Rivalry Fades as Urban Issues Pull 2 Cities Together

It has been 35 years since Carl Ward, then mayor of Oxnard, made a modest proposal that literally threatened the longevity of neighboring Port Hueneme.

After years of on-and-off debate, the mayor formally proposed that Port Hueneme be merged into the substantially larger Oxnard. This single new town, to be called Cabrillo, would be governed primarily by the existing Oxnard administration.

The plan didn’t go over well in Port Hueneme.

The proposed consolidation is one of many heated issues that have marked the history of the two interlocked cities.

The nearly 100-year-old relationship between Port Hueneme and Oxnard has at times been contentious and sometimes litigious, particularly in the mid-1950s when the two cities jockeyed for unclaimed land.

More recently, however, officials of Oxnard, with a population of about 142,000, and Port Hueneme, with slightly more than 20,000 residents, have worked closely on sewage treatment, street maintenance and other urban concerns affecting both municipalities.

And the future, say city leaders, will probably see continued cooperation, out of desire and economic necessity. As the recession and the state budget crisis continue to pinch city coffers, the two cities are considering sharing services that run from police patrols to animal regulation.

Relations have come a long way since 1958, when Ward’s proposed consolidation angered many Port Hueneme residents determined that their town should maintain its own identity.

Accounts of the days after Ward’s proposal tell of city residents gathering in protest and signing petitions opposing the plan, of references by Port Hueneme officials to the “greedy ambitions” of Oxnard leaders.

“They were trying to incorporate our city into their own,” said Walter Moranda, Port Hueneme’s city administrator from 1955 to 1975. “In other words, they wanted to eliminate the city of Hueneme altogether.”

Ward saw it differently. At the time, he viewed Port Hueneme’s need for improved recreation facilities, bus service and water supply as necessities that the larger, more financially sound Oxnard could provide. He cited what Oxnard could provide as one of the reasons Port Hueneme should go along with the merger plan.

Now, he says, Port Hueneme residents made a much bigger deal of it than those in Oxnard.

“I don’t think there was much feeling of any kind from the people of Oxnard,” he said. “It really didn’t make much difference to me, though I think it would have been much better for Hueneme if they had consolidated.”

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Plans for the merger ultimately died in 1960 when a petition drive failed to garner the support of 25% of Port Hueneme voters. On the other hand, said longtime Port Hueneme resident Elaine Garber, the proposal actually unified city residents.

“I remember walking around the neighborhood to see how everyone felt,” said Garber, who moved from Minnesota to Oxnard in 1955 and from Oxnard to Port Hueneme a year later.

“Everyone was saying, ‘We moved to Hueneme because we wanted to be in Hueneme.’ There wasn’t resentment as much as people were saying, ‘No, you’re not going to annex us,’ ” she said. “It was a catalyst to the people of Hueneme knowing they wanted their own city.”

Port Hueneme incorporated in 1948, but Hueneme residents had their own place to call home back in 1872.

Anchored by a much-used wharf built by oilman Thomas Bard, the town flourished until 1897 when the Oxnard brothers--Robert, Benjamin, Henry and James--chose their future namesake as the site for a new $2-million American Beet Sugar Co. factory.

With the factory up and running, and employment opportunities on the rise, residents of Hueneme picked up everything they owned--houses, buildings and all--and moved to the newly bustling town of Oxnard.

An item in the September, 1900, edition of the Hueneme Herald illustrated the frustration of the Hueneme citizenry: “Our lively sister, Oxnard, has been most unkind to us the past weeks by taking some of our good citizens for her own. . . .”

The Bank of A. Levy building, a Hueneme institution for 18 years, put another nail in the coffin when it relocated to Oxnard in 1904, a year after that city incorporated.

“As Oxnard grew more and more prosperous, it created a ghost town in Hueneme,” said Brady Cherry, Port Hueneme’s director of recreation and community services. “That created a sentiment of rivalry, a little bit of jealousy, perhaps.”

Madeline Miedema, an Oxnard resident since 1918, remembers Hueneme as a “flourishing seaport” before the arrival of the sugar beat factory.

“By the time Oxnard was founded, Hueneme had a well-established tradition,” Miedema said. “The fact that Hueneme just died a natural death after Oxnard was founded is cause for, I guess, regret on their part.”

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The rise of Oxnard and the accompanying fall of Port Hueneme were just the beginning of the back and forth shifting of the two cities. Their shared history is littered with annexation attempts as each city’s leaders tried to extend the reach of their respective locales.

“We were in court two or three times on annexation both ways,” Moranda said. “They stopped Hueneme. Hueneme stopped Oxnard. Oxnard would start over again.”

The land battles began in 1955, when Port Hueneme annexed 23 acres of county land east of Oxnard that is now the city’s Bubbling Springs Park, said Powell Greenland, president of the Southern California Historical Society and a Port Hueneme resident.

Oxnard countered by announcing the takeover of a 108-acre strip of land, which would have, in effect, prevented Port Hueneme from growing to the east, Greenland said. Then Port Hueneme officials announced their intent to annex 224 acres surrounding the 108 acres, separating that strip from the rest of Oxnard.

The issue was finally settled in court, with Oxnard getting the 108 acres and Port Hueneme getting nothing.

A glance at a present-day map shows the final results of all the maneuvering: Port Hueneme, a town of 4 1/2 square miles, is bordered one one side by the Pacific Ocean and surrounded on the other three sides by the 25-square-mile Oxnard.

“In some ways it’s like sleeping next to an elephant,” Cherry said. “If they roll over, we can be crushed.

“On one hand, there has been some strain in the relationship over the last 100 years, but we’ve seen that because the communities are so closely connected we are sister cities in a lot of ways.”

Since 1976, the cities have shared a sewage treatment facility, in Oxnard. They have worked together on street maintenance and improvement projects at shared intersections since the mid-1980s. Current resurfacing of the intersection at Victoria Avenue and Channel Islands Boulevard is one of those projects.

The two cities and the commercial Port of Hueneme have combined efforts to attack the traffic problems that stem from the port.

And last May, Oxnard and Port Hueneme leaders discussed the benefits of sharing services to cut costs. Options of combining fire, animal control and police services, and of working together to improve water quality, were tossed around.

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There is also a plan to revamp the intersection of Channel Islands Boulevard and Ventura Road, to be done as a joint project among Port Hueneme, Oxnard and the Naval Construction Battalion Center.

“You look at today’s economic times and how badly local governments are faring, and I think we need to push for cooperation,” said Assemblyman Nao Takasugi (R-Oxnard). Takasugi was mayor of Oxnard from 1982 to 1992 and a city councilman the six years before that.

“More and more, we need to explore innovative ways municipalities can cut back on the cost of services,” he said.

Port Hueneme City Councilman and former Mayor Dorril Wright agreed.

“We have to work together,” he said. “On some of the major issues, we can take advantage of the larger size of Oxnard. By the same token, the Port of Hueneme is in Port Hueneme.”

Officials and residents of the two cities say that along with increased cooperation has come a lessening of the rivalry that existed a half-century ago.

“I don’t sense a rivalry, just a good working relationship,” said Oxnard Councilman Michael Plisky. “There’s a strong mutual respect. Many times I’ve asked our staff to look at some of (Port Hueneme’s) projects for ideas in planning and landscape.”

Wright said he sees the relationship as akin to that of cross-town rival football teams.

“And I think that’s good,” he said. “It’s a friendly rivalry that in the recent past has led to aesthetic improvements in the two cities.”

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In recent years, Port Hueneme has made efforts to distinguish itself from Oxnard through landscaping and architectural themes.

Carroll Lorbeer, a resident of Oxnard since 1950, said any rivalry over the past 40 years has been between city leaders, not residents.

“Oxnard should look at Hueneme with pride,” he said, “not look down on them just because they are Hueneme.”

Where Wright likened the cities to sports teams, Lorbeer compared them to transportation companies.

“A rivalry? Like Greyhound Bus Lines and the Southern Pacific Railroad,” he said. “The way Oxnard is functioning is like Greyhound. . . . We ought to be humble with the high-quality management that Hueneme is getting compared to Oxnard.”

Through all the changes over the past century, Port Hueneme residents say, they have maintained their desire for an identity separate from that of Hueneme’s larger sibling. They have just adapted to changes in the economy.

“I think we have a certain amount of pride, but that pride might be expensive if we have to shortchange services,” said resident Gilbert Luna. “Unfortunately, with the financial crunch, perhaps we have to bite the bullet and compromise on things, a lot of joint agreements.”