Sticking to the commitments of SOAR
11/12/2009
“I did support SOAR,” said Oxnard Mayor Tom Holden in an interview last month regarding the strategic urban growth initiative.
Of all the cities in Ventura County, Oxnard has exclusively and literally built itself a reputation for its urban development. From the developments of Seabridge at the harbor to RiverPark and the Collection off the 101, to the upcoming Oxnard Village project at the Wagon Wheel site, anyone familiar with Oxnard 20 years ago would not recognize it, or at least most of it, today. While the town is nearly perfect for development — flat land as far as the eye can see — it also has some of the most precious land in the country: fertile farmland.
With more than 6,000 farm workers laboring in the fields, many of them picking Oxnard’s cash crop — strawberries — the thousands of acres devoted to producing some of America’s best fruits, vegetables and nuts are highly valued. So much so that Oxnard officials agreed 10 years ago to help protect that land. In 1998, Oxnard residents voted on and passed the Save Open-space and Agricultural Resources initiative by a margin of 70 percent. City officials created the City Urban Restriction Boundaries (CURB) lines, which would prevent vital ag land and open space from being eaten up by urban sprawl. At the time, city leaders said they had enough land to work with.
However, a decade later, city officials are changing their tune. With a clause in the SOAR initiative that allows for CURB lines to be redrawn through the passage of a ballot measure, the City Council has now decided that needs to be done.
Following suit of two other SOAR-bound cities, Ventura and Santa Paula, which also had their lines redrawn for projects, the Oxnard City Council has placed on the ballot for June 2010 an amendment to the CURB boundaries that would allocate 460 acres of protected land for a massive residential development. And this decision was made in the name of climate change and affordable housing. The Del Norte Extension Area project would provide 500 affordable homes out of a total of 2,500 planned housing units, and land near the development could possibly be transformed into commercial real estate, providing jobs to nearby residents and cutting down on greenhouse gases.
The problem, though, is twofold. And it all begins at the ballot box. While Americans tout the democratic process as the most important freedom we have, putting planning decisions in the hands of voters, who, for the most part, have never planned or developed any kind of massive project, is inherently flawed. While we can’t change the process by which CURB lines are redrawn, those who decide to participate in the process should be well-informed before doing so. But there is no guarantee that any one vote equals an educated decision. Second, whenever a developer comes along, wanting to undertake some immense project, and all he or she needs is a “little” ag land to build out, any city council should be very wary of slapping an amendment to CURB lines on the ballot. By doing so instead of choosing from other possibilities, it invalidates what SOAR was set up for in the first place and the commitment that was made by city officials and residents years earlier.
While we understand that the issues of affordable housing and climate change must be addressed, we can’t help but wonder why other options weren’t selected and insisted upon first, such as infill projects and refurbishing older buildings. We understand there is a big price to pay for such projects, but there is also a huge cost to losing precious ag land and open space. And once ag land has been developed, there is no turning back. If developers don’t have any other option but to build where we say, while some may move on to other towns, there will always be some who will stay behind and work with what has been offered to them.
We stand by SOAR and what it means. We believe city officials and voters should stick to their commitment to preserve such invaluable resources, and that we shouldn’t allow developers to dictate what is done with that land — no matter what the financial pay off might be. We just hope that when SOAR comes up for renewal in 2020, intervening ballot measures passed by the voters won’t have destroyed the land we intended to protect in the first place.
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