A public vote on growth not unlike Florida Hometown Democracy works in a California county

Editor's note: While Florida and the Treasure Coast wrestle with growth and sprawl, a Southern California county voted to manage development via voter referendums — similar to what Florida Hometown Democracy proposes. Here’s a status report on Ventura County’s program to Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, a decade after its implementation.

Ten years of SOAR have been good for Ventura County. Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources has clearly accomplished its major goal, stopping piecemeal development of the greenbelt buffers between our cities.

Many of SOAR’s staunchest foes now agree that the voters’ decision to protect farmland and open space from urban sprawl has been a success.

SOAR created a growth boundary around virtually every city in Ventura County for a 20-year period. The growth boundary cannot be expanded without getting approval from the voters. (There are a few minor exceptions, for example public buildings like fire stations, etc.)

Requiring a public vote before breaking a city’s growth boundary has had many refreshing benefits and none of the negatives that critics predicted.

There have been 10 elections over 11 years. Small projects generally have been approved while larger ones have not. The only exception was a 400-home project that passed. Developers pay for the cost of conducting these public referendums.

Among its many benefits, SOAR makes it more likely that our sense of community will stay strong in Ventura County. When cities sprawl together people lose their sense of place. Community connections improve when we live in environments that are clearly defined, and on a scale that we can get our heads and hearts around.

Additionally, SOAR has changed the power structure of local politics in Ventura County. Before SOAR, local governments were lobbied almost exclusively by pro-development forces. Today, SOAR forces serve as a counter balance to that old influence. It is no coincidence that tougher local campaign finance reform laws and other good government policies have been passed since the advent of SOAR.

A final benefit of SOAR is the overall paradigm shift in thinking about land use in Ventura County. A growing number of cities are now embracing smart-growth principles. Plans now call for a greater variety of housing options built inside existing city boundaries, rather than the almost exclusive construction of single-family homes on agricultural land outside a city. There will be more affordable, mixed use, housing units built, often in revitalized city centers that de-emphasize the automobile.

Compelling evidence of this paradigm shift is the recent action of the Ventura City Council. The council adopted a new General Plan that calls for no expansion of the city boundaries. Ventura will meet its growth needs with infill projects which will further revitalize the downtown core that had been abandoned in the suburb sprawl days.

Having made one paradigm shift also makes us more open to other creative ideas needed to face tomorrow’s challenges. Progressive ideas such as workforce housing dedicated to a particular business, countywide bicycle lanes, and mass transit options are now received more openly in this post SOAR environment.

During the SOAR campaigns of the mid ’90s, claims of impending disaster bordered on hysteria. Understandably, they were often made by groups who believed SOAR threatened their profit pipeline. But SOAR has not caused crime to rise, has not cost taxpayers the feared millions in legal defense fees, nor has it led to a dramatic drop in agricultural land prices.

Most significantly, SOAR has not caused high housing prices. Ventura County housing costs are high, but they have not risen faster than other coastal counties that have squandered their agricultural land to urban sprawl..

All Southern California coastal counties struggle with affordable housing challenges. The difference between them and us is simple. They have the same high housing prices yet have sacrificed their agricultural lands and the quality of life associated with a semi-rural environment. We have not.

Ventura County citizens should be proud. When they approved SOAR, they creatively addressed one of the toughest problems in Southern California, urban sprawl. That said, we still have real challenges ahead of us. We, like all other Southern California coastal counties, will see our populations age, with or without SOAR. We like all other coastal counties face a workforce housing crisis. Creativity, not urban sprawl, is the solution Californians need for these problems. We don’t have to pave over our greenbelts before we get creative.

We must tackle these problems while protecting our beautiful, semi-rural county, a county that provides us with a sense of place and refuge from the urban congestion that plagues the rest of Southern California. We intend to honor and preserve our precious land resources because a society should be noted not only for what it creates, but for what is refuses to destroy.

Bennett is a county commissioner in Ventura County and co-authored SOAR.