CALIFORNIA ALBUM : Ojai and the Black Orb : The latest battle involves a National Weather Service tower. Like it or not, citizen activists have become a political force to be reckoned with.

OJAI —  This is a well-read, well-educated hamlet that does not easily take no for an answer.

Its residents are more likely to vote than those elsewhere in Ventura County, they mobilize quickly and they do not take to those they consider a threat to the quality of life in the verdant Ojai Valley.

In recent years, Ojai activists have derailed a would-be landfill, squelched a petroleum plant expansion, felled a university site, muscled into a private golf resort’s development plans and filed numerous lawsuits to protect their interests.

Like it or not--and many clearly do not--citizen activists in the Ojai Valley have become a political force to be reckoned with.

“They’re very, very bright people,” said attorney Mitchel B. Kahn, who represented the waste management firm that last year lost a bid to open a landfill in a nearby canyon. “Together, they make quite a formidable group.”

A higher percentage of Ojai residents hold college degrees and library cards than in Ventura County as a whole. But some say that the location beneath the TopaTopa Mountains contributes to the town’s individualism.

“It’s geographical,” said Greg Helms of the Environmental Defense Center, a Santa Barbara legal advocacy firm that handles lawsuits for several groups in the area.

“When you live in the Ojai Valley, you’re together in a kind of village,” he said. “It’s a sort of an Old America feeling about the community that lends itself to public participation.”

Officials at USA Petroleum do not like to talk about Ojai’s activism. They are apparently still smarting from a citizens panel that 10 years ago thwarted a planned $100-million expansion at the firm’s Petrochem refinery.

Those 96 acres have been up for sale ever since.

The latest political battle cry was sounded after the National Weather Service began erecting a 98-foot radar tower atop Sulphur Peak in the upper Ojai Valley.

The tower will greatly enhance their ability to monitor thunderstorms, wind currents and other atmospheric conditions, weather service officials say.

Information gleaned from the new system--designed to replace an aging tower in Los Angeles--will be shared with federal air traffic controllers and military brass to help track flight paths and plan strategy.

“It is urgent that the Sulphur Mountain radar become operational as soon as possible,” said Thomas Potter, regional director of the weather service.

But no one told those who live along the pricey ridge that the so-called “black orb” was coming.

Upper Ojai residents awoke one crisp morning in early December in the shadow of what looked to them like a huge black ball nesting above a thick steel scaffold.

Within days they stood in front of a Ventura County Superior Court judge arguing for, and receiving, a temporary restraining order prohibiting completion of the weather-tracking project.

In the weeks since, the government has condemned a portion of a driveway that leads to the site, threatened to arrest protesters and unleashed federal lawyers to ensure that the project is not delayed further.

This month, a federal judge sided with the government and refused to issue a restraining order blocking construction of the project. Another hearing is set for Friday.

Opponents of the radar tower point to research that possibly links higher instances of cancer, birth defects, leukemia and other maladies to the kind of low-level radiation emitted from the system.

“We have a highly educated community,” said David Hedman, an upper Ojai resident who fought the Weldon Canyon dump and is one of the plaintiffs in the weather station lawsuit.

To hear those fighting the radar and other ecological-legal battles tell it, the Ojai Valley is one of the last resting places of popular rule.

Nina V. Shelley, an Ojai councilwoman who served a stint in the Marine Corps, calls the activist sentiment a mix of Old West tenacity and sheer grit.

“That’s what I operate with when I’m speaking for the community,” she said. “Don’t let go. Don’t even consider failing.”

Ranch owner Kim Bonsall knows that community doggedness from personal experience. She ran headlong into it last year when the Bonsall family was about to allow a landfill on part of its 6,500-acre spread in Weldon Canyon.

“I admire how quickly they got organized,” Bonsall said. “But I don’t admire what they said once they got organized. For any project that goes on, (activists) are very quick to say something negative before having all the facts in front of them.”

Bonsall is not alone. Many private attorneys and local officials have been forced to answer to Ojai-based environmentalists.

“They do keep me on my toes, no doubt about that,” said Richard H. Baldwin, director of the county Air Pollution Control District. “They confront us by meetings, letters, what have you. Elsewhere in the county, that’s not happening.”

But confrontation can also be an asset, Baldwin said.

“There’s the business view I hear constantly, but we don’t hear the citizen’s view very often,” he added.

However, lawyers for the firm planning to build a private golf resort on a sprawling hillside above the nearby community of Meiners Oaks still hold a grudge against the citizen activists.

“There are some genuinely concerned people up there, but some of the activists would have us all living in tepees again,” said Lindsay F. Nielson, who represents Farmont Corp., which wants to build the golf course. “They simply believe that any form of development is evil.”

Nielson, a board member of the Ventura County Taxpayers Assn., called many of the activist efforts misguided.

“Ojai does have a large number of people who are very environmentally in tune,” he said. “But they aren’t interested in what impact (a project) has on the economy of the area.”

Even a proposed university campus did not escape the purview of the ecological watchdogs. As soon as officials targeted Taylor Ranch, near California 33 and U.S. 101, for a state university, opponents concerned about air quality in the Ojai Valley went to work.

“They were planning for 20,000 students,” said Pat Baggerly, a Meiners Oaks resident and member of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County that opposed the site. “And all that (smog) blows up this way.”

The campus is now being planned for a lemon grove outside Camarillo.