The Evolving Saticoy & Wells Community Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you confused yet? Me too.

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

Hence the awkward straddle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 126/101 Connector

After I posted my Victoria Corridor blog last week, many people asked me just exactly why I thought the long-delayed 126-101 connector was off the table politically.

Most major transportation investments in these parts are controlled by the Ventura County Transportation Commission. That's a countywide entity created by the state to guide how transportation money in our county is spent. VCTC has 17 members -- all five county supervisors, one elected representative from each of the 10 cities, and two public members. Mayor Morehouse appointed me to be Ventura's representative in 2006. In addition there are two other Ventura residents among the 17 commissioners -- Supervisor Bennett and Keith Turner, our former county planning director, who is one of the two public members.

VCTC maintains a priority list of major transportation projects, and those projects get built as funding becomes available. This funding is typically from the state or federal governments; because we failed to pass Proposition B in 2004, we are the only large county in the state without a major local source of transportation funding, which means we must wait longer and lobby Sacramento and Washington harder to get transportation projects built.

The126/101 connector, which would take freeway-to-freeway traffic off of Victoria, is currently at the bottom on this list and there is no realistic possibility that it will be built in the foreseeable future unless something changes -- either we move it up the list and/or we pass a countywide transportation sales tax.

The politics of VCTC follows geographical lines. There is the West County, including Ventura and Oxnard; and the East County (Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Moorpark), and the Santa Clara Valley (Fillmore/Santa Paula). East County reps typically push hard for road projects and with considerable success. The Highway 23 widening in Thousand Oaks is a good example -- it was high on the list to begin with, and Congressman Gallegly, who's from Simi Valley, delivered a lot of additional federal money to make the project happen. It's now under construction. Another good example is the Lewis Road expansion in Camarillo -- supported by VCTC as a very high priority because it connects Highway 101 to the CSUCI campus.

In my view, West County concerns are often overlooked or outvoted at VCTC. This is not always true, but often it feels that way. So the politics of VCTC are stacked against the 126/101 connector. Countywide it is not viewed as a high priority.

Nevertheless, I do think it is probably worth revisiting this issue with our friends in Santa Paula and Fillmore and with Supervisors Bennett and Long (all of whose constituents must use Victoria) to see if we can lay the foundation to move the connector up the list in the future. But this is a long-term effort.

The Victoria Corridor

Last night, the City Council allowed the one-year moratorium on commercial development along the Victoria Corridor to expire. We voted 6-1 to move the Victoria Avenue Corridor Plan forward to the environmental review stage and 5-2 to draft an urgency ordinance subjecting large retail projects – new and remodeled stores of 50,000 square feet or more – to conditional use permits under the Corridor Plan is adopted. (The draft Corridor Plan can be found at http://www.cityofventura.net/newsmanager/templates/?a=1698&z=43.)

The urgency ordinance will surely ensnare Wal-Mart if they come in for a project on the K-Mart site before the Corridor Plan is adopted. This didn’t make the business community very happy (and it’s why Councilmembers Andrews and Monahan voted against it).

This was a joint meeting with the Planning Commission and it went well. Frankly, I was pretty surprised that we were all so close to being on the same page – and I don’t just mean the City Council but business interests and citizen groups as well. I was prepared for the worst. We’d gotten a lot of emails in advance in response to the story in the Star that focused on the possibility that we might limit through traffic on Victoria to three lanes rather than four. (http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/ve/article/0,1375,VCS_251_5311777,00.html)

Also, I knew the anti-Wal-Mart crowd would be out in force (http://www.coastalalliance.com/) and I feared that the Chamber of Commerce would come out and suggest that the proposed plan was wildly unrealistic.

The new plan does call for some significant changes. It has an extensive set of proposed streetscape improvements that would create a more boulevard feel. It would also alter our approach to private building regulation to create a more urban feel, with, among other things, buildings up closer to the street (once Victoria has been “tamed”) and a form-based code. Through traffic would be limited to three lanes, with the fourth lane devoted to a “slip road” serving businesses and buildings along the side. One real estate broker I ran into on the street said she thought everybody at City Hall was smoking crack, and a Victoria Avenue commuter wrote us to tell us that he thought that this was the most idiotic idea he had ever heard.

That’s not what happened at the meeting. The consulting planners gave us three choices for what to emphasize on the corridor in the future – neighborhood infill (mostly housing), town center (heavily retail), and workplace (mostly office). We green-lighted the workplace scenario, as the staff recommended, adding some retail components at least to analyze in the EIR. The idea is to create a Class A office district that can compete for Class A tenants. But we don’t want to just create a bunch of nice office buildings. Along the way we want to create a “place” along the way that has some retail and other services for employees and residents in the area. I personally think that’s the only way you’re going to win the competition for high-end office users and high-wage jobs in the years ahead.

The anti-Wal-Mart folks, while clearly still focused on their goal, have changed their name from “Ventura Stop Wal-Mart Coalition” to “Livable Ventura,” and they are trying to fuse some of our quality of life goals to their social equity agenda about Wal-Mart – but they supported the direction the plan was going in. The Chamber folks – though by no means showering us with universal praise – nevertheless liked the workplace alternative. (They had prepared a stinging white paper criticizing all the ideas contained in the neighborhood infill alternative, only to be deflated by the fact that the staff recommended that it not be adopted.) Chamber Chair-elect Ted Cook was very gracious in suggesting that we have made progress.

There was a lot of skepticism from many quarters, of course, over the idea of redesigning Victoria as a boulevard and limiting it to three through lanes in each direction. Many people want to jump to the conclusion that this will create further bottlenecks on Victoria, especially for commuters who go to the government center from out of town.

I’d rather wait and see what the EIR says. The one thing we know for sure is we can’t keep doing what we’re doing on Victoria. We can’t make it any wider than it already is, so we’re going to have to find a different way to operate it. And it already functions as a kind of 3+1 street already, with the fourth “through” lane serving mostly as a local turn lane. So we’re going to have to do something, and it will likely be something along the lines of what’s being proposed.

Our Public Works Director, Ron Calkins, was asked to make some “on the spot” guesses as to how the more formal 3+1 boulevard approach might affect traffic flow. He said the 3 through lanes would probably flow better, but the 1 local lane probably would flow less efficiently. Overall, he guessed that 2025 Level of Service would drop by one grade from what it otherwise would be – meaning most of Victoria would be a B or a C instead of an A or a B (I think that’s what he said).

Most members of the council said, in one way or another, that they believed the Victoria re-do would have to be accompanied by other traffic relief on parallel corridors. Jim Monahan voted against my motion to move forward with the Corridor Plan because he wanted language saying that we should beat on Caltrans’ door to get them to finally build the 126-101 connector so trucks don’t use Victoria to get from one to the other. (I’m sympathetic but, as a member of the County Transportation Commission, I know that the politics aren’t right for this anytime soon.) Neal Andrews and others talked about the possibility of widening Johnson Drive (requiring the taking of private front yards north of Bristol) or another river crossing at Montgomery or Kimball (this last would require a SOAR override vote).

I suggested that, in planning for the long term, we work with commercial landowners on the west side of Victoria to create a new north-south street from Telephone to Moon. Most other councilmembers liked this idea and the staff agreed to analyze it in the EIR.

Planning Commissioner Martin Johnson made the suggestion that a re-do of Victoria might only be triggered by the creation of an alternate route. I guess my feeling is (1) we’re going to have to do an alternative route no matter what, and (2) I haven’t seen the numbers yet on whether a boulevard approach will really harm the Level of Service on Victoria.

But back to Wal-Mart. (You didn’t think I was avoiding this issue, did you?) Not surprisingly, the Chamber’s Ted Cook said the interim CUP requirement on big retail was essentially extending the moratorium. I don’t agree with that – but I do agree that the biggest question along Victoria, after the road configuration, is how to handle retail. The “workplace” scenario assumed no large-scale retail, but of course there are several large retail sites along Victoria and Wal-Mart has its eye on the Kmart site.

Inevitably, the first – and maybe only – large retail project that will go through the interim CUP process is Wal-Mart. That’ll obviously be fought largely over social issues, with Livable Ventura determined to keep Wal-Mart out and the Chamber determined to bring Wal-Mart in. But the interim CUP requirement will also allow us to take a look at what the effect of a new large-scale retail project will have on the Victoria Corridor and whether we think, on balance, it’s a benefit to the overall Victoria strategy. That’ll inform the whole Corridor Plan and help shape how much retail – versus high-quality office space – will be created in the area.

Yet another plan that will be back to us later in the spring. And of course Wal-Mart might now come along with a proposal that will trigger the CUP. Stay tuned.

More on Midtown

I finally watched the tape of the January 17th council meeting, which I missed because I was traveling on business, and I have also caught up on what people wrote to me and other councilmembers afterward about the proposed Interim Code for Main and Thompson in Midtown. (The staff report and proposed code can be found at http://www.cityofventura.net/newsmanager/templates/?a=1645&z=43. I don't think the streaming video is up yet.)

As Mayor Morehouse said at the meeting, I was proud of everybody for engaging in such civil dialogue. Many good points were made on all sides. I thought Dave Sargent, our Town Architect, did a great job of presenting facts and articulating his views -- and doing it in a matter-of-fact way without being preachy. I also thought Jack Schaffer, the newly appointed chair of our Historic Preservation Committee, did a good job of using visualizations to show what the impact of new development (of all types, not just three stories) might have on hillside views from certain perspectives in Midtown.

The staff and the consulting planners are now going back and taking a more a surgical approach toward the code, examining in a bit more detail where different heights might be appropriate, along with possible changed standards (such as setbacks) that might help out.

Although some folks, including my good friend Camille Harris, continue tohave strong feelings about anything over two stories in the Interim Code, I saw quite a variety of points of view on the tape and, in fact, the communications we received after the meeting were much less harsh and open-minded about possible solutions than the communications we received before the meeting. Which usually means a well-run meeting.

Stay tuned!

Midtown

First, an apology: I won’t be at the meeting on Wednesday. As many of you know, my job requires me to travel frequently. (Being on the city council pays $600 a month plus another $200 for expenses, so I need a job.) I try to schedule my travel later on in the week and especially on weeks the regular council meeting does not occur (which was the case this week). Many months ago, assuming the council would not meet at all this week, I scheduled a course on land-use planning for 40 midcareer professionals at UC Davis Extension in Sacramento for this coming Thursday and Friday. I have to unlock the door to my classroom in Sacramento at 7:45 a.m. on Thursday. Experience has taught me that you can’t attend a night meeting in Ventura and be in Sacramento at 7:45 a.m. the next day.

However, remember that Wednesday’s meeting is just the first airing of the ideas in the Midtown Code Actual approval is months away. l will watch the tape of the meeting and communicate my comments to the staff.

I love Midtown. I live on Anacapa Street near Main and I used to live on Santa Ynez near Thompson, right next door to Camille Harris. There is no question that Midtown has a distinctive character that we all want to maintain, even as we recognize that some new development is going to occur and some change is going to occur.

The city will work with the Midtown community to undertake a Midtown Community Plan in 2008. The proposed code is a stop-gap measure, applying only to Main and Thompson, to get us closer to what we want in the short-term until the Community Plan is adopted. As we learned at 1570 E. Thompson and in some other recent projects, the current code is woefully inadequate in ensuring that we get the kinds of projects that will be a benefit to our neighborhood.

Before I make some specific comments, I want to make one more thing very clear. All too often, planning decisions are reduced to “yes or no” on one idea, or else they become fixated on abstract number – 8 units an acre versus 6, or 2.5 parking spaces per unit versus 2.0. When the discussion is framed this way, it is not surprising that things become confrontational. Developers want the higher number and neighbors want the lower number.

But planning a neighborhood should be about far more than just a high number or a low number. There are so many things that go into making a good neighborhood – architectural design, the scale and massing of buildings, what the streetscape is like, how people get around, how parking is handled in the neighborhood, what kinds of businesses go into the new buildings, how different buildings, parks, schools, etc., are connected to one another. Planning our neighborhoods is a more subtle process that requires a wide-ranging discussion of all these things, rather than just a focus on higher or lower numbers.

This is one of the reasons I pushed for Community Plans in Midtown and elsewhere, and I am looking forward to the Community Plan process. The interim code will get us part of the way there, but not all of the way. It will deal with some issues and not others. It is focused on the short-term, not the long term. Planning a neighborhood is an evolving process.

This is a new kind of code – really the first form-based code that has come before us. It’s very different from the conventional code, which specifies height limits and setbacks and what-have-you, but otherwise focuses on “use” – what goes on in the building.

This form-based code does contain similar broad parameters, such as building height. And it does prohibit some uses in a new and useful way, such as auto repair. But beyond that it focuses on building design and context. There’s a typology of different kinds of buildings, often with pictures, so we can visualize what these buildings might look like.

With that in mind, let me address a few of the specific issues that the


Building Height and Views

I have argued for many years that most additional density in Midtown should be created on the edges of the neighborhood (along Main and Thompson) and not in the middle of the neighborhoods.

The interim code addresses only the commercial strips and not the interior of the residential areas.

I believe residential buildings in the interior of the neighborhoods should be limited to two stories. I live almost catty-corner from the 3-story outbuilding now being constructed at 60 Anacapa. I think this building is extremely well designed for what it is, but I think it would probably be better if we limited heights in the interior of the residential neighborhoods in Midtown to two stories.

The tradeoff for this, however, might be taller buildings on the commercial strips. Current code permits up to 6 stories in many parts of Midtown and up to 3 stories in others. Furthermore, the General Plan anticipates greater densities and mixed uses along the corridors as a critical part of our infill-first strategy, which was created in part in response to the city’s previous actions to protect both farmland and hillsides from development. This approach has the advantage not just of protecting open space but also bringing new investment and new life to these older commercial strips, which are having an increasingly difficult time finding their place in today’s market.

The City Council has green-lighted a number of 3-story projects in Midtown in the last couple of years, including the large project at 1570 E. Thompson and a project at the Café Scoop site across from Ventura High School. Throughout Southern California, the economics of high-density housing and mixed-use have generally required 3-story buildings in recent years. Whether you like it or not, if you want to upgrade the commercial strips and provide new housing in Midtown, it would appear you need 3-story buildings to do it.

The draft interim code calls for a 3-story height limit on both Thompson and Main, with two exceptions. Development would be limited to 2 stories along Thompson and the north side of Main in the westernmost part of Midtown, and 6-story buildings would continue to be permitted around Five Points.

In recent weeks, the Bungalow Neighbors have raised the issue of whether hillside views would be blocked by 3-story buildings, and some people have advocated a ban on 3-story buildings in the interim code as a way of protecting views. I have been thinking a lot about this in recent weeks as I have traveled around Midtown. It’s true that our community is framed by the hillsides, the ocean, and the rivers. The feel in Midtown is especially intimate since the hills are so close. And it’s also true that we have not always done a good job in Ventura of protecting views.

But on the issue of views, where you stand depends on where you sit. In many parts of Midtown, a one-story building will completely block your view of the hills from the commercial corridors – in fact, this is already the case in many places. In other parts of Midtown, a three-story building would not block the view, or at least not obstruct it completely.

In other words, the issue here is not whether we should permit 3-story buildings or not, but how we can best shape the future of Midtown – short-term and long-term – to create the community character that we want to see. There are many aspects to this community character – street frontage and setbacks, architectural design, quality of construction materials, landscaping, and views of the hillsides are well.

As the interim code evolves over the next couple of months, I would suggest that we should frame the issue as how to pursue those values, both in the interim code and in the community plan, rather than a yes-no on whether we should permit 3-story buildings. I am frankly not sure how to do this, especially in the short run. In the last few days, a number of ideas have been kicked around for the interim code – adding a required viewshed analysis for 3-story buildings, creating an overlay where 3 story buildings are only permitted with special approvals, requiring additional setbacks for taller buildings in order to protect views, and other similar ideas. I favor exploring these ideas to see if there is some way to frame the discussion as how to protect important community values, including hillside views, rather than a yes or no on a certain building height.

As for Five Points, I am not sure I favor 6-story buildings. But I do think there is a pretty good argument for taller buildings in some locations in Five Points, for two reasons. One is that the “triangle” is not immediately adjacent to any residential neighborhood. The second is that, on the north side of Main Street, the medical district already features several buildings of 4 stories or more, including Community Memorial Hospital. This is an obvious place to create a stronger commercial center with some additional housing. I am not sure I favor tall buildings on all parcels (for example, I don’t think the Borchard shopping center is a good location because it is adjacent to a one-story neighborhood and I have the same concern about some of the parcels on the north side of Main Street beyond Five Points), but I think selected taller buildings is worth considering – especially if the type of mitigating measures I describe above (additional review, additional setbacks, etc.) are put into place.


Building Setbacks

Building setbacks are just as important to maintaining community character as building heights

Typical of a form-based code, this code creates a building typology and provides different standards, including different street setbacks, for different types of buildings. One type of building, for example, is called “Shopfront,” and would require zero setback from the sidewalk. Other building types are residential in nature and would require varying setbacks. Many building types are required in each zone, although not all building types are required

This is all to the good. But this might require a little tweaking. We have a variety of setback situations along Main and Thompson. Some portions have a more residential character, more a kind of “Main Street” commercial character. It seems to me that, as it is currently written, the draft ordinance might allow different building typologies with different setbacks immediately adjacent to each other.

The planning staff has told me that they are aware of this potential problem and they are going to work on some tweaks, especially in the proposed two-story area around the island streets.


Parking Ratios

Just as important as building height and building setbacks is parking ratios. The assumption behind the code here is that traditional parking ratios are too generous and can be reduced; and, beyond that, that when uses are mixed parking can be shared, so that a business can use parking during the day while residents use the same parking spaces at night.

There is always a lot of pressure from neighbors to provide as much parking as possible. But parking is very, very expensive to provide. Indeed, I would guess one of the main reasons why developers want to build three stories instead of two. A typical infill development model is to build ground-floor parking (underground parking is too expensive) with two levels of dwelling units (either townhomes or condos) above it. Ironically, the more parking a developer is required to provide, the more likely that developer is to want to build a tall building.

The draft interim ordinance calls for a parking ratio of 1.5 parking spaces per unit on the commercial corridors. This is lower than the current parking ratio. (There is a typo on page 19 of the draft code, which says that the ratio is 1.0. It is correct elsewhere.)

I support this change. There is no question that, in the interim, we still need ample parking in Midtown. It is not yet what the planners call a truly “transit-rich” environment. Every adult who has a license will also have a car. I think it is reasonable to assume that new projects in the corridors will be more or less evenly split between households with 1 adult and households with 2.

However, I have generally opposed parking variances in Midtown and elsewhere because I believe developers should be held to code, especially on parking. If we do set the parking ratio on the commercial strips at 1.5 spaces per unit, very likely I will vote against all requests for variances that would permit further reductions.

Of course, merely reducing the parking ratios will not create a permanent parking solution for Midtown. The main reason I pushed for a Community Plan in Midtown is to deal with the parking issue once and for all. My argument was that radically cutting parking ratios without also devising a neighborhood-level overall parking strategy probably would not work. You can cut parking ratios some, but you can’t cut them dramatically without an overall plan for exactly how shared parking and pooled parking at the neighborhood level is going to work. I look forward to this debate in the Community Plan.

The Star site on Ralston

Last night I joined the 4-2 council majority in denying a General Plan pre-screen request to change the land use designation on the Ventura County Star site on Ralston from industry to commerce. The vote came on the motion of Councilmember Andrews, who once again eloquently defended the need to reserve as much land as possible in the city for non-residential development.

I can see already that this will be cast by our critics as yet another example of either (1) our anti-development bias, or (2) the mixed messages we sent to developers. In my view, it was neither. Rather, it was a vote in favor of maintaining the integrity of our General Plan, which we passed less than 18 months ago.

In spite of what has been reported in the press and elsewhere, we did not "deny a rezoning" nor did we "turn a project down". Rather, we properly used the General Plan pre-screen process to indicate that we were not favorably disposed to a mostly residential project on this site. The whole idea of the pre-screen is to give early signals to developers as to what kinds of General Plan Amendments we might or might not view favorably.

When we passed the General Plan in 2005, our discussion included several factors relevant here:

1. Based on real estate market research, we concluded that we do not have enough commercial and industrial land in the city to meet future needs; therefore, we made significant statements that we should reserve industrial land in particular for future job growth.

2. We decided to target new infill efforts in specific focus areas -- downtown, for example, and Wells-Saticoy. Ralston was not one of those areas.

I think what happened last night was a majority of the council concluded that there was no reason to back off of either of those General Plan conclusions.

The Star site is 8 acres in between Ralston and the 101 freeway near the police station. It is an extremely underutilized parcel to begin with -- an outmoded 40,000-square-foot building on a 350,000-square-foot site. The Star, which built a new facility in Camarillo some years ago, is vacating the site in March.

The new owners, Sheridan Ebbert Development of Sylmar, came to the city for a pre-application meeting in late 2005 with an idea for a number of small office/industrial buildings. This would have been permitted without a change in the General Plan designation of the parcel. Eventually the owners changed their mind and began to craft a project that would be mostly housing. This required a change in General Plan designation from industry, which permits only live-work units as a second use, to commerce, which permits straight-up residential-commercial mixed-use.

The applicant then used our General Plan pre-screen process to come to the council with a request to change the General Plan designation. This action was initiated by Sheridan Ebbert and it is not without some risk. If we turn a pre-screen down, an applicant can't come before us again for a year. The staff suggested the possibility of changing the General Plan designation of the northern part of the site along Ralson to commerce while leaving the southern part of the site, near the freeway, as industry. However, the staff made no recommendation one way or the other.

It is very tempting to allow the General Plan to be amended whenever a landowner or developer comes along and requests it. But this process undermines the whole idea of a General Plan. This happened repeatedly in Ventura during the 1990s. As a result, the General Plan's credibility was gradually eroded until the ideas in the plan had no meaning to anybody. This lack of credibility was one of the reasons the public could not buy in to that General Plan -- and one of the reasons we saw so many ballot initiatives on land use during that time.

As I said above, in the General Plan we decided to reserve most industrial land for jobs and focus mixed-use and housing in certain centers and corridors elsewhere in the city. Last night, there was no compelling reason to devite from those two policies just because a developer came along and asked us to.

In the material it presented to the Council, Sheridan Ebbert stated that its original office-based development project wouldn't pencil out because costs were too high and rents were too low. In my experience, what this usually means is that the developer paid too much for the land.The Star site is a prime site and over time it will emerge as an excellent location for good jobs.

Sheridan Ebbert did attempt to make the argument that the location would make excellent workforce housing. I don't disagree that the Ralston corridor is a good location for workforce housing. It is adjacent to housing of various densities and it is located in extremely close proximity to lots of jobs and lots of day-to-day retail. But there was no guarantee from this proposal that the people who work in the area would actually live in the housing. If Sheridan Ebbert returned with a large employer like the County in tow, with an iron-clad guarantee of workforce housing, that might create a more compelling argument to deviate from our General Plan policies.

Sorting Things Out in Wells-Saticoy

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

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

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

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

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

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