Diane Underhill - Slow Controlled Growth / Back-to-Basics Platform

By Diane M. Underhill

I am dedicated to preserving Ventura's quality of life and our "small town" character.

I am a fiscal conservative. I believe the majority of Ventura citizens want sane, sustainable, slow growth policies. I believe ours is a community that:

• Wants the City to manage its spending so that traditional and essential public services like police, fire and infrastructure maintenance are the main priorities;

• Values our knowledgeable public employees, and does not want them haphazardly replaced by out-of-town consultants;

• Understands that our water resources can only sustain slow growth and that the traffic and congestion of major development could quickly overwhelm our infrastructure;

• Values our quality of life--I will jealously preserve it for our children and grandchildren.

An Open Letter To: Downtown Merchants and Landowners, Regarding: Downtown Redevelopment Project and City Claims.

First I would like to thank the downtown merchants and landowners for all the information. It would be interesting to see whether the City (or anyone) undertook a truly objective marketing study, particularly, a before and after foot traffic count. (Maybe the-powers-that-be were afraid their project wouldn't hold up under that kind of direct scrutiny.) I would also like to see an objective look at actual retail sales. What I hear from most downtown merchants there has been no marked increase in sales revenues since the theatre. Perhaps the reason the theatre has not affected retail sales is that, as studies have shown, most movie theatre clients are teenagers without much expendable income, but time to wander around. Someone suggested that if the theatre would also play some foreign art films that cater to a more sophisticated crowd, the retail sales might be positively affected. Along those same lines, one of my customers complained that, even with three theatres in Ventura, he still has to drive to the Camarillo to see anything that is not "mainstream"...

It bothers me is when people imply that Downtown Redevelopment was pivotal in downtown's "rebirth." In an 8/26/99 Our Times article Downtown Community Council President is reported to have said, "While monthly rents have slumbered around 20 to 40 cents per square foot for anyone who signed a downtown lease prior to two years ago, monthly rents have more recently roared to anywhere from $1.15 to $1.80 per square foot." I don't know where he was getting his 20 to 40 cents figures, it has certainly not been my experience that prior to two years ago the leases downtown were that low. On the contrary, having inquired on numerous downtown buildings (in the 1000 to 3000 square foot range) over the last ten years, lease prices were always above $.60 per square foot and usually in the $.80 and $1.20 per square foot range. Alleging leases were 20-40 cents a square foot prior to two years ago seems to imply that the downtown area was derelict before the theatre was added. That is just not the case. In my opinion, the downtown has been steadily coming up through natural market forces for years. Yet, rents of $1.80 plus triple net do seem extreme since there has not been a comparable jump in the actual sales arena. As you say, these high square footage costs plus triple net seems to limit these properties to use by big retailers who can afford these terms.

For years after the exodus of J.C. Penny's, Wards, Scott's, Lerner's, Woolworth's, etc. from downtown to the mall, downtown was not an attraction for most middle-class Venturans. Everyone wanted to shop at the new mall. Luckily, there were some hold outs in the great exodus: Rain's Shoes, Great Western Dress Shop, County Stationer's (Or was that still Jack Rose's Shop?), the vacuum and camera shops, etc... Soon other little independent stores started to move in to fill the vacancies. Mom and pop antique stores moved into the area. Ventura's citizens started returning to downtown to shop and spend the afternoon. Out-of-towners were drawn by the sheer quantity of antique stores in Ventura. Good restaurants sprang up to feed the shoppers... All this happened long before they started spending Redevelopment money in the old downtown area. Now from what I've been told about these triple net leases, it seems that these independents who were actually responsible for resurrecting and preserving our downtown, are going to be (or have been) driven out.

In a Sun. Aug. 29, editorial in the Star, "A way to escape sales-tax game" it talks about redistributing sales tax revenue by dividing it among cities and counties based on population, not the point of sale. It adds that the state would cushion the blow to cities that might lose money under such a redistribution (by handing back some of the property tax revenues it diverted from local government to education (ERAF) during the recession in the early 90's.) This redistribution could end the wasteful and risky planning (Redevelopment) that cities have been engaging in in an effort to grab more sales tax dollars. As an example it states:

"Oxnard, eager to cash in on its own freeway frontage, offered incentives to several big-box retailers, which built anchor stores in highway retail centers that killed the city's existing mall and sped the decline of its downtown."

Do you think any of our city leaders read or understood this? Do you think they understand that when they use Redevelopment's public subsidies in the private marketplace they corrupt the marketplace and that their actions will always have unintended consequences? The editorial concluded:

"The robust economic climate in California makes this the best time to correct the unfortunate course local government has been encouraged to pursue for more than two decades now. If steps aren't taken now, the future will find all cities--winners and losers alike--confronting the unhappy consequences of poor planning."

Of course, our city leaders are probably aware that this proposal is in the works. We probably have this "awareness" to thank for the suggestions of "rezoning" and "higher densities" in the Seize the Future Plan Draft, and the suggestion in the Zucker Study for the possible elimination of our present Residential Growth Management Plan. If revenues are now going to be tied to population you can bet our present city leaders are going to drastically increase the city's population in the next few years, good planning or not. Due to SOAR, they don't feel we have enough land left to develop, so they want to rezone for higher densities througout the city. They are out smarting themselves by this constant quest for more revenue dollars at all costs. Do you think they will ever come to the realization that trying to ride the wave of each new state revenue distribution scheme is not the proper way to run a city? Do you think they will ever get it through their heads that this city is our home, and that rather than making the almighty dollar the defining planning principle they should make good solid quality-of-life planning the main objective?

Do you think that they will ever realize that if, rather than jumping on the Redevelopment-as-a-financial-tool bandwagon (and giving away millions of General Fund dollars as "incentives" to the Downtown Redevelopment Area), they had just carefully managed the City's money (and waited for the natural upturn in the market) that the city wouldn't be suffering such a poor financial state? In attempting to ride the Redevelopment-for-future-sales-tax-revenue wave, the city leadership got on the wave prematurely before the 1999 California Public Policy Institute Study and the UCLA Study were released. These studies state unequivocally that using Redevelopment in attempt to grab future sales tax dollars simply doesn't work and is a bad investment of taxpayer money. The studies found that subsidizing private business with public money is a waste of money since much of what is subsidized would have occurred anyway. They also showed if, for example, you add a theatre to a city that already has two other such amenities you are only dividing the market share within the city, the net effect on the local economy is zero. (We added such a theater at the cost of $6.5 million taxpayer dollars--dollars that could have gone toward funding city wide parks, road repairs, libraries, or more police and fire personnel...) Now, not only is there over $20 million dollars of Redevelopment debt owed to our City's General Fund, but the State is potentially going to change the rules of the "sales-tax game." Now will our City leadership make equally bad choices trying to weigh down the City with higher densities in an attempt to win that sales-tax-by-population distribution game?

We need City leaders that understand that PUBLIC money should be spent for PUBLIC services. We need City leaders that: view public safety as their first priority; use wise fiscal management of the funds that are available to us; quit trying to play games where the state can quickly change the rules; use good planning principles to achieve a sustainable and livable community. This is our home. The present city leadership should plan mainly for us, the present tenants. They should quit trying to plan mainly for a future that we cannot, by the very nature of the future, foresee (or, for that matter, even predict the future rules of the game.) The City needs to get out of marketing and trying (unsuccessfully) to chase the sales tax dollar. By using public money to subsidize developments like the theatre complex, the City Leadership is skewing the market place and driving out longtime small Ventura merchants who by their very longevity had proven they were economically sustainable. There is now more vacancy downtown than I have seen in years, and I have to wonder, will the businesses subsidized by taxpayer money still be there in five years? What will be the impact on the downtown area when the new, bigger mall opens? The City leaders need to get out of marketing and get back to the business of running the city. Our present slow growth policies (like our current RGMP) have served us well. The City Council should listen to the ninety-two percent of its citizens who, in the City's own Demographic Study Dec. '98, responded that they were satisfied with the present quality of life in Ventura. The City should listen to its citizens who, in the City's own Future Fest Survey '99, responded overwhelmingly that they want any growth to be slow. Listening to your citizens and using good solid planning principles for those citizens, (not planning principles perverted by attempts to grab future money), is perhaps the most secure way to ensure that Ventura remains an attractive, economically vital, sustainable, and, above all, livable community.

OUR TIMES QUESTIONAIRE

1. Do you support redevelopment agencies? Did you support Measure A, the Midtown Redevelopment Plan that failed at the polls in June? Would you support the formation of a redevelopment agency to revitalize the Avenue and why?

I am against the use of inappropriate Redevelopment agencies. I was staunchly opposed to the Midtown Redevelopment Plan for that reason. I would not support the formation of a Redevelopment Agency on the Avenue. "Redevelopment" (Health and Safety Code sections 33000 et seq) was designed to eliminate blight in slum areas where physical and economic blight is "so prevalent and so substantial that it constitutes a serious economic burden on the community which cannot be alleviated by private enterprise or governmental action, or both, without Redevelopment." The Avenue is not blighted under the definitions of blight within the Redevelopment statutes and recent case law, and should therefore not be subjected to the heavy handed governmental intervention of State Redevelopment Law. Rather than a Redevelopment agency on the Avenue the City could encourage private revitalization by property and business owners by easing up on city permitting fees on improvements in the area. (There are also federal government grants through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that can be sought and used to clean up the "brownfields" along the end of the Avenue. Cleaning up these polluted parcels would help attract new business and revive the area.)

A big problem with Redevelopment is the money can only fund development. Necessary public services cannot be funded with this money. A higher police presence on the Avenue would do much to combat the prostitution, and drug deals that continue to go on in some areas of the Avenue. If the City would do its part to help the Avenue residents and merchants out by providing:
1. Attractive well maintained streets and sidewalks (public thoroughfares are a city's most visible feature, even good ongoing private investment cannot produce a beautiful city if street maintenance is continually neglected);
2. More community parks and play fields that are easily accessible to the children and would encourage private groups to form more after school youth and sports activities;
3. Police that have enough staffing and equipment so that they can properly address the prostitution and drug dealing that occurs in certain areas of the Avenue. Given this kind of support from the City, the Avenue community could continue its own private revitalization efforts. Also, Redevelopment as a creative financing attempt is starting to fall out of favor with California cities, as well as in Sacramento. There is legislation in the works to cap the ERAF [Educational Relief Augmentation Fund] money that the state took from local governments during the 1993 recession, and return all future incremental property tax revenues to the control of local governments. Future incremental property tax revenues are what fund Redevelopment agencies. If this legislation passes, incremental property tax revenues will be returned to the control of local governments' General funds. The money will be free from Redevelopment's restrictions, and will be able to fund all necessary public services, rather than to just subsidize development.

2. Do you support SOAR? How about the East End Regional Sports Park? Do you support measure C, the proposed church, school, and athletic field development off Kimball Road?

I do support SOAR, I think the voters passed this measure to halt the excessive development of agricultural land and to get more control over local land use policies.

Of course, I will support whatever SOAR vote comes back on the East End Regional Sports Park Project. However, I have serious doubts that spending $25 million dollars on a single regional sports park is what the citizens want. I think the proposed park's scale and cost are diametrically opposed to the "small town" feel that the citizens throughout the "Seize the Future" Visioning process have said they want to protect. The argument that we need a single huge "regional" sports park to properly host tournaments for our children is ridiculous. Ojai hosts a world class tennis tournament using public and private courts throughout their own and neighboring cities. To say that West Side kids will have easy access to this regional sports park is equally as ridiculous. If we have the $25 million to spend (and there is future Federal grant money that is being earmarked for local parks) we should be able fund all 500 park acres we are short within the City, not just this 100 acres. Yes, our kids do need more sports fields, but lets be fair and distribute them throughout the city so that they can be accessible to all. The aquatic center does not have to be where the sports fields are. Again, if we have the money to build two or three pools, they would best serve the community if they were spread throughout the city. A nice West Side community park and pool would go a long way to enhancing the north end of the Avenue. If the East Side sports park were scaled back from large "regional" revenue-generating sports park to a lower-use, less expensive "community" park made up simply of walkways, play grounds, and large, open, grassy playing fields, I believe it would have a much better chance of passing the SOAR vote. (As it is with all the services they are trying to pack into this one 100 acre parcel, the parking lot will probably have to cover a large percentage of it.) The people are saying they cherish our "small town feel," a major "regional" sports park does not promote that ideal.

Measure C is an example of the SOAR initiative at work. The proposed church sanctuary, classrooms and athletic field development will be put before the voters of Ventura to decide if it is a project in keeping with their overall vision that they have for their community. I personally support it.

3. How would you boost employee morale at City Hall? What is your stand on City Manager Donna Landeros'leadership and relationship with the City Council?

I would boost employee morale at City Hall and in the police and fire departments by getting back to a city management style of empowering the line level employee and getting departmental staffing up to acceptable levels. If you look at successful private businesses like Kinko's, Patagonia, Microsoft, Cisco Systems... they all have pro-employee management styles. Our knowledgeable city employees are a great asset to this community we need to stop micro-managing them and acknowledge them as the valuable resource that they are.

At City Hall we are currently understaffed and are relying on present employees to significantly increase their work loads, and we are hiring high-priced consultants to do work that could be done "in house" if staffing was adequate. At the police department, we have essentially the same number of sworn police officers today at a population of 102,000 as we did 20 years ago at an approximate population of 65,000. My point is that with an increase in population of approximately 37,000 people there has been no significant increase in our sworn officer police force. Police morale is affected when the city does not adequately staff the department for our current population. At the Fire department there is a Federal Law commonly known as "2 In 2 Out" this law was designed to protect the lives of fire personnel and to push cities to assign a minimum of four firefighters per engine. Ventura's city policy is three men per engine forcing the firefighters to wait until another engine arrives before they can enter a structure to fight the fire. This eliminates the most effective "quick attack" method of fighting the fire while it is still small and less dangerous. I would also help Fire Department morale by fighting to change the legislation at a state level that allowed the County to shut down our paramedic transport service. This service had documented faster response times (where minutes could mean lives), it cost the public less (with a flat fee as opposed to per item fee), and (after the initial equipment payoff) was operating at no cost to the City General Fund. We need to change state laws so that our city's citizens have a right to this quality of service and our firefighters have a right to provide it.

Public safety is the primary reason that government exists. Local taxpayers want to have proper public safety protection. For this reason, police and fire departments and well-maintained safe roads should be fully funded before money is spent on any fringe items. As long as money is tight, we need to prioritize spending so that the essentials (police, fire and infrastructure maintenance) are funded first.

Donna Landeros works for our City Council. I would move to retract the protocols that she put in place shortly after taking over the position of City Manager. These protocols took powers and from the City Council members and gave them to the City Manager and her staff. We need to eliminate some (or all) of these protocols to get project input powers back to the voter elected Council. I'm sure Donna Landeros is a nice person. Her micro-managing style and pro-development and pro-redevelopment approaches might have proved effective and necessary in Yolo County (pop. approx. 150,000), however, she might not be the right woman for the job here in Ventura. In a Southern California coastal city we should not pay developers with public money incentives to come in and develop. In Yolo County, perhaps this was necessary, but not here. In a 10/6/99 LA Times article "Putting the brakes on Growth" it looks at the growth rate in the Calif. Central Valley and concludes that what cities are spending to serve new development--police and fire protection, water, sewer and streets--often greatly exceeds the property and sales taxes generated by growth. "As a consequence, cities have taken on record bond debt to pay for new infrastructure tied to growth. The debt is being carried on the backs of current and future residents who must pay higher fees to meet the bond debts."

Some of the candidates in this race would argue, yes, but that is the Central Valley and that is sprawl. They would say that they advocate "smart growth"--increasing population densities within the city's existing boundaries where infrastructure and public safety services already exist. I would counter that when you increase population densities you also must increase costly public safety services. That when you increase densities you also place added burden on your infrastructure, your water and air resources, not to mention, your community-desired quality of life.

Higher densities and population out-growths are not the answer to a sustainable community. We can no more house everyone who might have a desire to live in Ventura than any major university could take and effectively teach all student applicants. Limits must be established for the good of all. We need to keep our present Residential Growth Management Plan and our current zoning requirements intact or adopt even more stringent limits. A quote from the aforementioned article from Carl Abbott, a professor of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland University, "The general consensus in the planning field is that local governments have to collect a separate impact fee of $25,000 per housing unit in order to keep their budgets intact." Growth is not paying for itself. If we give subsidies to businesses to come to Ventura but when the subsidies run out they leave, or when they get a better offer from another city they leave, or when there is a downturn in the economy (and there always is) they leave, then we lose. If we give seed money to a mall, then renovate it every fifteen or so years so as to rewrite sales tax rebate contracts to effectively keep the sales tax at a steady, unremarkable plateau, never really getting ahead, we lose. Ventura is now a built up city, we do not need to offer public money subsidies to developers, through redevelopment or any other mechanism. Land, both vacant and recycled, is a precious commodity. Any development now needs to be slow and careful, privately funded, in keeping with our current Comprehensive Plan's RGMP guidelines, and needs take into consideration the costs of growth to this City and its citizens.

4. What should the city do for the homeless? Should there be a city-owned shelter?

First, we need to agree on a working definition of "homeless". To me, homeless persons are those who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times and have no place to live. For such persons, the City should support agencies, both public and private to assist them. (It is interesting to note here that one of the fastest growing segments of the homeless population in the late 80's was women, and half of these were refugees of domestic violence. Perhaps at a City governmental level, we could help these women remain in their homes by having fully staffed police departments with enough manpower to more effectively respond to and enforce the state laws mandating arrest for domestic violence.) There is a need for homeless and mentally disabled shelters, but I do not think the city should operate a shelter, but should leave this responsibility to other public (County and State) and private agencies.

5. How do you propose increasing the sales tax base in Ventura?

Stop giving sales tax rebate contracts to entice national chain stores to come to our town. If we bring these business to town for their sales tax revenues but then continually rebate a portion these taxes to them, where are the significant gains? There needs to be a level playing field for independents and national chains. If the chains want to open a business in our town, then they should pay all of the sales tax they collect and not get to keep a portion as a subsidy. In others words, and especially now with AB178 being passed, Ventura should stop playing the grab-for-sales-tax game. We do not need to subsidize retail stores to come to our city. There comes a point where a city is saturated with retail establishments and the only thing that is accomplished when more are added is the retail dollar pie is sliced ever more thinly between the existing entities. That is to say, we start dividing up the city's existing market between more and more retailers, but the net effect on the local economy is zero. (With the exception that a few more low paying retail jobs are created.)

Our City has gone to considerable trouble and expense to get the new bigger Pacific View Mall and to establish a freeway-easy Auto Mall, but were we really "planning for the future" as many would like to think? With cyber-space virtual shopping now a reality for buying everything from clothes to cars, one has to wonder. Also, with the State holding complete power over how sales tax revenues are distributed, and with talk of changing that distribution from point of sale to being distributed by population, a basic city policy of no more public money subsidies to private business might be in order.

As long as sales tax continues to be distributed by point of sale, I would start an ongoing educational "Shop Ventura and Keep our Sales Tax Working at Home" campaign (much like the "Buy American" campaign that was launched at a national level) to make citizens more cognizant of their buying habits and the effect they have on funding local government services.

6. Should the city set tourism as a priority what should the City expect in return?

I do not think the City has to pour money into attracting tourism. I think Ventura is a natural for tourism, because of our location on the only coastal route north of LA. I do think the City should recognize that the numerous antique shops in our historic downtown are a major out-of-town people and money draw. I was disappointed to find that our city-funded Visitor and Convention Bureau was no longer producing the Ventura Antique Shopping Guide. The antique shop owners paid for the ads or listings in this pocket sized brochure and it helped them promote Ventura as an antique shopping destination, which in turn helped fill our downtown restaurants, etc. The elimination of this promotional advertisement, done at no cost to the taxpayer, seems incongruous in light of the desire for tourist-spent dollars. I would not support major funding to make tourism the icon for city revenue. Tourism is not a recession proof industry and is the first to disappear during a down swing in the economy.

Diane Underhill--Candidate for Ventura City Council--Nov. 2