VENTURA : Officials Get Look at Marine Center Plans

Officials from the city of Ventura, the Ventura Chamber of Commerce and the Ventura Port District got their first look Wednesday at architectural drawings for a proposed marine education center at Ventura Harbor.

The center, including indoor and outdoor aquariums, would be topped by eight five-story copper domes, said Al Fiori, a partner in Rising Hawk Productions, the company planning the center. The bodies of the buildings will be a sand-like material, to remind visitors of the shore, he said.

“Conceptually, it’s absolutely awesome,” Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures said. “It will be a world center that’s like no other.”

Plans call for the facility to include an outdoor shipbuilding facility, the aquariums, fish hatcheries, an Imax-Cinemax large screen theater and a research center for Jean-Michel Cousteau, the son of oceanographer Jacques Cousteau.

The city of Oxnard unveiled plans in July for a 100,000-square-foot aquarium at Channel Islands Harbor, and a $16,000 study of the proposal is being undertaken. Richard Parsons, general manager of the Ventura Port District, said the competing proposal made Ventura officials eager to move ahead quickly.

Fiori made the rounds Wednesday to the City Council’s economics committee, the chamber’s land-use subcommittee and the Port District Commission, which owns the site on which the facility would be built.

Fiori told the economics committee that he needed another $30,000 to add to the $10,000 the city has already spent to fund planning for the project. The chamber subcommittee recommended contributing $3,000 of chamber money.

“It’s going to cost some sizable dollars,” said Measures, saying public and private funding was needed to build the marine center.

The City Council is scheduled to review the plans at 6 p.m. Monday, before its regular meeting, and decide whether to commit more money to the project, whose total cost is estimated at more than $5 million.