Planning Panel in Moorpark May Disband

Members of the Planning Commission in Moorpark, the county’s fastest-growing city, will consider disbanding because of frustration over what they call their lack of clout.

Concerned that they do not wield any real influence over planning decisions in the city, commissioners said they will meet next month to discuss the panel’s dissolution.

At a meeting last week, commission Chairman Michael H. Wesner Jr. called the panel yet another layer of government that increases costs to the city and to developers trying to get projects approved.

Wesner and other commissioners said they are particularly bothered by City Council responses to two recent commission actions--the commissioners’ approval of a paint-ball game site in a residential neighborhood and their recommendation against expanding Moorpark’s city boundaries.

“I’d like to bring it up as a future agenda item that we dissolve this body to help the business community” and to defray costs for the city, Wesner said at the meeting.

Each of the five commissioners is paid $100 per meeting, or up to $200 a month. The panel usually meets twice a month.

The four other commissioners agreed, scheduling a discussion for their March 2 meeting on whether the advisory body should cease functioning.

“It just seems like there’s a lot of Planning Commission-bashing lately,” Commissioner Steve Brodsky said.

However, City Council members said they have no intention of dissolving the panel.

“They make much more of a contribution than they realize, I think,” Mayor Paul W. Lawrason Jr. said.

Planning Commissioner Barton Miller pointed out that Port Hueneme recently became one of the first cities in the state to dissolve its Planning Commission.

“I guess if they can do it, we can do it,” Miller said.

But the termination of Port Hueneme’s Planning Commission was done under order of that city’s council members, who deemed the panel unnecessary because most of the city is already developed. The Port Hueneme commission will be dissolved in March.

Moorpark, however, far from being built out, appears poised to continue in its position as Ventura County’s fastest-growing city. Since 1980, the population has soared from 7,798 to about 26,000. The City Council is considering a set of proposals to add another 9,500 new homes, which could lead to a doubling of the population over the next 20 years.

Wesner said he was not concerned that it may be unusual for a rapidly expanding city to disband its planning commission.

“It’s Moorpark’s business to do what it wants to do,” Wesner said. The City Council appears to be duplicating all of the commission’s work on the current set of growth proposals, commissioners said.

The four men and one woman on the Planning Commission spent more than 40 hours during eight meetings late last year considering the growth proposals. The City Council is now holding its own series of hearings on the proposals, and appears not to be relying on the commission’s evaluation, commissioners said.

“It’s as if they had started all on their own without even looking at what we did,” Brodsky said.

Brodsky and Wesner said they were also stung that two City Council members publicly criticized the commission’s approval of the paint-ball game site before commissioners took their final vote on the project.

“I felt that was a direct tampering of our process,” Wesner said.

Lawrason and other City Council members said that they do rely on the Planning Commission’s evaluations of development proposals and that the advisory body is necessary for getting public input and ironing out technical details.

“Now wouldn’t be the time when you’d want to dissolve your Planning Commission,” Lawrason said.

But Lawrason said he sympathizes with the commissioners’ frustration over having no direct authority on development decisions. Lawrason and the other four City Council members are all former planning commissioners.

City Councilman John E. Wozniak said the City Council should take the blame for the commissioners’ sense of frustration.

“We give people absolutely no training when we put them there,” Wozniak said, adding that he thinks the commission should do long-range planning in addition to reviewing development proposals.

Wozniak also said he is not concerned that the Planning Commission review process increases the costs for prospective developers.

“Yeah, it costs the developers money,” Wozniak said. “That’s just the way it works.”