Mixing Business and Environment

It is a welcome, new era in Ventura politics when two City Council candidates step forward with equally strong credentials in the business and environmental communities.

The city’s future lies in capitalizing on its priceless natural assets--beaches, harbor, islands, open spaces--in ways that respect and preserve them. Through their actions and community involvement, Sandy Smith and Brian Brennan have rejected the popular notion that a person--especially a politician--must choose between backing business and defending the environment. Protecting our vital assets, they sensibly say, is good business.

So The Times endorses Sandy Smith and Brian Brennan in the Nov. 4 council election. With four of the seven seats up for grabs this time, we also endorse 20-year veteran Jim Monahan, whose broad experience in every aspect of city business should provide a stabilizing sense of continuity. And we endorse newcomer Donna de Paola, who seems especially eager to translate the momentum of Ventura’s reviving downtown into progress in other parts of the city.

Smith, 47, part-owner of three downtown restaurants, is a third-generation Venturan. He has been an active participant in public life, serving on the city Planning Commission, the Downtown Ventura Assn. and a variety of city committees.

“A big issue is planning skills,” he says. “We’ve allowed a lot of big development to happen in a haphazard way and that has touched off a backlash.”

He admires Pasadena’s success in turning its threadbare downtown into a vibrant moneymaker as well as the way that city got its citizens involved in deciding what kind of future to pursue.

“We need to start being active participants in what we want to be, instead of passively waiting for things to happen,” he says.

Brennan, 45, moved to town in 1989 and became active in the Surfrider Foundation as well as the Chamber of Commerce, chairing the chamber’s environmental committee. He served as Visitors and Convention Bureau chairman for two years and is a member of the county Planning Commission.

“I hope I’ll be able to bring some people to the table that might not normally sit down together,” he says. “At Surfrider we used to spend a lot of time standing on the sidelines throwing stones and now we’re coming to the table with solutions, and not just on coastal issues. We’ve let it be known that we are there to help solve problems. I’d like to see the business community be a little more that way.”

He envisions pride--and income--from Ventura’s retooled downtown as a catalyst for improvements elsewhere in the city.

“The Saturday-morning farmers’ market gives people a focal point for their energy about the city, makes them passionate about why they live here. That inspires more people to get involved.”

Monahan, 62, was born in Ventura and grew up on the Avenue. He took over his father’s welding business in 1957 and still runs it. This long career has made him a champion of local business people and the council’s leading supporter of development. However, he disputes the widely held notion that he is Mr. Growth.

“I don’t want to see this become an Orange County or be paved over in concrete,” he says. “I’d like to see Ventura remain the prestigious little community that it is. If you like the way Ventura is today, I have to take some credit for that. I’ve been working on it for 20 years. I think we’ve done a good job.”

If he is reelected, we hope Monahan will work to prove the skeptics wrong by applying his long experience to the multitude of ongoing issues that don’t require new construction.

De Paola, 47, coordinated the Ventura County Bar Assn.’s legal clinic for seven years before earning her law degree in 1991. She started her own law practice two years later. She is a director of the Downtown Ventura Assn. and has served on the Air Quality Advisory Board.

She cites her varied experience--as a businesswoman, a legal mediator, a single parent of two--as qualifications for the City Council job.

More than the other candidates, she speaks about improvements for parts of the city that lie beyond downtown: building that long-delayed park and pool on the east side, sprucing up the Thompson Boulevard strip and bringing new businesses to Victoria Avenue.

Not incidentally, De Paola is the only woman among the 10 candidates. In future campaigns we hope to see many more, and minorities as well.

Like Ventura County and each of its cities, Ventura needs the ideas and leadership talents of all of its citizens.