Appeals Court Affirms Ventura Greenbelt Law

An appeals court has upheld Ventura’s sweeping farmland preservation law, dealing a second blow to a coalition of farmers and landowners who argue that the 1995 voter-approved initiative violates their constitutional property rights.

A 2nd District Court of Appeal panel ruled unanimously this week that Ventura voters have the right to decide at the ballot box whether thousands of acres of farmland in and around the city should be paved over for more houses, shopping centers or other development.

“It’s satisfying. It’s not surprising,” said Ventura Councilman Steve Bennett, who was one of the initiative’s principal backers. “We knew it was legal. This confirms that.”

But an attorney for landowners said the three-judge panel left room to take the case to the California Supreme Court. His clients are now weighing that option.

Approved by 52% of voters in November 1995, Measure I forbids nearly all development in the city’s greenbelt areas for at least 35 years--unless the development project wins permission from a majority of voters.

Shortly after the measure passed, outraged farmers and landowners filed suit in Ventura County Superior Court, alleging that their property rights were violated and their land values reduced by as much as one-third.

The lawsuit pointed out that owners of land just outside the city limits are affected by the law but cannot take part in votes concerning their land because they are not city residents. That raises constitutional issues of voting rights and equal protection under the law, the suit argued.

The appeals court dismissed such claims, ruling that nothing has ever precluded property owners outside the city limits from asking the Board of Supervisors to allow them to develop their land rather than approaching the city for permission and running the risk that the project would first need approval from city voters.

If supervisors agreed to allow urban development on the agricultural land, “there is nothing in Measure I to prevent it,” the appeals court ruling stated.

On Thursday, the landowners’ attorney, John H. Findley, called the decision a partial victory for his clients.

But the measure’s backers said they have never disputed the property owners’ ability to seek development approvals from the Board of Supervisors.

“They didn’t win anything,” said Susan Goodkin, an attorney who helped defend a similar law in Napa County and who has long held that Measure I is legally bulletproof. “That was the law before the initiative, that was the law after the initiative. . . . That’s not a victory.”

Former Mayor Richard L. Francis, an attorney who drafted Measure I, said the fact that landowners on the outskirts can still win development approvals points to the need for a countywide farmland measure being modeled after the Ventura law.

And indeed, Bennett said, the appellate ruling comes as further encouragement for slow-growth activists pushing similar ballot initiatives across Ventura County.

The appeals court ruling, Bennett said, “makes it easier to convince voters that this is the right thing to do.”

“They’re giving us good publicity here with all these cases,” Bennett said. “Otherwise, we’d have to advertise that these things are legal. They’re doing it for us.”

Meanwhile, Findley maintains that the case has huge social, economic and environmental ramifications, and his clients are deciding whether to take their case further up the legal ladder to the California or U.S. Supreme Court.

But Goodkin warns against it, noting that the Ventura initiative was modeled after the Napa law, which withstood a California Supreme Court challenge in 1995. She predicted that the challenge to the Ventura law would fail again before the state’s highest court, especially since the appeals court in its ruling cited the Napa case.

“That’s the kind of thing we like to hear,” she said.

Findley, however, believes that the court gave “unnecessary short shrift” to some of the suit’s equal protection claims. He contends the law violates farmland owners’ rights by singling them out as the only landowners who must seek permission from the voters to develop their land.

“It seems they’re unfairly singled out,” Findley said.