As most of you who receive this report know, I firmly believe that we must act as a team, you – in particular, those of you who are active and engaged politically – and I, to assure that the long-term interests of the community as a whole are well served by the policies adopted and the actions taken by our City government and City Council.

My custom each year since I was first elected to the Ventura City Council has been to provide constituents a report summarizing what I feel were the chief issues and achievements of the previous year and outlining what I anticipate will be the major public policy issues of the coming year and the goals I hope you will help me serve. The focus here, of course, is on the things I played or hope to play a substantial role in, not everything that happens in the City or that is done by the City Council.

There may certainly be things that you think are very important about City business that I do not dwell on in this report, and there are surely some important things that other Members of Council have done or attempted to do that aren’t mentioned. I assure you that it is not that I have less regard for those activities or the achievements of others. It’s just that this is my report to you, not theirs, so my focus is naturally on what I have done or tried to do and the goals I will pursue in the future, not those of others.

Accordingly, it’s time once again to review the developments and our accomplishments of the past year and lay the course for the next.

Significant Events of 2005

Throughout the first half of 2005, my major focus lay in supporting the City’s efforts to implement the performance based management system that I have sponsored since first being elected and that was embedded in the terms of the new City Manager’s employment agreement. In addition, I worked to maintain sound budget discipline, which has been my consistent interest as a Council Member, and we indeed adopted once again a budget designed to reduce our structural deficit and keep us on a three-year plan to restore sound fiscal condition. Finally I worked with my colleagues to assure completion of the draft of our City comprehensive plan, now known as the General Plan. During this same time we also finally dedicated land to be used for the Cultural Arts Center, which was made a Council priority project as a result of my sponsorship in 2002.

During the second half of the year the land was acquired at last for the combined ArtSpace (affordable artist housing with studio workspace) and Transitional Living Center project, the Daybreak Center, which I have worked so hard for as well. My proposal to initiate a public-private collaborative program of support for affordable employee housing was also adopted unanimously by Council, and the first 6 houses were approved for historic preservation under the Mills Act, a part of a program of historic preservation that I had first sponsored three years ago.

It was a busy year.

Re-Election Campaign

I suppose it is an understatement to say that another major focus during the last half of last year, of course, was the re-election campaign.

It is with pride, and especially with humility, that I look back on the re-election effort.

Pride

The pride is in our accomplishment of a successful re-election despite significant challenges and adversities.

I have always stood firmly on a broad base of bi-partisan political support. My endorsements have been noteworthy for including as many high-ranking Democratic leaders as Republican. In this election that breadth of appeal actually tended to make things a bit more problematic than usual.

This year the polarization of national politics that had been building through two controversial national elections and the terrible misjudgments and disastrous 2005 ballot propositions of the Schwarzenegger Administration, together, resulted in a very hostile environment for a candidate like me who has always run on a collaborative bi-partisan platform. As a result, my traditional alliance of labor and business interests, joined behind a moderate and progressive consensus platform, was continually undermined by those whose goals were better served by divisiveness and political agitation. Throughout the campaign season there was constant effort on the part of the more extreme partisans to drive a wedge between these groups. At the same time, in several instances opponents deftly exploited this rise in partisan angst by seizing upon my strong stands on a few sensitive issues to split potential supporters off, effectively deflecting their attention from the moderate or centrist quality of the bulk of our platform and philosophy. That is always a risk when one takes strong stands. It comes with the territory.

Labor Peels Off

In the end, I lost the endorsements of both the police and the firefighter labor organizations, despite a long career in emergency services and a history of strong support for public safety programs. Moreover, while the Tri-Counties Central Labor Council did endorse me (after at first rejecting the idea), their endorsement unfortunately didn’t produce the kind of enthusiastic support that had been offered by many in this significant labor group in the past. Indeed, the building trades unions disregarded the leadership of the Central Council entirely and actively and independently supported other candidates, even going so far as to support candidates specifically rejected by the Central Council.

Business Was Ambivalent Also

On the business side, I was denied endorsement as well by the influential Building Industry Association and the Building Contractors’ Association, and though I received the endorsement of the Chamber of Commerce, the highest compliment they were able to offer was that I was a “thoughtful” candidate.

Humility

All in all, it was a trying re-election year. In the end obviously a lot of other people and groups supported us strongly, including the California Nurses Association, the Ventura Mobile Home Residents Council, Ventura Citizens for Hillside Preservation, Ventura County Coastal Realtors, and both the Ventura County Star and the Ventura County Reporter, just to name a few.

That’s where the humility comes in.

My humility lies in the fact that we were able to prevail over the adversities in this election because so many people clearly saw through the campaign rhetoric of opponents, or perhaps they simply were confident that their own judgments of my character and program were more valid. The truth is that it was not so much anything that I did, but rather their faith and persistent support that was the key to success in this election, and I know that. I try hard to remain focused on the public interest, not personal advantage, and I maintain the perspective that if the people don’t really want what I offer, it’s OK to lose the next election. Still, I am both grateful to everyone who supports my efforts and a bit daunted by a concern that somehow I may be unable in the end to live up to your trust and loyalty. I am nonetheless ever so grateful for it.

Re-election Gained, but Not Advancement to Deputy Mayor

In the end, we ran a strong campaign on a solid record of achievement, and with your help, we won re-election with a bit to spare. I cannot say thank you often enough.

On the other hand, while the forces of division in our community could not prevent my re-election, one outcome of all their political agitation was to consistently depict me throughout the campaign as too independent and, thus, not to be trusted. (Extreme partisans always fear a candidate who effectively appeals to the center of the political spectrum. Further, if you agree with them in one thing, they find it very difficult to understand why you do not agree in all things, and thus tend to characterize any independent stance as traitorous.) In the end that characterization made a convenient excuse and was successfully exploited as the “reason” by a majority of the Council to obstruct my election to the position of Deputy Mayor, an honor, although only a titular position, that customarily goes to a person with my seniority on the Council.

The raw truth is that blocking my election to Deputy Mayor served the personal ambitions of those on Council who are bent on sidetracking any chance of my ultimate advance to the Mayor’s position in the future. While the partisan ideologues fear the visibility and credibility that such honors could bring to my program proposals and political views, the fact is that at least half the votes of my colleagues against my election were merely to remove me as a potential obstacle for their own advancement.

That’s politics.

While some have advised that it is unbecoming to make the observation that I just made, I believe we have to deal pragmatically with the facts. It would be silly not to recognize the facts for what they are. People too often make nice and play games of political pretend, and that just makes it hard for the average citizen to figure out what’s really going on.

New Initiatives in 2005

The most important new initiative that I was able to introduce and secure Council support for in 2005 was the proposal to develop a joint public-private collaborative, employer-funded program to provide more affordable housing to employees.

This is not intended to be a give-away program. Though it ultimately may lead to the construction of lower cost affordable housing, it is not primarily intended to build inexpensive housing, and especially not lower quality housing. It is a program designed to help make market-rate housing more affordable for our employees, both in the private and the public sector, provided they are willing to live in the City. It will rely primarily upon employer contributions to a capital fund that can be leveraged effectively to magnify its purchasing power, thus buying down the cost of housing on the employee’s behalf at a fraction of the cost of the actual price reduction.

For all practical purposes it would cost the City next to nothing. My proposal to the City for its share of the fund will be to allocate a small percent, maybe 5-10%, of the added property tax revenues collected due to the growth in property values each year derived from our economic good fortune, to be set aside for the employee housing program. That would cost not one dime in new taxes, and it would take not one dime from any existing program. It would simply dedicate a small amount of the windfall the City receives from growth in property values each year to this purpose.

This program will take several years to bring to full realization, but the ship has been launched. I have high hopes that, in doing so, we made 2005 a watershed year for both affordable housing in Ventura and for the relationship between the City and our City employees.

In addition, in 2005 we also saw the formal establishment of the River Haven community, the self-governing group of homeless citizens who had formerly lived in harm’s way along the Ventura River bottom and were re-located just prior to last year’s floods. This remarkable program, the topic of a widely acclaimed documentary film in 2005, reflects the tremendous success that can be generated in solving a persistent community problem when a City and its citizens approach the problem creatively and collaboratively, and when they embrace the idea that those most affected can also be most interested in helping themselves, if provided with some modest resources.

River Haven is only 30 people among 150 or so evacuated from the Ventura River, but it is 30 people living independently, meeting their monthly living expenses, holding jobs, not tolerating substance abuse or social misbehavior, and building a future together – 30 people who have been able to achieve that together, who were not able to do so previously on their own. It is a tremendous achievement for those 30 people, but it is also a seminal achievement for the people of Ventura. It gives us another tool and another way to approach the problem of dealing with homelessness and despair in our community. Admittedly, it is a tent community. (If they could afford houses and if houses were available, they’d almost all rather it be a community in houses.) But it is a self-governing community moving toward a self-supporting community, it is a community with self-respect and whose members toil honorably every day, and it is a community that has been able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps to get back on the road to some sort of normal, stable family existence, and that is a major achievement.

Things Not Done So Well

On the less satisfactory side, while we adopted a new General Plan for the City after seven long years of laborious meetings and prolonged discussions, we did so only after acknowledging that much would have to remain undone for the time being.

Most notably we left unresolved several major questions: 1.) How will we regulate the pace of development and the quality of major development projects within the City in the future (i.e. what would replace the Regional Growth Management Program)? 2.) Where will new growth outside the existing community boundaries (the Proposed Expansion Areas) occur, if at all? And 3.) What exactly will constitute the new design and land use guidelines (the so-called Form Based Codes) in each of the areas of the city?

In other words, we pretty much simply retreated to a reiteration of the ambiguous and general statement of our consensus community image (what we might want to be when we finally grow up, so long as we really never have to grow up very much and can still pretend that the nineteen-fifties or early sixties was pretty much all we ever really wanted to be anyway), and we decided to call that a victory and stop trying to resolve the inconsistency between that world and the one we really live in.

We did promise ourselves, of course, that we really would go back and answer these questions within two years.

We’ll see.

Perhaps the most notable decision the Council actually did make in the General Plan was to agree to allow traffic conditions to worsen significantly over the next twenty years. Though we might not have been able to do anything about that anyway, still I am proud to say I was one of two who voted against it.

In addition, 2005 saw the Sonderman-Ring proposal for a 300 unit apartment project in the Ventura Harbor stalled and a lawsuit launched to try to break it loose. In essence, the City Manager (and the Council majority, because, as we all understand, the City Manager only gets to do what at least four members of Council agree should be done) decided that it was too important a piece of real estate to permit it to go forward in spite of the community consensus plan of design that S-R had developed previously, pretty much at the request and direction of Council and City planning staff. In the meantime it is now also complicated by a disagreement with the Port District on how to deal with the impact that the added residents will have on our fire and police services and who should pay the cost of that impact.

In the end I am confident the project will go forward and possibly with an arguably better over-all design, just as the Olsen and Hales projects went forward after the City Manager decided to “New Urbanize” them before allowing them to be built. Nonetheless the pain and cost of retrofitting these projects into the New Urbanist mold seems disproportionate to the gain to some of us, while the need for additional housing continues to grow to unprecedented levels and the costs of construction sky-rocket. Moreover, the actual relevance of the New Urbanist model to such compact projects seems questionable to begin with, since there is little opportunity in them to create meaningful neighborhood centers with sufficient amenities to turn them into self-sustaining walk-able communities, even if the surrounding population represented an adequate market to support local businesses and people could actually be induced to patronize them by walking and leaving the car at home.

We lost two major employers again in 2005, including the Ventura County Star, which made the decision to move to Camarillo. The former Downtown Ventura Community Council seems to have given up the ghost, albeit still another unrepresentative incarnation as DowntownVentura.org is in the works. Once again we can look forward to a parasitic attempt by downtown merchants and land speculators and their naïve minions to attach themselves to the City revenue stream, while, in the name of quaintness and “authenticity”, they simultaneously steadfastly resist bringing major new commercial franchises into town that could actually revitalize Main Street, whose sales volume once again seems to have flattened despite a robust regional economy.

And here we are proposing to spend hundreds of thousands of scarce dollars to “save” the Top Hat, while not a single commercial development venture in the downtown has moved forward significantly this year.

As the French so aptly say, “Plus ca change, plus la meme chose. N’est-ce pas?” The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Making 2006 Better

We face several challenges that will come to a head in the upcoming year and should begin work on several important new initiatives.

One of my most important specific goals for this year will be to try to put some real substance into our economic development strategy by focusing City attention once again on economic issues and the need to infuse economic priorities into our planning efforts at each level.

The City is committed to creating three or four community plans for significant portions of Ventura and another seven or so specific plans for individual neighborhoods over the next two years. There are not only no meaningful guidelines today for those plans, there is no basis for integrating into them the focus on economic considerations we spent so much effort to bring to the General Plan. That is, they will be almost exclusively infrastructure, form and design oriented unless we intervene to try to make economic functionality an important consideration in them.

This is vital if you believe as I do that economic prosperity is the precondition for achieving all other goals.

Economic considerations are particularly important with respect to the Downtown Specific Plan. If we do not plan for land and building conversions to accommodate larger scale commercial and office operations and the commercial revitalizations needed to make a downtown cultural arts facility a success, we will once again doom the downtown area to economic stagnation. We need to lay the foundation today for creation of at least one major downtown office complex and one or preferably two national brand retail operations. That includes providing necessary parking.

To this end, my specific goals this year will include pushing forward the concept of a “strike team” to seek potential retail or office tenants and to begin a courtship process that would bring at least one meaningful office tenant and one major retail prospect to the table to discuss a relationship with the City. While our housing initiatives of recent years will go a long way toward beefing up the consumer market in the downtown area, it has to be supplemented with a stronger daytime component, which is typically associated with office workers, and without the presence of some more impressive brands and the marketing budgets they command, it will be extremely difficult to keep our downtown commercially competitive. River Park in Oxnard looms menacingly on our downtown’s horizon. You have to understand threat when you see it!

In a similar and potentially related vein, I believe it is appropriate to attempt to bring at least one new major employer into at least a preliminary discussion as to the prospects of relocation to Ventura.

Again, related to these goals, I will attempt to convince my Council colleagues to create a more effective strategy for the use of the City’s revolving economic development capital reserve. The intent, when I asked Council to create this reserve, was that it would be used as an investment tool to stimulate new economic development by providing capital to potential new employers or financing for new commercial enterprise. It was designed to be not only self-perpetuating by repaying itself from the proceeds of the investments, but to grow as those proceeds exceeded the initial investment. Thus, for example, if a loan were made to a business from this fund, the fund would eventually be restored by repayment of the loan, but it would also grow by the amount of the interest. If some part of the fund were invested in an enterprise or a capital asset, its value would appreciate with the value of the enterprise or the capital asset it had been invested in. When the asset was sold, the increased value would be returned to the fund. Over time the fund would become a very significant potential element of the City’s economic vitality. In sum, this fund was designed to put the City into the investment banking business to stimulate desirable economic development.

This fund today still remains largely unused. My goal for 2006 will be to generate an active, albeit conservative, investment program and strategy for these funds. No harm is done by idleness of these funds, and they are earning interest while un-invested, but the point is that they are not serving us as intended, and the City is losing out on the opportunities they represent.

Another important goal for 2006 for me is to move the collaborative employer-funded employee housing concept forward to the next level. That requires creating a more formal plan of action, moving beyond simply a conceptual format, and initiating discussions with potential collaborating employers. In order to provide the seed money for this program, I will propose to the Council that the City set aside up to 10% of the annual growth in property tax receipts being generated by rising property values in the City. Again this is “found money”. It takes no money from any existing program. It derives from the inflationary trend in property values. However, over time it could build up to a substantial amount, and, as it would be self-replenishing by repayment and reinvestment, it would ultimately become a major factor in our affordable housing programs because it would keep pace with the rate of inflation of property values in the City. Thus, what’s affordable today would stay affordable without on-going investment by the taxpayer.

In another area of concern, I believe it is time to seriously consider the possibility of Charter revision. Several years ago Councilman Morehouse proposed that we at least discuss the possibility of Charter reform during one of our City Council workshops, and I supported the idea. He is now the Mayor, so I hope he will take steps to carry forward with that proposal. If he does, I will support it.

The City Charter was designed for a City half our size and complexity. It was created in a tax environment unlike that which exists today in a post-Prop 13 world. It contemplated budgets one-quarter the size of today’s nearly half billion dollars. It assumed that government services would be relatively easily adjusted to meet growth requirements. It assumed that City affairs would remain no more complex and demanding of time by those elected to represent you than is typical of a small town – indeed a small town twenty or thirty years ago.

As a result, your elected officials find it difficult to stay on top of things and maintain appropriate accountability by City Administration. The consequence is a significant transfer of functional authority to the City Manager, far more in fact than had been customary in prior decades and far more than had been contemplated when the Council/Manager system was first adopted. In my opinion, far more than is wise.

Ventura is no longer a small town. Though we like to cultivate that atmosphere as much as possible, we do so by artifice and contrivance that actually stresses our resources and capacity to govern. Frankly, it is what our citizens want, but the cost is significant and the effort required of City leaders to stay “connected” demands far more than the 4-6 hours a week that was once typical. I dare say the average City Council Member offers at least 10 hours of week in service to the City. I know that to do what I think is a good job I must commit 30. I put in 6 in office hours alone, trying to be available and of use to our City staff and to our fellow citizens. Maybe I’m just not very efficient, but I think the problem is the job is bigger than we have been pretending it is.

So, I think it is at least time to think about modernizing our governance.

I do not have a fixed idea of what might be appropriate. Some say we should directly elect the Mayor. Some say we should elect our Council in general election years, rather than in the “off-years” as we do today. Some say we should reduce the number of Council seats to five. Some say we should elect Council Members by District, instead of at-large. Others argue that we need to compensate Council more appropriately in order to make it possible for the average person to consider running for office. Still others think we should finance elections with tax funds and forbid anyone from accepting any political contributions. The point is that we seem to indeed be at a time and place where such things should at least be investigated systematically and where carefully selected changes might well be productively evaluated.

Finally, I believe it is time that we come to grips with what is gradually approaching a critical shortfall in our public safety resources. We need more police officers and more firefighters. The population of the City has grown 13-15% since we last added public safety personnel. Calls for service have increased by more than a third, and the nature of the calls has changed with greater emphasis on medical emergencies in an aging population.

In the meantime, our response times have fallen to unacceptable levels. Our compensation for public safety personnel is less competitive with other communities, and if that continues over time we risk simply becoming a training ground for new recruits, who transfer to other cities as soon as they get some job experience here. Already, our firefighters demand that we disband our Fire Department and allow them to be merged with the County Fire Service, which, while it may prove advantageous to them in terms of compensation, would represent an absolute disaster in my opinion for the City. It would leave us with no control over how our fire and paramedic resources are deployed, reduce the certainty of adequate service, and almost surely result in higher cost over time. (If you truly believe that the County is a more efficient form of government, God save you from your delusions.)

As a member of the Council Ad Hoc Budget Committee, I recommended last year that we explore the development of one or more new funding approaches to solve the public safety problem. The Council has authorized a study of these options, and the public will be surveyed – probably several times – in an effort to assess public understanding of the need and voter sentiment for the various options that might be proposed. I will support this process. I hope you will too. There is no point in investing time and energy in a proposal that won’t wash with the public.

Conclusion

Those will be the things I expect to work on in 2006. I trust that you will be active partners in formulating these plans or developing workable programs to solve these problems. I look forward to discussing ideas with you as we go forward through the year and using our dialogue to formulate or refine proposals to my Council colleagues and to City management, or to the voters if necessary.

Please let me hear from you at any time on any of these ideas or goals. If you have a special interest in one or more of them, I will try to work with you to make sure your views are fully considered and shared with others. If you have alternative ideas or simply believe that other priorities should be given more attention, please let me know your opinions.

As always, I will continue my practice of keeping regular office hours at City Hall on most Mondays and Fridays from 3:00 PM until 6:00 PM. Please just call (654-7827) to make an appointment if you would like to talk. If you’d rather, of course, you can simply send me an e-mail message on any matter of concern. For City business, I do prefer you use my city e-mail: nandrews@ci.ventura.ca.us.

Please also feel free to pass this annual report along to your friends and others who may have an interest. If you would like to be removed from the distribution list, please just reply with the message “Please remove from Annual Report list.”
If you receive it from another and would like to be added to my distribution list, likewise please reply with your request and the e-mail address you would like me to use.

I apologize if you receive more than one copy of this report. In an effort to make sure that I remain able to communicate with the many different constituencies that have supported or expressed interest in our efforts, I maintain multiple mailing and contact lists. It probably just means that you are important to me in more ways than just one. Unfortunately, because of the way the lists are managed and the different sources used, I am often unable to purge overlap in the lists. In addition, sometimes you receive the second or third copy because someone has forwarded it to you. It just means you are important to someone else as well. Be grateful that your views are so highly esteemed and that so many seek to keep you informed.

In any case, I appreciate your interest and your support. Thank you!

Respectfully,

Neal Andrews
Council Member
City of Ventura