Sierra Club, Chamber Agree on 2 Candidates

VENTURA — Breaking with Ventura’s usually polarized politics, local grass-roots environmental groups and the pro-business Chamber of Commerce have endorsed the same two candidates for the Ventura City Council race.

The news sparked immediate speculation that this could signal a dramatic shift in city politics.

“All signals suggest that we will have the most centrist council we have had in anybody’s memory,” said Bill Fulton, an expert on urban planning and local government across California. “And that’s good.”

Members of the Voters Coalition and the local chapter of the Sierra Club announced Thursday they will back businessman Brian Brennan, local restaurateur Sandy Smith and county planner Carl Morehouse for three of the four seats up for grabs on the council.

Last week members of the Chamber of Commerce political action committee said they also planned to funnel their considerable financial resources into supporting Smith and Brennan.

The chamber endorsed five-term veteran Councilman Jim Monahan as a third candidate, and decided not to push a candidate for the fourth seat.

The environmental political action committee was formed in 1989 and backed three council candidates, all of whom won handily in that election, garnering about 10,000 votes apiece. In 1991, the Chamber of Commerce formed its own political action committee. The chamber backed Tom Buford, Greg Carson and Jack Tingstrom--who also won.

But this is the first time since the two groups were formed that they have backed the same candidates, representatives of both groups said Thursday.

“I think this is unique in the history of Ventura,” said Joy Kobayashi, political chairwoman of the Los Padres chapter of the Sierra Club.

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Added Ken Schmitz, chairman of the Chamber PAC: “To my knowledge, this has never happened before.”

Fulton said the biggest problem with Ventura politics the past two decades has been the lack of a political center.

“We’ve been bouncing back and forth between the chamber and the enviros for 20 years,” Fulton said. “Finally we have people who are acceptable to both sides and who have attempted to be centrist over a long period of time.”

Smith, who received both endorsements, said he believes the change reflects Ventura’s political evolution into an established city with limited room to grow.

“We aren’t the old west anymore. Everybody started realizing that we are a mature community in terms of building out,” said Smith, an 11-year member of the Chamber of Commerce. “At that point you start wondering how you are going to improve the areas you already have . . . and that brings the two sides together.”

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Councilman Steve Bennett, who heads the environmental Voters Coalition, partly credited the Save Our Agricultural Resources (SOAR) initiative--which removed designated farmland in Ventura from development until 2030 without voter approval--for bridging the divide between environmental and business interests.

“The SOAR campaign has changed the political landscape of Ventura,” Bennett said. “The concept of paving over everything has become so discredited that the chamber . . . and that extreme political base has been shaken.”

But Bennett stopped short of calling the double endorsements a landmark change.

That, he said, will come only when the chamber endorses someone who is not already a chamber insider, as he claims both Smith and Brennan are.

“If they had endorsed Carl Morehouse, then you could have really said, ‘Wow!’ ” Bennett said.

Morehouse, a county planner with no political experience but a strong grasp of county and state government, is one of the 10 candidates running for the four council seats.

Other candidates include retired engineer and perennial candidate Carroll Dean Williams, researcher Brian Lee Rencher, motorcycle magazine editor Mike Osborn, business owner Doug Halter, lawyer Donna De Paola and California Highway Patrol Officer Paul W. Thompson.

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Like Bennett, Schmitz downplayed the significance of the overlapping endorsements.

He credited the shift less with a change in the chamber, than with a change in the way the chamber is perceived by the public.

“Business candidates have always been painted as trying to bring in the developers, bring in the concrete, bring in the asphalt,” Schmitz said. “We haven’t shifted that much. But maybe we have changed how we are trying to portray ourselves.”

Brennan, who has developed strong ties to both the environment and pro-business camps, is a member of the chamber’s board of directors, and the former head of the local chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, an environmental group.

“There’s an inherent distrust, almost knee-jerk, between the two groups,” Brennan said. “I’m not a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Sometimes everything I do will not be good for business. But this shows that both groups believe we share some common ground.”