Ojai Expected to OK Study of Plans to Unify Valley

While Ojai Valley residents remain deeply divided over whether they want the city of Ojai merged with the unincorporated areas around it, the Ojai City Council is expected tonight to commission a five-month study of how the valley might be unified under one government.

The study should be finished by October, said Richard Milbrodt, the Sacramento consultant whom the city has selected. His job will be to outline possible options for merging the valley’s various communities.

A border about 10 1/2 miles long encircles Ojai, separating the city of 7,600 residents from the unincorporated valley that is home to 24,400 more.

City officials say unifying the two areas would give Ojai Valley residents outside the city of Ojai more control over growth and more voice in their government than they have with the County Board of Supervisors.

But many valley residents fear that it would put them under Ojai’s thumb and increase their taxes, and many city residents say they just don’t need the change.

Take Oak View, a little village of homes and businesses clustered around Route 33 about three miles south of Ojai.

“Oak View considers Ojai snobbish. Ojai considers us country hicks,” said Lanie Jo Springer, Oak View’s honorary mayor. “You know how two high schools can get a rivalry going? It’s like that.”

Many residents of Oak View and other unincorporated valley communities “are very, very skeptical” about giving up the county government’s support and their own independence to become part of Ojai, Springer said.

“They don’t want to be a big city,” she said. “They don’t want Ojai telling them what to do. They’ve got what they need now without being a city.”

And many Ojai residents also prefer to keep the city as it is, said Mansfield Sprague, chairman of the city committee studying the unification idea.

“I think most of the people in the city feel they really have it good here, and why change it?” said Sprague, who lives in the east end of the Ojai Valley, just outside the city limits.

Some east-enders might like their neighborhood to join the city, which they feel a part of, so long as their taxes do not increase, Sprague said. But most Ojai Valley residents living outside the city are against unification, he said.

Despite opposition to the idea, city officials say they expect that the council will vote tonight to approve paying Milbrodt $16,000 to study the options.

Milbrodt says the possible methods of merging are many:

* The city could simply annex the outlying areas, either all at once or piece by piece, and give them seats on the City Council;

* The city could dissolve its own government and form a new valleywide government;

* The unincorporated valley communities could merge their water and sewer districts into one unified service district;

* The valley communities, with the approval of the state Legislature, could form a special district, which would have authority over public utilities and land-use planning.

* Or those communities could even incorporate into one city, separate from Ojai.

Milbrodt said he will examine how much services cost and how they are paid for inside and outside of Ojai, and give the 29-member study committee a list of alternatives for providing those same services under different forms of government.

The report should be done by October, Milbrodt said.

At that time, Sprague said, the committee would hold public hearings on the options in the city and each of the unincorporated areas, which include Casitas Springs, Meiners Oaks, Mira Monte and Oak View.

Ojai Mayor James D. Loebl said he opposed the idea nine years ago as a member of the City Council, which at that time considered and then rejected unification.

Back then, residents of the unincorporated areas were not as opposed to growth as they are now, Loebl said. They would not have meshed politically with city residents who just three years before had passed an anti-growth ordinance limiting new building permits to 16 homes per year, he said.

At that time, Loebl said, he questioned--as he still does--whether the city could bear the cost of serving a much greater number of residents.

Now, he said, all residents of the Ojai Valley are “more unified around the idea that preventing growth will protect the environment. But does that mean they will embrace a valleywide government as such? That remains to be seen. . . . I recognized when we started this that we had some convincing to do.”

Sprague said the Ojai Valley Study Committee must open the eyes of residents of Ojai and the unincorporated areas and change their minds about the benefits of mingling the two.

“I think an obstacle is lethargy, or that phrase, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ ” he said.

“My personal view is . . . if the people in the valley want to control their own future, then they ought to be unified and elect their own representatives,” Sprague said.

About 90% of Ventura County’s residents live in cities and are represented by city councils. The remaining 10% are represented directly by the County Board of Supervisors. But in the Ojai Valley, only 31% of the residents live in the city.

The process of unincorporated areas becoming cities of their own or joining them by annexation is not new, nor is it finished.

From 1978 to 1981, Ventura County’s cities annexed unincorporated land in Ventura County that was home to more than 12,500 people, said Robert Braitman, head of the county Local Agency Formation Commission.

And the city of Ventura is proposing to annex Cabrillo Village, a community of 153 homes and apartment buildings just outside its eastern border.

“There are higher levels of service if you live in a city,” Braitman said. “There’s more democracy if you live in a city; you’ve got government that’s closest to you.”

Annexation also benefits Ventura County because it can refocus its resources from unincorporated urban areas to countywide services.

One thing annexation would not bring to Ojai is higher taxes, because Proposition 13 forbids it, Braitman said.

The public fears what it does not understand, he said. “Part of it may be they fear they’d be controlled by Ojai, and they outnumber the city residents.”

Councilman Joe De Vito, who, like Loebl, is a liaison to the study committee, agreed.

“I think when people realize that the City Council is not trying to make one big valleywide city, that we’re not trying to run the whole show, and they realize that the City Council’s wanting honestly to look at the options, then they’ll listen,” De Vito said.

But Springer said one question remains, which Milbrodt’s report must answer.

“The main question is: ‘Show me how you’re going to give me what you currently have, and we’ll not have to pay for it,’ ” said Springer.