City Initiative for Urban Boundary Limit Would Complement County’s

Activists in this city, known for its slow-growth ways and 14,000-acre ring of open space, are now pushing for an urban boundary limit that would require a public vote to annex new land for development.

The so-called City Urban Restriction Boundary is intended to create a limit along the city’s sphere of influence--swaths of county land outside Thousand Oaks city limits.

The urban boundaries would be the city component of the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources--or SOAR--initiative. A related countywide initiative is separately being pushed for the November ballot.

Spearheading Thousand Oaks’ SOAR initiative is City Councilwoman Linda Parks--the author of a popular 1996 initiative preserving existing Thousand Oaks parks and open space.

Despite the city’s ample open-space preservation and growth-control laws, Parks said the city initiative would complement the county proposal, both of which would require a majority vote to become law.

“Say someone tries to annex land that’s protected by county [SOAR] limits, then it’s good for each city to have an urban boundary limit,” Parks said. “Let it be decided by the people if they want to sprawl beyond what is the recognized limit for development.”

County-controlled areas that would receive extra protection under a Thousand Oaks SOAR initiative include the bucolic Hidden Valley, posh Lake Sherwood and the Tierra Rejada greenbelt separating Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Moorpark, Parks said.

To get open-space preservation rolling, Parks on Monday took the first step toward placing the proposal on the ballot: She submitted a draft SOAR petition to the Thousand Oaks city clerk.

Thousand Oaks is not the only city that launched a local open-space protection drive Monday. Petitions were also submitted for approval in Simi Valley, said local organizer Jon Palo.

Camarillo SOAR advocates had earlier contacted that city’s clerk, but organizers of campaigns in Moorpark and Oxnard have not yet submitted petitions.

In Thousand Oaks, the city attorney has 15 days to review the proposed petitions before SOAR backers can print petitions and begin to circulate them, said City Clerk Nancy Dillon.

From there, Parks, who said she has more than 100 volunteers, will have up to 180 days to gather signatures from 10% of the city’s registered voters, or about 7,000 people.

They hope to gather 12,000 signatures by mid-May, as do Simi SOAR backers.

“What we’re really doing is drawing a line in the sand to let people know this is as far as sprawl can go,” said Palo, the Simi SOAR organizer. “We need it [the initiative] to protect our hillsides in this beautiful area from uncontrolled development.”

While the Thousand Oaks initiative might seem redundant in light of existing rules preserving open space and curbing growth, Parks said it is vital for making the county law work. So intertwined are the two SOAR proposals that volunteers in Thousand Oaks will simultaneously collect signatures for the city and county SOAR efforts.

“You really need them both,” agreed Steve Bennett, a former Ventura city councilman working on the county SOAR drive. “Cities could literally grow together with a countywide SOAR but no city SOARs. One without the other is not nearly as strong as having both. The two together are much greater than the sum of their parts.”

City officials in Thousand Oaks will be closely examining the effects of the proposed law in the coming days, said Interim City Manager MaryJane V. Lazz.

“The likelihood is that its impacts would probably be limited since we’re pretty much fully developed,” she said.

Times staff writer Coll Metcalfe contributed to this story.