Candidate for
Member, Democratic Party County Central Committee; County of Ventura; Supervisorial District 5

I am a lifelong Democrat. I voted for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 in my first trip to the polls. And, like most Democrats, I have always been more concerned about the needs of ordinary working folks like myself than providing tax dodges to wealthy people who already have what they need.

My first foray into local politics was as a member of the Board of Directors of the Vineyard Avenue Acres Mutual Water Company. El Rio has a number of tiny water companies; ours serves about 550 homes. It was the late Eighties and a drought was taking its toll. Our water level was supposed to be about 35 feet down; it was 95 feet down, and dropping. The problem was that, for 46 years, everyone had simply paid a flat rate for water. The wells would go down in the summer but come back up during winter rains. But some of the folks paying the same rate as everyone else were watering one or even two acres of avocado and/or citrus trees. We had to pay the state for every acre-foot we pumped up, so we were in an unsustainable situation. I decided to run for the local water board and I was elected. My first move was to persuade my fellow board members to abandon flat rate and impose a reasonable rate that would make folks pay for what they used and provide us enough income to pay the state for water. And to do that, we had to know how much water each household actually consumed, so I persuaded my colleagues to install meters. I was villified by some of the big users but I won out, and we went to work putting meters on every house, granny flat and/or trailer we could find on every parcel of land. But the system was so old that it was literally falling apart. We had the reserves, so we spent about $250,000 on repairs. Homeowners had to pay for their own meters, and we selected the same meters that Oxnard used so that if we were ever annexed we wouldn't have to replace the meters. We also instituted a tiered-rate system that allowed only so much water usage per household before a higher rate kicked in. I was reviled by some unhappy freeloaders, but I stuck to my guns. A year later the water levels were up in our two wells and we we generating enough income to pay the state for our water. AND we knew who was using how much water, so everyone was paying his or her fair share. And what if we had not done the right thing? Well, we would have run out of water because of the unsustainable and unfair usage of a few big users who weren't paying for more than a tiny fraction of the water they were consuming, and we would have been forced to agree to annexation by the City of Oxnard to get water. A year later my neighbors were telling me "Mike, you did the right thing."

Despite my pretty traditional liberal views, I am primarily an environmentalist, not a traditional "politics-above-all-else" candidate. That's because over the years I've come to realize that our environment is the only one that we have, so we all need to work together to save, protect and restore what's left of it so that we can pass it on to future generations.

That doesn't mean that we all have to give up our standard of living to get there. In my view, we can also create jobs, good-paying jobs, by moving Oxnard toward a newer economic model of eco-tourism. There are only so many jobs in traditional occupations like agriculture, manufacturing, trucking, shipping, police, fire, education, etc. Some of these types of jobs will always be available, but perhaps not in the numbers we need. That's one reason why so many communities are dying across our country as a result of a crippling recession that has made business-as-usual virtually impossible.

But over the last couple of decades, some communities have reinvented themselves by turning to newer economic models that take advantage of their natural assets, like their mountains, deserts, forests, rivers, lakes, beaches, coastlines, wetlands, etc. These communities now attract a new breed of tourism - "eco-tourists" - who travel to various destinations to experience environments different from their own. And the communities that are successful in attracting these eco-tourists are undergoing a renaissance in how they generate income and jobs. Restaurants, hotels, "bed-and-breakfasts," curio, gift and souvenir shops, cafes, art galleries, live music, bookstores, etc. - all of these new service industries create jobs and provide income to the community in the form of wages and benefits to employees and tax revenues to local governments.

According to Destination Development International, a consulting firm that Oxnard hired to help it redefine itself a couple of years ago, Oxnard could become one of these cities, if it wants to. We have miles of solitary undisturbed beaches. We have coastal wetlands and coastal dune scrub habitat, rare natural assets that are all but extinct on the southern California coast. Over 250 species of birds, some of them endangered, populate our own Ormond Beach Wetlands. And we have a rich history of farming and distinct cultures - Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, etc. - that goes all the way back to the Oxnard brothers' original beet processing plants. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, our own Channel Islands Harbor is already the gateway to the Channel Islands National Park, currently one of the least visited of all the national parks. Just think what it would do for the economy down at the harbor if Oxnard were to begin attracting an influx of eco-tourists who actually came to town to experience everything that Oxnard has to offer, including a trip out to the islands from our own harbor!

I lived and went to high school in San Antonio, Texas, which has a similar history of farming, a unique heritage that reflects the distinct cultures of its Mexican and German founders, and the nearby Hill Country. But rather than ignoring its diverse multicultural history, San Antonio embraced it a long time ago and is today one of the four or five most beautiful cities in the USA. With the right kind of leadership, greater Oxnard could do the same thing.