The “Anti-Wal-Mart” Initiative

Last Monday, the City Council placed the “anti-Wal-Mart” initiative on the ballot for next November. Dozens of constituents had asked us to simply adopt the measure instead, but no one on the council made the motion to do so. I made the motion to place the measure on the ballot, and that motion passed 7-0..

Under state law, when an initiative’s proponents deliver enough signatures (in our case about 6,000 valid signatures from registered voters), we must either place it on the ballot or adopt it. I am generally not in favor of simply adopting an initiative. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is the fact that, for us (as for the voters), an initiative is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. Even if everyone agrees the measure could be changed or improved, we don’t have that option. If we adopt it, we must adopt it word-for-word as the initiative’s proponents have drafted it.

In the case of this initiative, I think it is important for the voters to have a lively debate over what our community’s goals are and whether this initiative helps us accomplish those goals. As with the VCORD height/view initiative (which will also be on the ballot next November), clarity about the impact of this initiative is very important.

I have not taken a position on this initiative and I have not yet decided whether or not I will take a position on it. However, I do think it’s important that everybody understand what this initiative will and won’t do. Many initiatives have unintended consequences that voters should know about.

This initiative prohibits any retail store of over 100,000 square feet from devoting more than 3% of its merchandise to selling non-taxable merchandise (i.e. groceries). That’s all it does. It does not name Wal-Mart or any other retailer, and it does not call out Victoria Avenue or any other part of town. It does exempt warehouse retailers such as Costco.

So, I think voters will probably want to measure this initiative against what they believe the city’s goal should be. Here are some examples:

If your goal is to prevent Wal-Mart from opening a store in Ventura, this initiative will not accomplish that goal.

We have heard from many people who don’t want Wal-Mart in town. But if this initiative passes, Wal-Mart could still open any store of any size in any location in Ventura. The only thing Wal-Mart could not do would be to open a “Superstore” – a store that’s typically 150,000 to 200,000 square feet and also sells groceries. Even if the initiative passes, Wal-Mart – which apparently has a 20-year lease on the old Kmart site on Victoria – could reoccupy that store or build a new store if it does not sell groceries.


If your goal is to prevent Wal-Mart or any other retailer from building a very large store on the Kmart site on Victoria, this initiative will not accomplish that goal either.

We have also heard from many people who fear more traffic on Victoria Avenue because of large retailers. But as I explained above, this initiative would not prevent a regular Wal-Mart or other retail on the Kmart site. Indeed, because of the warehouse store exemption, the initiative would permit a full-blown Costco on the Kmart site.

The City’s new Victoria Corridor code, scheduled to be adopted by the City Council in early 2009, will provide stronger protection than the initiative in this regard. The code will limit the size of any single store to 100,000 square feet, which the initiative does not do.


If your goal is to prevent very large retail stores from also selling groceries, then this is the initiative for you.

We have also heard from many constituents, including unionized supermarket workers and their supporters, who fear that a Wal-Mart Supercenter would undercut Albertsons, Ralphs, and Vons and cause the grocery workers to lose their jobs (which provide much higher pay and better benefits than Wal-Mart jobs). This initiative will make it impossible for Wal-Mart and other large retailers from building very large stores and also selling groceries.

Bear in mind, however, that if passed the initiative might affect other retailers as well as Wal-Mart. For example, the new Target at Pacific View Mall would not be permitted under this initiative. The Target is about 200,000 square feet and devotes about 6% of its square footage to groceries. If the initiative passed, Target would become a “non-conforming use,” meaning it would not be able to expand or remodel unless it conformed with the initiative – presumably by reducing the amount of square footage devoted to groceries. And no other store like it could be built in town, no matter whether it's a Target or anything else.

Clearly, the initiative’s proponents are hoping not only to prohibit a Wal-Mart Supercenter but also to discourage Wal-Mart. If a Supercenter is not permitted, the reasoning goes, perhaps Wal-Mart will not be interested in building any store in Ventura. It’s hard to know whether this will work, since Wal-Mart tends to get its corporate back up when challenged and has been very aggressive in fighting these ordinances throughout California.

And if Wal-Mart does not build a store in Ventura, it’s very possible that the company will build a Supercenter in Oxnard. This might make us feel good about having kept Wal-Mart outside our boundaries, but it will have other effects as well. Ventura residents are likely to patronize the store (apparently 20% of current Oxnard Wal-Mart shoppers are Venturans). This would mean that Ventura retailers would business to Wal-Mart anyway, even though there's no Wal-Mart in Ventura, and the City would lose all of the resulting sales tax to Oxnard.

As I say, I am not sure what position I will take on this initiative, if any. But I hope you can see that there are lots of issues that should be debated fully by the voters next fall.

The Metrolink Crash

Everyone in Ventura County is feeling grief and a sense of loss from the Metrolink crash along the Ventura County line in Chatsworth on Friday, which killed 26 people. Almost all the victims lived in Ventura County, mostly in Moorpark and Simi Valley. Our hearts go out to all the victims -- and especially to our two devastated neighboring communities.

Our hearts especially go out to the family of Dean Brower of Ventura, who perished in the crash. Dean, his wife Kim, and their three children are a wonderful family with very big hearts. I remember Kim from the years that she organized the annual Girl Scout appearance at the City Council (my daughter sometimes participated). You can read more about Dean's life in yesterday's L.A. Times story. You can also learn more about Dean and his family on the web site of their family business, Pulse Drumming. The story of their family is very heart-rending, which makes Dean's loss even more sad.

I'm feeling this loss in so many ways. Among other things, I ride this line pretty frequently, and I'm also Ventura's representative on the Ventura County Transportation Commission, which is one of Metrolink's member agencies. If you're a Metrolink rider, you might be a little skittish about getting back on the train, and that's understandable. But it's kind of like flying in an airplane -- overall, the odds of an accident are very slim. I plan to get back on the train on Thursday for meetings in downtown L.A.

As of today, Ventura has no train service at all. The Pacific Surfliner is not running north of Los Angeles, and Metrolink is terminating in Chatsworth, with buses to Simi Valley and Moorpark. Service should be restored by Wednesday or perhaps Thursday at the latest. You can keep track of the schedule on the Metrolink web site.

Friday's crash highlighted some of the operational difficulties in running a commuter rail system alongside a busy freight system in a regional where there is lots of single track. If you want to read more about this aspect of the situation, check out the blog I wrote yesterday in my day-job capacity as publisher of California Planning & Development Report.

Why We're Giving The Firefighters A Raise

As you may have heard by now, next Monday (8/4), the City Council is scheduled to approve a new contract with our city firefighters than includes both a raise and an increase in their pension benefits.

In such a bad budget year, I’m sure this will come as a shocker to most people. After all, this new contract will cost us more than $1 million per year. And I think I know what the reaction will be:

How dare they, especially after imposing the 911 fee?

They should be cutting spending, not increasing it! No wonder they need all that fee money!

The firefighters’ pensions are already pretty cushy!

It’s just payback to the firefighters union for campaign contributions!

All fair comments. But there are very good reasons why we are giving the firefighters a better deal – even in a bad budget year when we increased fees on lot of other things.

Most people think we’re just cutting the budget. But we’re doing more than that. At the same time that we are restraining spending, we’re also reprioritizing how the money is spent, so it goes to higher-priority items.

And the Fire Department is a high priority – one that is at risk if we don’t improve the compensation package. No matter what I or anybody else thinks about how good our firefighters have it, we’ve fallen far behind Ventura County, Oxnard, and Santa Barbara in both pay and pensions. In dealing with the future of our Fire Department, we have three choices:

-- Pay through the nose to merge with Ventura County Fire. Because the County pays better than the City does – and because they have no motivation to merge except on their terms – this would cost a fortune. The Fire Department currently costs us $20 million a year. Merging with County Fire would probably cost us $30 million a year.

-- Resign ourselves to being a “farm team”. We could not improve the compensation package – or we could even cut the pensions and salaries – but the net result would be a much lower-quality department. We might have to give up the requirement that firefighters be emergency medical technicians; and we’d probably lose most of our promising recruits to the county after a couple of years. In other words, our city firefighters would be younger and greener, kind of the like the ambulance technicians in town.

-- Invest some money in improving compensation in order to stay competitive. We don’t have to gold-plate our Fire Department to compete with the County. People like working for our Fire Department. All we have to do invest enough money that good people come to work for us and then stay. That’s what we’re trying to do with this new contract.

Earlier this year, we made a deliberate decision not to simply cut the budget across the board. We decided we were not going to sacrifice our goal of raising salaries and benefits in key areas where we knew we were far behind. Instead, we identified things the City couldn’t justify spending money on and eliminated those instead.

In other words, part of the reason we worked so hard to cut the budget this year was that we would have enough money for high-priority items like firefighter salaries.

Also – and I know a lot of people won’t believe me when I say this – we’re not using the 911 fee money to give the firefighters a raise. That money is reserved for hiring additional police officers and firefighters so that we cut reduce the response times to 911 calls. We didn’t even include the 911 money in the 2008-2009 budget. The money that we are using to provide the firefighters with a new contract is coming out of the money we already have – the increases in property tax revenue that we have obtained over the last year, plus the money we cut from other programs.

I wish all this were easier to accomplish, but it’s not. Remember that since I took office, we’ve faced a series of fiscal challenges.

First, we had to erase a $9 million budget deficit dating back to the 2003-04 fiscal year. We set a goal of balancing the budget in three years, then did it in two. And we’ve made tough cuts this year to keep the budget balanced even as our actual revenue has gone down.

Second, we had to add police officers and firefighters without the benefit of the sales tax revenue from Measure P6, which failed (with 62% of the vote!) in 2006. We used all of our 2007-08 property tax revenue growth to add the first group of officers. And we will use the 911 fee revenue to add many more, focusing on increasing response time.

We’re not out of the woods yet. It’ll be a while before the economy turns around, and we’re likely to see one or two more years of stagnant revenue in the meantime. And we all know that we have to work hard to get more revenue – especially more sales tax revenue – in order to stay competitive. That’s why we’re working so hard on downtown, on trying to bring retail back to the north end of the Pacific View Mall, on adding auto dealers at the auto center, and on targeting specific retailers we want like Best Buy.

But I’m proud of what we’ve done. I think we have our priorities straight – balance budget and have an outstanding public safety force – and I hope we can stay competitive in the future.

"I'm From Here"

“I’m from here.”

It is a very powerful thing when one of the most famous people in the world stands on a stage at the corner of Main and California, looking up at City Hall, and declares that he is home. That’s what happened Saturday night – the unofficial “Kevin Costner Night” in Ventura – when the hometown boy returned for a special premiere of his new movie, Swing Vote, a fundraiser at the new restaurant Watermark, and a free concert featuring his band, Modern West.

I thought it was a great day. The buzz from having a movie star in town was a lot of fun. Main, California, and Chestnut streets were all closed off to accommodate the activities, and an enormous stage was set up at Main and California facing uphill toward City Hall. Costner did a red-carpet walk across Main Street from the Watermark to the movie theater, stopping again and again to sign autographs – often in an old Buena High yearbook. When his band played, all of California Street turned into an outdoor amphitheater, with thousands of people standing, sitting, and listening all the way up to City Hall. You couldn’t move on the sidewalk during the concert; and afterward hundreds of people just hung around downtown, dining along the sidewalks and waiting for a glimpse of the star.

If you think it was all a bit too much Hollywood hype for Ventura, you’re probably right. We’re not used to burly bodyguards and velvet ropes and restricted access around our town. We’re not used to Hollywood entrances like Costner made, walking in the spotlight all the way from City Hall down the California Street hill to the stage, accompanied by music so grandiose you’d think it was the opening ceremony of the Olympics. (Not all was gold-plated for the star, however: Watermark owner Mark Hartley drove him from Main up to Poli in an electric golf cart – which stalled halfway up, meaning Costner had to make the rest of the climb on foot.)

And after all, the whole thing was just publicity for a new movie.

But so what? The movie’s pretty good. The band is better than you’d think. The Watermark is a fabulous restaurant. It was a nice warm afternoon and a beautiful night. And Kevin Costner – hometown boy – was as gracious and down-to-earth as his reputation suggests. He thanked his best friend, Ventura real estate agent Tim Hoctor, for putting the whole thing together. He recalled his days as a boy in downtown Ventura, attending Cabrillo Middle School and wondering what happened inside the big building at the top of the hill.

Not every city is capable of pulling off what happened in Ventura Saturday night, when our downtown was turned temporarily into a major entertainment venue featuring a world-famous star. I’ve always loved the fact that we are so good at special events in Ventura. Think of ArtWalk and the street fairs and the Music Festival, which fills venues all over town for more than a week, and the annual Hillside Conservancy concert, which turns Arroyo Verde Park into an amphitheater just as the Costner concert turned downtown into one.

We on the City Council spend most of our time grinding through the details of running a municipal government. How do we pay the police officers? How do we upgrade the sewer lines? Should buildings be two stories high, or three or four or five? When we inspect somebody’s building to make sure it’s not a fire hazard, do the taxpayers pay for that or do we make the building’s owner pay full freight?

These activities are the nuts and bolts of municipal government, and I’m not complaining that we spend a lot of time dealing with them. But Saturday night was a good reminder that a successful community requires far more than just water lines and sewer pipes and firefighters and building inspectors. A successful community requires thousands and thousands of people who are dedicated to making it a great place – a place where people put their money on the line to open new businesses, where they work together to create big events that we all love, and where they turn out in droves to see a world-famous guy who maybe sat three rows behind them in eighth-grade homeroom.

More once during the concert, I couldn’t resist turning around and just taking in the view of thousands of people lined up the California Street hill – loving the concern, loving the scene, and just loving being Venturans.

Ventura’s way better at this kind of community-building than almost any other city I can think of. That’s why I love being on the City Council.

Doing Things Differently

Monday night, the City Council undertook the first of what will presumably become a monthly event – a meeting focused entirely on planning issues. According to the protocol changes we made last spring – at the same time we switched the meeting time to 6 p.m. – we will now devote the second meeting of every month just to planning and community development.

After kind of whining in last week’s blog about how long our council meetings are, I have to admit that I was mostly to blame for the length of Monday’s meeting. Everything that the staff put forth was on the consent calendar, and we were done with that by 6:45. But Councilmember Summers and I had put forth two policy considerations. (Details below.) The first, dealing with a possible view task force, took 2 hours and 15 minutes, coming up till 9 o’clock. The second, dealing with building heights in duplex zones in Midtown, took about 45 minutes before it was tabled due to my conflict.

We’ll keep working on all this!

Moving Forward With View Protection

We’re moving forward with view protection.

Monday night the City Council voted 5-2 to accept a proposal by Councilmember Summers and me to give the General Plan policy on “public viewsheds and solar access” a high priority and create a task force to make recommendations on how to implement that policy. The task force is scheduled to come back to us in the spring

The vote was 5-2, with Neal Andrews and Jim Monahan opposed. Neal said he believes the council can deal with these issues individually at the plan and project level, as we did with the Midtown Corridors Code – an approach that has merit, and might be worth considering were it not for the pending VCORD initiative. Jim said he would have supported the idea if we committed ourselves to placing the resulting view protection policies on the ballot – something we still might do in the future, once we have an actual policy in place.

In the course of a discussion that lasted more than two hours, we also made a number of other changes and clarifications:

-- The task force will have 15 members, not 11. This did not change the composition of the task force but, rather, corrected a math error that Ed and I had made.

-- Instead of 3 members drawn from the old Vision Committee and Community Plan Advisory Committee, we will draw 2 from that group and 1 representative nominated by the Building Industry Association.

-- Both citizen and business representatives from different neighborhoods around the city will be appointed by the local Community Councils.

-- The committee will not be charged with specifically making recommendations on viewsheds and solar access for the Wells & Saticoy Community Plan, which is likely to come before the council prior to the task force’s recommendations; but East Ventura Community Council will nevertheless have two representatives on the task force.

-- The two public members and the two Vision/CPAC members will be nominated through the normal council appointments committee process.

The task force will report back to the council no later than March 15, rather than February 15.

One very important point is that we clarified that we are asking this task force not only to make recommendations on how to implement the “public viewshed and solar access” policy but also to suggest what those terms really mean.

There has been considerable discussion as to whether this policy means we intend to protect views (of the ocean, the hills, or whatever) from private property as well as public locations; as well as which public locations we should emphasize – for example, should we focus only on north-south vistas (such as along Seaward or California streets) or should we protect views from east-west locations along Seaward and Thompson, which would obviously require much more restrictive policies?

Neal called the fact that we charged the committee with figuring this out “a punt,” and in a way he’s right. This is a tricky issue that requires a lot of discussion – and in my opinion such a detailed discussion is better conducted by the stakeholder task force than by us. This is often the case on planning issues.

Having said that, I will say that in the Midtown Corridors Code, the council interpreted “public viewsheds” to mean the protection of views along the north-south roadway corridors. We also interpreted “solar access” to required stepped-back development on commercial parcels adjacent to the yards of residential parcels.

On Wells & Saticoy, Nelson Hernandez, our Community Development director, pointed out that if we wanted this committee to make recommendations on how to incorporate view/solar policies into the Wells & Saticoy Community Plan, we might further hold up approval of that plan. That plan has been in process since 2005, and we have already held it up several times to introduce additional issues for discussion. So we removed the Wells & Saticoy plan from the task force’s charge but retained the East Ventura Community Council members on the committee.

EVCC members at the meeting were understandably not happy with us for doing this. We will have to deal with view/solar issues in Wells & Saticoy when the Community Plan and the project-level Specific Plans (for example, for the Hansen Trust and Parkland properties) come before us. Dan Cormode of EVCC pointed out that the City Council may have to come up with our own definition of public viewsheds and solar access in those situations – possibly different from what the task force will come up with.

He’s right about that. As a trained city planner, I have to say that I wish we could stop the world from moving forward while we write our planning policies until they are perfect. As a politician, I know this is not realistic in most cases. Doing a Community Plan at the same time that we are doing Specific Plans in Wells & Saticoy has been an “awkward straddle” from the beginning, and it will continue to be so until we are done.

A lot of the discussion on Monday night revolved not around how the committee would be formed or what its charge would be, but whether the resulting policies should go on the ballot. VCORD’s representatives criticized us for attempting to “end-run” their initiative and for a “bait-and-switch”. Although they weren’t specific about what they meant by this, I assume that they think the end result is that we will place a completing measure on the ballot in November of 2009.

Meanwhile, Councilmember Monahan made it clear that a competing initiative was exactly what he was looking for. He asked two pro-business speakers if they would support putting a competing measure on the ballot; and indicated that he voted against the task force idea because it did not include a provision to place the resulting policies on the ballot.

I think the question of whether we should place our public viewshed/solar access policy on the ballot in November of 2009 is premature. Right now, all we are doing is creating a task force to make recommendations to us about what that policy might be. If all goes according to plan, those recommendations will return to us next spring and we can debate at that time what policies and code changes we should put into place.

If and when we put these new items into place, we can decide whether to place them on the ballot in November 2009 as well. But let’s take this one step at a time.

Oops!

I’m embarrassed. In the middle of the debate Monday night over the second policy onsideration on heights and solar access brought forward by Councilmember Summers and me – one that would slightly shave the building envelope for three-story buildings in certain Midtown location s—the city attorney reminded me that I had a conflict of interest.

The only properties affected by this change would be properties in Midtown with R-3-5 duplex zoning. I co-own a duplex on Anacapa, in the R-3-5 zone. My property would be affected by this change. If it passed, I would have less development potential than I have now.

Frankly, I assumed that because my development potential and hence my property value would be reduced by this change, it wouldn’t be a conflict. I forgot that it’s a conflict if your property is affected by a zone change at all, no matter whether the value is increased or reduced.

We had to take a time-out from the meeting while I declared my conflict and then the council tabled the item, which can be brought back in the future by my co-sponsor, Councilmember Summers, without my name attached to it.

I apologize to everybody, especially my colleagues, for the “rookie mistake”.