Serendipitous Growth

Under threat of Assembly Speaker Willie Brown’s regional government legislation, Ventura County’s plaintive plea to associate with Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties--rather than being thrown into the Southern California Assn. of Government’s maw to the south--seems a bit disingenuous. Reactions by Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo officials are more than hypocritical.

In reality, growth management in Ventura County is as much due to serendipity as it is due to deliberate and conscious public policy making and implementation. When it serves Ventura County politicians’ purposes, agricultural lands are used for jail sites, open space is used for a presidential library or annexed for comedic golf club dreams, and scarce coastal resources are offered to out-of-county developers for resorts and marinas. The Simi and Conejo valleys willingly serve as residential retreats for escaping Angelenos.

Politicians in both northern counties would have done the same, given better geographic luck to be adjacent to Los Angeles. Water limitations have done more to affect development in Santa Barbara than the local politicians’ will. San Luis Obispo has mortgaged its future to second-home development that up close still looks like any other suburbia.

Until Ventura County rings down an iron curtain to Los Angeles, the Highway 101 corridor through the county will still epitomize Ventura County’s Southern California growth ethics that our northern neighbors fear.

NEIL A. MOYER

Ventura

Moyer is president of the Ventura-based Environmental Coalition.