Ventura Car Dealers Press Demands for Stadium : Commerce: Some threaten to move to Oxnard. They also cite a need for road improvements near the auto center.

Renewing pressure on Ventura to build a baseball stadium, some Ventura Auto Center dealers say they may move to Oxnard if Ventura does not pay for a minor-league stadium--or other business-friendly amenities--soon.

Such threats are potent in Ventura, where sales from the dealerships make up a hefty 9% of the city’s annual sales tax revenue.

The $15-million stadium is proposed for a vacant field abutting the auto center. John Hofey, who owns the auto center property and the field, has offered the empty land for the stadium. He said he also wants to build a sports center complex around the stadium that could include an ice-skating rink and a water park.

The dealers say the facility would bring much-needed traffic to their auto mall, which they say has suffered for years from benign neglect by a City Council that is not business-oriented.

“I’m thinking, here’s the city of Ventura. How many mistakes have they made?” asked Frank Kirby, owner of Kirby Oldsmobile. “Do they need another one?”

Kirby said he has talked to Oxnard officials about moving his dealership--one of the oldest on the mall--to that city because he is so frustrated with Ventura’s lack of action on making improvements to the area.

But city officials--already strapped for cash and wondering where the funds will come from to pay for a stadium--said it is hard to determine how serious the dealers really are.

“It’s a wonderful game of chicken,” City Manager Donna Landeros said.

Officials said, however, that they are scrambling to do something soon because the frustration levels among the auto dealers and the pressure from manufacturers to leave are both getting too high.

The dealers and the city agree that the center is too hard to reach. Customers must either circumnavigate a gnarled intersection where Johnson Drive meets the Ventura Freeway off-ramp, or they have to wind their way in from Victoria Avenue, twisting and turning on side streets edged by vacant fields.

“We need the city to encourage Caltrans to make some improvements,” said Jack Weber, the owner of a Mazda and Nissan dealership. “So it doesn’t take Marco Polo or some other explorer to figure out how to get here.”

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The city has, in fact, worked with the California Department of Transportation for years on plans to completely redesign the Ventura Freeway in the area, not only widening the freeway bridge over the Santa Clara River, but revamping the on- and off-ramps at Johnson Drive.

The $100-million project was to begin next year, funded mainly by Caltrans. But in the wake of the Northridge earthquake, all Caltrans seismic retrofitting projects have been moved to the top of the agency’s list, pushing the Johnson Drive project back to 1999, city officials said.

The dealers had pinned their hopes on the freeway project as the long-awaited improvement that would jump-start traffic flow along their beleaguered row.

Now, with the road work put on hold a few years longer, the dealership owners are clamoring for Ventura to at least extend Olivas Park Drive so that it runs from Johnson Drive to Victoria Avenue in a clear, wide arch. The plan is another idea the city has discussed for years but never acted upon.

“If I knew a way to hop up and down and make the city do something, I would--but, I don’t,” said Ed McDonald, who owns the center’s Mercedes dealership.

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But city officials say rumors that the dealers may be wooed away are getting worrisome enough to make them scrounge for the money to at least help pay for extending Olivas Park Drive. The extension would cost about $18 million, with the city paying up to half and the rest coming from a proposed auto center assessment district.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Millais said. “Oxnard has a very aggressive attitude about wooing Ventura dealerships.”

Not only is Oxnard’s auto center more accessible from the freeway than Ventura’s, dealers say, but it is surrounded by shops and restaurants, drawing people to the auto mall area even when they do not plan to buy a car.

The Ventura dealers say their center also needs that kind of traffic, to attract impulse buyers as well as to achieve a high profile so that when they do decide to buy a car, they think of the Ventura dealerships. The stadium and sports-center complex--with the attendant stores and eateries it might attract--would accomplish that purpose, they say.

Hofey, who owns the stadium property and the auto center land, said he will go again to the City Council on Monday night and ask council members to take seriously the requests for street improvements and new facilities.

“I think these (dealers), if the city does not make a positive move, they will see there’s no leadership,” he said. “They will see there’s no future for them.”