feel like a typical person.

Here’s what happened:

At the Farmers Market, I ran into a devoted constituent who is very active in the library issue and talked to me for a long time ago different ways to keep Wright Library open. She was, by turns, angry, fearful, concerned, confused, and full of ideas.

On my way to Target I stopped off across the street at Fire Station #5 and chatted with firefighters about how the pending budget cuts might affect them. They were, by turns, angry, fearful, concerned, confused, and full of ideas.

While checking out at Trader Joe’s I talked with the cashier and an elderly lady standing in line about how bad the parking was and how much worse it might get if Wal-Mart moves in next door. Though opposed by many people for many reasons – including, apparently, this elderly constituent concerned about parking – Wal-Mart would appear to be one of the few vehicles for the city to obtain more revenue in the short run.

So it was not exactly a relaxing day off. I reconnected with my town and my constituents, but they are all understandably anxious that things are bad and getting worse. The things they cherish about their community – their neighborhood library, easy parking at Trader Joe’s, quick response times from firefighters and police officers – all seem at risk.

And all this is happening at a time when we are all afraid of what is going to happen to us personally. Will we lose our jobs? Will our wages be cut? Our health insurance? Will we ever be able to retire? I am very fortunate – I made a good amount of money, more than most people – but I am scared too. I feel at risk in my personal and business life just like everybody else.

The months ahead will not be easy. Starting tomorrow night (Monday), we on the City Council will start eliminating positions and possibly even laying people off. Over the next couple of months, we will be making even more severe cuts in city services – cuts that people will inevitably feel, even if we try to blunt the impact. We may well ask the voters for an increase in the sales tax. But even if it passes, that won’t generate enough money to restore all the services we have now. So we will be faced with terrible choices. Do we want to lay off police officers in order to keep the libraries open? Shall we close the parks or stop paving the streets? Shut down a fire station or stop servicing our vehicles?

Nobody wants to make these kinds of choices, whether it’s in government, in our private businesses, or in our personal finances. And it’s been very, very hard for all of us to face up to what has to be done. Whenever I’ve talked to people around town about making cuts in their favorite service, they’ve reacted all kinds of ways. Many have simply insisted this can’t be happening. Some have yelled at me. Others have insisted that there must be some other way – cutting back on paper clips, firing the overpaid top managers, cutting somebody else’s favorite program. Others have been combing through government budgets trying to prove that money is wasted. Many have suggested that I cut my own salary as a City Councilmember. (I’d happily do so, but that fat $7,200 per year is set in the City Charter and can’t be changed without a vote. By the way, it’s hasn’t gone up in 35 years.)

The truth is that at this point we could do all these things and probably the budget still wouldn’t be balanced. And, whether we like to admit it or not, next year’s going to get worse. Anything we save this year might only be getting a reprieve.

As I have talked to constituents over the past few weeks, I have been recalling the five stages of grieving laid out in Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s famous book On Death and Dying, which I first read in college more than 30 years ago. The five stages were meant to be applied to grieving over the death of a loved one (or one’s own mortality). But as it turns out, they can be applied to the grieving process you go through whenever you suffer any kind of loss. The recent loss of our prosperity – and the consequences for both our personal life and our civic life – means not just a loss of material things but also a loss of confidence and a loss of our sense of well-being. In dealing with constituents – and dealing with my own feelings about the current financial situation – I have come to recognize all five stages of grief, which area:

Denial: "This can't be happening, not to me!"

Anger: "Who is to blame?"

Bargaining: "I'll do anything for a few more years!"

Depression: "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?"

Acceptance: "It's going to be okay."

In both our personal lives and our civic life, many of us have been in denial. This library can’t be closing! A lot of people have moved on to anger, which is why I get yelled at so much. It’s all the City Council’s fault! Or it's the fault of the stupid library director, who should be fired! Many people are stuck there, but I notice a bunch of constituents moving on to bargaining. Let’s raise enough money just to keep the library open for a year, and then maybe things will improve!

Maybe because our city’s financial woes have been coming on for a while, I guess I feel like I have worked through those first three and right now I’m at depression. Things are awful. Why bother continuing to make them better? That’s how I feel a lot of the time these days.

But I also know that people have faced tough times before. I’m trying my best to move toward acceptance. Acceptance is liberating, because it makes you realize that some things are going to happen that you can’t control. We are less prosperous than we were a year or two ago. We will have less money to make things happen. This means we will have to endure some cutbacks; but it also means we will have to use the money we have more creatively, and come up with solutions nobody has tried before.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t hope things will get better – nor does it mean we shouldn’t campaign for a sales tax measure if the Council decides to put it on the ballot this year. But it does mean that, tax or no tax, we will have to pull together as a community, both to accept the loss that we are going to feel and to turn things around so our community is successful again. It’s hard to work through the five stages of grief in a situation like this. But people – and communites like Ventura – are very resilient. And that gives me hope.

Library Update

By now, everybody in Ventura seems to have recognized that we will have to reduce library service later this year unless we can come up with more money to pay for it. Thankfully, last Thursday (February 5th), we got a two-month reprieve from the Ventura County Library Services Commission.

Now comes the hard part: Figuring out what to do. By April 1, we in Ventura either have to raise enough money to keep both Foster and Wright libraries open full-time; or we have to agree on what service reductions we can live with. There may yet be a way out of this, but the truth is that the library situation is only the beginning. Our economy is so lousy that, this year and next, we will probably have to make hard choices on every single public service we enjoy here in Ventura. Sorry to be gloomy, but that’s the truth.

Our libraries are funded primarily by a small share of the property tax in the Ventura area that goes to the county library system. That’s about $2.1 million this year. In addition, the San Buenaventura Friends of the Library generously raise more than $100,000 a year; the city puts in $90,000 a year in federal funds for which only Avenue Library is eligible; and various other grants and bequests add a little more, so that we put about $2.5 million in. Unfortunately, it takes about $2.8 million to run the libraries at their current level, which includes 55 hours a week at Foster and 40 hours a week at Wright. Traditionally this shortfall has been made up by funds from the state or elsewhere in the county, but the Library Agency has a significant deficit too and can no longer subsidize us.

Most of our neighboring cities put additional money into the kitty to get additional service. Ojai has a parcel tax. Thousand Oaks and Camarillo provide huge contributions from their general fund (meaning millions of dollars). In Port Hueneme, private foundations and a small city contribution have provided steady supplemental funding. Other than the occasional last-minute bailout of $50,000 or $100,000, Ventura has never done this. And with a looming deficit of $10 million or more at City Hall, the city is not likely to start now.

Our wonderful San Buenaventura Friends of the Library have already started a fundraising campaign to try to raise the $300,000 to keep current service available for another year. In addition, the City Council is considering placing a citywide sales tax on the ballot later this year in order to raise funds to maintain vital services, including libraries. At the very least, I am hoping the Friends can raise enough money to keep Foster and Wright open full-time until a sales tax election can take place.

If you’d like to make a donation, write a check to “Save Wright Library – San Buenaventura Friends of the Library” and send it to the Friends at P.O. Box 403, Ventura 93002.

Meanwhile, our city Library Advisory Commission (different from the county commission) will spend the next month or so debate what the best options are for reduced service if the money cannot be raised.

As you all know by now, county library staff has suggested a consolidation plans that would include permanently closing Wright, moving the collection to Foster, opening Foster on Sundays, and possibly adding a children’s library at the Pacific View Mall and a large-print collection at the Ventura College Library.

Closing Wright makes sense in some ways, because Foster is much larger and can accommodate the entire collection, whereas we will lose the land lease on Wright in six years anyway. But Wright is a beloved community asset, which is more centrally located than Foster. And nobody wants to close a library.

So, at the City Council’s direction, the Library Advisory Commission will assess at least two other alternatives. One will almost certainly be to reduce hours at both Wright and Foster. The library staff has initially suggested this would mean Foster would be open three days a week and Wright two. Although this would keep some service at Wright, it would also mean valuable resources at Foster – including the 24 internet computers and the genealogy section – would be unavailable most of the time.

The Library Advisory Commission is planning several meetings to deal with this question. I will keep you posted as to when and where this will occur.

Sometime in March or early April, all these options will come back to the City Council for further discussion. By then we’ll know how much money the Friends have raised; we may know whether a sales tax election will be held and when; and the community will have debated a wide range of alternatives.

The Library Challenge

Tomorrow night, the City Council will hear a report from Jackie Griffin, the Ventura County Library Agency director, about her proposal to consolidate library services in Ventura. This proposal – which would involve closing Wright Library near Ventura College, moving its collection to Foster Library downtown, and expanding Foster’s hours – is obviously very controversial. I don’t think I heard from so many constituents even during the 911 fee controversy.

Let me talk a little about how library decisions get made; why tough decisions about the libraries in Ventura have to be made; and what some of the options are.


First, some details about how decisions get made:

This issue won’t reach resolution tomorrow night. The final decision-maker here is not the City Council, though the City’s views will be given great weight. Through a complicated power-sharing agreement between the county and the six cities that are in the county system, the County Board of Supervisors has the final say, but our county’s Library Services Commission, which includes one elected representative from the county and each of the six cities in the system, also has great influence. The supervisors can overturn the recommendations of this commission only on a four-fifths vote. The County Library Commission will meet on Thuresday, February 5th, at 6:30 p.m. in the Topping Room at Foster Library. (I have served on the County Library Commission for more than five years and I am currently the chair.)

Here in Ventura, we also have a City Library Advisory Commission, whose job it is to advise the Council on library matters, and so far the Council has not sought the advice of these local library experts. The City Library Commission is scheduled to meet next Tuesday night, February 3rd.


Second, let me move on to some of the factors that are forcing this issue now as well as some background on how the library system works.

Part of the crisis is, as advertised, a budget crunch. But it’s not just that the County Library Agency has less money than anticipated. It’s also that there’s a built-in tension in the way the county library system is put together, which has a particular effect on Ventura.

Some of you may remember that during the recession of the early ‘90s, library hours were cut extremely. Wright and Foster were open only 16 hours a week, and they were open on alternate dates. Other cities in the system were similarly affected. This occurred because the state shifted property tax funds away from the library system (and other agencies) to schools. (Our library system is funded primarily a tiny portion of the property tax dedicated to it.)

As a result, the cities in the county system forced a change in the way the county system was run. This “memorandum of understanding” (which established the County Library Services Commission and the 4/5ths vote requirement) was based on two fundamental principals:

First, the property tax collected inside each city’s service area should be spent in that service area. Our service area includes not just the City but also Montalvo, Faria and Solimar beaches, and a few other unincorporated areas. This generates about $2.5 million per year in revenue for Ventura’s libraries.

Second, each library should be open a predictable number of hours, depending on its classification. For large libraries, like Foster, that number was 55 hours hours a week. (For more than 80 years, Foster was the central library for the entire county.) For community libraries, like Wright, that number was 40 hours a week.

Ventura is the only city in the system with both a large library and a community library, and so therefore under the agreement we are guaranteed far more hours of library service per week than any other city. (Avenue Library, a “neighborhood” library, is operated mostly, though not entirely, through federal funds that the City of Ventura must spend in low-income neighborhoods like the Westside.)

To put it bluntly, the money we are guaranteed for libraries is not enough to keep Foster open 55 hours a week and Wright open 40 hours a week. Therefore, to maintain this service, the County has had to subsidize Ventura with money from other sources, including property tax from other unincorporated areas and state funds. As a longtime member of the County Library Commission I can tell you that this creates a great deal of resentment from our neighboring cities.

These funds are now diminishing, and it is virtually impossible to honor both #1 and #2 above, which are required under the memorandum of understanding. We have always known that sooner or later something will have to change.


Here are a couple of other background points about Wright and Foster:

The Wright building is owned by the City but it is on land leased from Ventura College, and the lease is up in 2015. I am sure as I can be that the College will not renew the lease and, in fact, would like to use the Wright building and/or the land sooner than 2015 because of their ongoing expansion. So, sooner or later, we will have to stop using Wright as a library.

At Foster, on the other hand, both the land and the building are owned by the City. The building was owned by the County Library Agency until 1999, when the City took title in exchange for $2 million in renovations and taking over maintenance of the building.

It is important to note that the 1999 Foster renovations were based on a rethinking of the roles of the two libraries. (I remember this because I was Chair of the City Library Advisory Commission at the time.) The idea was this:

-- Wright was intended to be – and is – a busy library where community members come in and check out books.

-- Foster was intended to have a different purpose. The 1999 renovations – paid for in part by private donations on the condition that it remain in use as a library – opened up the second floor, previously used for administrative offices. Though Foster’s longtime role as the central library for the entire county was abandoned at that time, it was intended to remain Ventura’s main library. The second floor housed a children’s library. The collection was not focused on checkouts but rather on reference books. And more than 20 Internet computers were put in for the public’s use.

In the last 10 years, Foster has not been heavily used as a children’s library. However, most of the other ideas in the 1999 plan have worked out. Wright has more checkouts than Foster, but that is partly because of the nature of the collection and the nature of the library. Foster has more reference books and more computer use, and therefore Foster has more patrons (that is, people walking through the door) than Wright.

As has been reported, the City has always assumed that, eventually, a large citywide library would be built at the Community Park. Wright could then be closed and Foster might be converted, at least partly, to a different use. We have some money set aside for planning and design of such a library, but no such planning and design has been initiated yet, so that’s a long way away.


Third, let me talk about some of the options we have.

County Library Director Jackie Griffin has suggested closing Wright and consolidating virtually all library services at Foster. I admit this does not make geographical sense. But it may make sense operationally. At 35,000 square feet, Foster is the only library building presently available to us that is big enough to serve as the community’s only library. At 12,000 square feet, Wright is not big enough to serve that role.

A number of people have complained that Foster does not have enough parking and that the homeless often linger in or around the building. It is true that Foster does not have a large expanse of dedicated parking immediately adjacent to the building, as Wright does; but there are several thousand parking spaces in downtown Ventura, including hundreds in the parking garage a short walk away. It is also true that Foster, like other downtown locations, does have issues with the homeless; but in the last 10 years block that Foster is on has become one of the busiest places in the city, so there are always lots of people around and many “eyes on the street”.

A second option would be for the city to subsidize library operations to keep both Wright and Foster open. In the past, the city has sometimes provided $100,000 toward this goal. But more is needed this year, and the City Council is in the process of figuring out how to cut $5-8 million from its own budget because of low revenue. City subsidy is not an option.

A third option would be to cut hours at both libraries in order to keep both of them open. This is what the county did back in the early ‘90s, and I can tell you that everybody in town hated it. Nobody could remember which library was open which day, and of course large chunks of the collection were inaccessible to patrons no matter what day of the week it is. Beyond that, this is a kind of “hunkering down” solution that assumes we can return to the current situation when things “go back to normal”. Given what I know about the inherent stresses in the library system, “normal” will not return. We cannot sustain the situation as it currently stands.

A fourth option that a number of people have suggested is to make structural changes at Wright and/or Foster that would increase the amount of library space available at Wright and convert some of Foster to another use. Some people have suggested that we cover the Wright patio to create more space. Others have suggested that we move library offices back into the second floor of Foster or even rent it out to private offices. Both of these ideas have merit, but they would require planning, design, time, and up-front funding that we do not have.

A fifth option would be to leave the county system altogether and try to make this work on our own. This is an understandable reaction, given everybody’s level of frustration. However, every analysis I have ever seen suggests that running our own library system would cost more than being in the county system – so we would simply be faced with the same set of choices. Moorpark pulled out rashly last year and has had nothing but difficulty trying to provide library service. Also, if we pulled out we would lose that part of our funding base located in unincorporated areas – especially the property tax from the Faria and Solimar beach areas, which provide several hundred thousands of dollars per year

A sixth option would be to find ways to ensure that East Ventura retains important library services even if Wright is closed. I personally do not want to close Wright if it leaves East Ventura without a children’s library, without large print books, and possibly without the popular fiction that is so popular among patrons. I think we need to find ways to make those services available in locations other than at Foster. I don’t know what all the options are, but I do believe that we might be able to work with Ventura College to provide some (though not all) of these services at their library. Some people have complained that they do not want to use the college library because parking is so limited; but again I think we could work with the college on that issue.

Also, a number of people have pointed out that the Wright building has certain important cultural assets, including a garden memorializing Johnny Cash’s first wife as well as some of the city’s public art. These are important considerations, but what happens to the Wright building is a different question than whether it is used as a library.


A closing thought

I realize that most library advocates might not agree with me, but I think we might want to view this as a “fortunate problem” to have. Ventura’s libraries have guaranteed funding of approximately $2.5 million. I know of no community service provided by the City that has such ample funding earmarked for it. The issue as I see it is not so much whether to keep a particular library open, but how best to use the resources we have to provide the best library service we can.

For many years I and other library advocates in Ventura have known that we have a difficult choice: We can have two libraries in different parts of town, providing suboptimal service, or we can have one really good library. We have always chosen the first. Other cities, such as Simi Valley, which are of a similar size and have similar financial resources available, have chosen the second. Because of the circumstances I have described above, we have to face this question sooner or later, so I am glad it has come before us now.