Panel Urges Freeze on Expanding Cities’ Boundaries

Capping nearly a year of debate, a committee charged with finding ways to save Ventura County’s farm industry finalized its recommendations Tuesday, calling for a freeze on expanding city limits until voters approve new growth boundaries.

The strategies proposed by the Agriculture Policy Working Group will now be presented to the county and its 10 cities for consideration and could wind up competing with the SOAR initiatives on the November ballot.

But details of how the moratorium, so-called urban boundary limits and other strategies would work--if local government decides to pursue the group’s proposals--remained unclear Tuesday.

“I look at the core proposals here and I have no problem,” said Camarillo Councilman Bill Liebmann, a member of the group formed by the county Board of Supervisors last year. “We get into it, and we see the devil in the details. . . . A lot of issues need to be addressed before my council would buy into the finished product.”

Supervisor Judy Mikels said the working group had strayed from its mission, but supported the recommendations anyway.

“I have some very grave reservations,” she said. “We started out to save the agriculture industry, not to become a land-use-by-initiative panel.”

Because any hope for consensus seemed to be fading fast at a working group meeting last week, a nucleus of members held an impromptu meeting Sunday and hammered out a more simplified proposal.

To ensure that the group presents an unified front, the full 25 members--including politicians, farmers, environmentalists and business leaders--then agreed Tuesday to release a two-tiered report: concepts it could unanimously support and other things many, but not all, members consider good ideas.

The working group plan now calls for a moratorium, to be enacted by voters through a ballot measure or by a vote of cities and the Board of Supervisors, on all future plans to expand city borders through annexation.

With money from the cities and the county, the Local Agency Formation Commission, the state panel with the power over local annexations and boundary changes, would then conduct a study to determine where the borders should be drawn. The border study could take as long as two years, meaning that the moratorium could be in place even longer.

Those borders, in turn, would then be placed before voters for approval. And once they were in place, the boundaries would last until they were changed by voters. The borders could only be changed once every 10 years.

Other recommended strategies include forming a special government district to acquire farmland, possibly with money generated by an increase in the sales tax. But that proposal would take several years to develop because it would require changes in state law.

Richard Francis of the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources movement, which wants to place a series of initiatives before voters this fall, said the working group had effectively tried to outdo SOAR, recommending a similar, but stricter, set of measures.

He vowed to continue pushing the SOAR initiatives. They too seek to place urban boundaries around Camarillo, Oxnard, Moorpark, Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley that only voters could alter. But unlike the working group plan, the SOAR boundaries would only be in place 30 years--and voters could change them at any time, not just once a decade.

A countywide SOAR initiative also seeks to take the power to rezone farmland and open space away from politicians and give it to voters.

“There is a certain amount of awe about what is happening here,” Francis said, watching the meeting. “But we’re not going to stop what we’re doing. Who knows what’s going to happen with this.”

Supervisor Kathy Long, who persuaded her peers on the Board of Supervisors to form the working group last year, said she will ask them to send the recommendations to the Ventura County Organization of Governments, which includes representatives from the county and all 10 cities. She also plans to ask the board to enact the moratorium rather than put the issue to a vote.

“This gets us to the starting point, to the real work,” she said.