Blissful Silence Greets Plan to Provide Santa Paula With More Room to Grow

SANTA PAULA —  In 1992, Santa Clara Valley residents fought plans to build the $54-million Todd Road Jail on a 157-acre lemon orchard east of Santa Paula.

The jail was built on the orchard, smack in the middle of a long-established greenbelt.

Last year, they fought and lost again, in a battle against an expansion of the Toland Road Landfill, midway between Santa Paula and Fillmore.

They see the dump and the jail as two more signs of gradual development that will hurt agriculture and detract from the region’s rural atmosphere.

Now Santa Paula wants to acquire more than 11,000 acres of surrounding countryside for potential development--a move that could result in an almost four-fold increase in the community’s size. It might be expected that residents and farmers would again decry encroaching urbanism as a threat to their way of life.

But so far that hasn’t happened.

With the first in a series of monthly meetings on the annexations scheduled for today, no opposition has surfaced.

Instead, city residents and farmers in the surrounding area praise the city for an open process that encourages debate.

“It all boils down to good planning,” said Doug Nelson, an architect and farmer who grows 85 acres of citrus and avocados near the landfill. “In the case of the jail and the landfill, I think I can safely say the agricultural community was not approached about the planning process and were not really given a chance to be involved in the planning process. . . . If we have a good plan that encourages quality projects, we can avoid mistakes and we would consider the landfill and the jail to be mistakes. They are the wrong projects in the wrong locations.”

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Intent upon not making the same mistakes, the city gathered a lot of input from residents during the last few years, giving residents a proprietary attitude toward the expansion, said Dan Pinkerton, whose 100-acre Happy Talk Ranch is located in Adams Canyon.

The 6,000-acre canyon has the highest potential for large-scale residential development. But Pinkerton doesn’t necessarily see that as a threat.

“Does Adams Canyon have development potential?” he said. “Certainly it does. Has it been well advertised that this is one of the areas they’re looking at? You bet it has.”

The possible expansion is part of the city’s effort to update its General Plan, essentially a blueprint for future development. Ideally, such plans are updated every five years; Santa Paula hasn’t done that since 1978.

But today the city, which hasn’t substantially increased its boundaries in about 25 years, is more than 95% built out, so there is little land for new homes or businesses. About 270 acres of vacant land remain, with only 10 acres zoned commercial, Mayor Robin Sullivan said.

Last year, the city conducted a community survey about Santa Paula’s future, in part to find out if there was support for the city’s goals.

A majority of respondents said they believe development is appropriate in five of the six areas under consideration for expansion. However, only 15% wanted residential growth to occur faster than the 1.5% annual cap the city places on new home construction.

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“In all of Ventura County, there’s a strong sentiment to keep things the way they are,” Planning Director Joan Kus said. “We’re certainly not having any overwhelming outcry for growth.”

Still, Santa Paula’s economic deterioration in the last few years has made growth imperative.

City analysts predict that without budget cuts or more income, Santa Paula will have a deficit of about $1.3 million by the turn of the century.

The lack of land makes it difficult for the city to attract large companies, so the annexation is crucial to the city’s future, said Norm Wilkinson, the city’s public works director.

“We’re doing what’s called consensus planning,” he said. “[Without it] you risk coming to the end of the process and coming up empty-handed. That would be the biggest disaster for Santa Paula.”

That’s what occurred several years ago when a previous effort to update the General Plan went awry. A consulting company was hired with money a developer fronted for the planning effort, Wilkinson said.

But farmers and other residents came “unglued,” he said. People perceived that a prepackaged development was already in place and their participation was irrelevant, and the opposition managed to kill the proposal.

“We learned from that,” Wilkinson said. “We learned you have to develop the plan to a great extent in-house. You have to build a public consensus.”

The most likely areas for development are the canyons to the north of the city, rather than the rich agricultural soil along the Santa Clara River.

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About 500 acres east of the city in the greenbelt between Santa Paula and Fillmore are included as a potential development area. However, a report issued in 1995 recommended most of the area remain undeveloped.

The same report also cited the possibility of adding about 200 acres west of the city.

Still, Santa Paula’s geographic constraints make almost any development a challenge. The city is hemmed in by a river, a freeway, rich agricultural land and relatively inaccessible canyons that would be expensive to develop and boast a variety of other problems, including high wildfire potential.

That means hillsides lined with condominiums are unlikely, even if residents supported such development. The city hopes to attract builders of expensive homes, which would generate more revenue from taxes than the cost of providing services, Sullivan said.

The hearing is scheduled from 7 to 9 p.m. today at the community center, 530 W. Main St., and officials hope to have a final document in place by this time next year.

“All of this has to be done very, very carefully,” Kus said. “We need to be careful not to make a large subdivision, call it Lemon Grove Acres or something like that, and the lemon groves are all gone. We need to preserve what we have.”