Development of Greenbelt Areas

* No amount of post hoc rationalizations and duplicity by the two east county supervisors and their aides can disguise their intentions to “revisit”--i.e., undercut and, ultimately, do away with effective and stringent greenbelt agreements, the Guidelines for Orderly Development, and the growth managements and conservation principles underlying these policies (“Activists Fail to Crash Session on Buffer Zone,” May 3).

Throughout the entire county, these policies and “gentleman’s agreements” dictate to the county and all the cities that development of all kinds and their resultant urbanization be confined well within the defined urban boundaries of the county’s 10 cities and within their existing urban infrastructures, in order to maintain rural open spaces, their valued natural habitats and resources, to support productive farmlands, to conserve scarce public revenues and to avoid taxpayer subsidies to land speculators and developers. These policies should preclude the supervisors and the county from being agents for development on unincorporated lands.

Of course, if you are a supervisor coming from a background of paving over the Simi or Conejo valleys, then these mostly time-honored (by the cities) policies and principles are an anathema and jeopardize your role as a “deal maker.”

When the county supervisors busted the Tierra Rejada greenbelt by approving the Reagan Library and conference center and by failing to enforce threatened vegetation protection permit conditions there, community activists warned this was the first step in appeasing influential developers, who would seek subsequent approvals for nearby luxury home developments. Against the unanimous opposition of the cities, this now has come true when the supervisors unilaterally approved an exclusive home development in the shadow of the Reagan Library.

The supervisors and the county executive have shown, with their sponsorship and approval of the Reagan library and now home development in the Tierra Rejada greenbelt between Simi and Thousand Oaks, the Ahmanson Ranch gated “new town” near Agoura, the new county jail on farmland in a flood hazard zone adjacent to the Santa Clara River near Santa Paula, the water-sucking Farmont Resort near parched Ojai, the ephemeral CSU campus on farmland near Camarillo and the bogus San Antonio Creek “flood control” project north of Ventura, that they are not to be trusted to uphold established, sound growth management and environmental protection policies and laws.

NEIL A. MOYER

President, Environmental Coalition of Ventura County

Ventura