A Brief History of Environmental Activism in Ojai

A Brief History of Environmental Activism in the Ojai Valley

The citizenry of Ojai has a long history of successful fights against major development proposals which threatened to change the nature of the Ojai Valley.  This brief summary presents an overview of the biggest campaigns that Ojai residents have led over the past half century.

Some of these campaigns opposed specific projects slated for the Ojai Valley. Others contested proposals outside Ojai, whose air quality impacts would have led to greatly reduced air quality in the Ojai Valley. Air pollution blows in to Ojai from the direction of the ocean and gets held there by the hills that surround the valley.

  Any history of environmental campaigns in Ojai must begin with Pat Weinberger, who moved here from Akron, Ohio in the early 1960’s with her neurosurgeon husband Dr. Larry Weinberger.

  Pat jumped into activism right away. Among her early campaigns were those that stopped the construction of a freeway through Ojai, from Carpinteria to Santa Paula, on the Hwy 150 route; and the blocking of 2 of 4 proposed electric generating units for Southern California Edison’s Ormond Beach plant, reducing by half the proposed air quality impacts on the Ojai Valley.

  Perhaps the campaign Pat is most proud of was the creation of the Teague Memorial Watershed around the edge of what was then the new Lake Casitas. Pat found out that the watershed was zoned for 10,000 single-family homes, which would have meant a new city of some 25,000 residents on five square miles of land west of the lake.

  She enlisted the help of Congressman John Seiberling of Ohio, who she had grown up with and who was in a position in Congress to move federal legislation to establish the protected watershed. (Congressman Seiberling was a longtime champion of National Parks and wilderness areas.) The watershed was thus protected from development and the lake’s water quality was preserved from a substantial source of contamination.

  Pat also led a later campaign in the late 1990’s, to protect Lake Casitas’ water quality from being contaminated by the opening up of the lake to swimming. Body contact with the lake would have introduced dangerous bacteria into our water supply.

  The other really big campaign that Pat Weinberger led was the opposition to US Gypsum’s proposal in the early 1970’s to construct open-pit phosphate mines on the south slope of Pine Mountain, at an elevation of 6,000 feet, east of the summit of Hwy 33 between Ojai and Lockwood Valley.

  The beautiful mountainside that forms the northern rim of Sespe Creek’s watershed was to have been floodlit all night to allow the 24-hour mining of a 5-mile stretch of hillside. Half a million gallons of concentrated sulfuric acid was to have been stored on site, and Godwin Creek, a Sespe tributary, was to be dammed to hold highly acidic mine tailings.

  As with the current sand and gravel mining plans for the Cuyama Valley, the main impact on Ojai of the phosphate mines would have been the convoys of up to100 truck and trailer rigs coming down Hwy 33 through Ojai every day – 24 hours a day.

  The US Dept of Interior held an all-day public hearing on the phosphate mining proposal at Nordhoff High School, attended by California’s two Senators (Cranston and Tunney) and 1800 concerned citizens. In the end, the project was dropped when an enormous new deposit of phosphate was discovered elsewhere, causing the world price of phosphate to drop substantially. Without local opposition, which slowed the project down, the mines would have been in operation long before this price drop occurred.

  Pat Weinberger also put a stop to a motorcycle race track past the top of Dennsion Grade, and to a proposal for an Albertson’s supermarket on the open field on Hwy 33 opposite the Nordhoff stadium.

  She founded, organized and led two important environmental organizations – the Citizens to Preserve the Ojai and the countywide Environmental Coalition, both of which then had many hundreds of members who could be counted on to get involved and show up at public hearings.

  Ojai was also very fortunate in those days to have an activist owner/editor of the Ojai Valley News. Fred Volz covered the development battles in great detail, and editorialized loudly and clearly on the inside pages about any number of threats to the Ojai Valley.  The vitality with which Fred Volz engaged the citizens of Ojai through the Ojai Valley News has been unmatched in the recent years of the paper’s absentee ownership – and is sorely missed.

  By the mid-1980’s Pat Weinberger grew less active in environmental causes, chiefly due to her need to focus on the care of a daughter and later a husband, both with terminal ailments. Nobody that knows her would say that Pat ever retired, though!

  Development proposals that rankled many Ojai citizens continued to be proposed through the 1980’s and 1990’s. The Palmer property, behind the Nordhoff bleachers, was the site of a proposed big box Vons store and a TG&Y on 9 acres – with 20 acres of new housing in back. Rich Handley and Wini Hirsch were instrumental in opposing that project, starting in 1981.

  Shopping center opponents first had to work to get candidates elected to the Ojai City Council who were against the project. The Ojai City Council rejected the project and the developer appealed to the courts. The CA Supreme Court declined to hear the developer’s final appeal – and he went bankrupt.  Other proposals for the property were put forward, but only in 1999 did the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy acquire the land as a permanent open space preserve – the Ojai Meadows Preserve.

  Following a similar pattern, a developer by the name of Schuck proposed 150 town houses on Besant Meadow, between the Ranch House Restaurant and Meiners Oaks Elementary School, around 1986. This proposal eventually failed and the owner also went bankrupt. Rich Handley led this campaign too, and this property as well was finally preserved in 2000 when acquired by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy as part of the Ojai Meadows Preserve. Instrumental in the collapse of the Besant Meadows townhouses project was CalTrans’ designation of the Hwy 33 rush hour bottleneck through Casitas Springs as Level F – their worst category of congestion. This led to Ventura County Supervisors voting to put a moratorium on new subdivisions in the Ojai Valley – until Hwy 33 is improved.  The moratorium was backdated to where it prohibited the Schuck townhouses.

  The early 1980’s saw the threat of uranium mining in the Lake Casitas watershed, which was opposed by a group of Ojai citizens under the banner SUN – Stop Uranium Now.

  The expansion of the Petrochem oil refinery adjacent to the 33 freeway also came up in the 1980’s. This would have led to major air quality impacts on the Ojai Valley. Stan Greene was a leader of the opposition to this proposal. Petrochem is now permanently shut down.

  The early 1990’s saw a proposal north of the Ventura River and east of the 101, near the ocean. Taylor Ranch was slated for a CalState University campus, with as many as 35,000 residents. Once again, the air quality impacts on the Ojai Valley were considerable. This proposal also went down, and the CalState Channel Islands campus was developed instead.

  The biggest campaign of the last two decades in the Ojai Valley was the opposition in the 1990’s to Weldon Canyon as West Ventura County’s main landfill. In spite of clear and detrimental air quality impacts from the hundreds of trash truck trips per day, the powers were moving along the Weldon landfill proposal, to be operated by Waste Management Inc. Weldon Canyon is situated south of the 33 Freeway and west of Casitas Springs.

  Hundreds of people turned out at the public hearings before the Ventura County Board of Supervisors. Major opponents of the landfill were Nina Shelley, then a longtime member of the Ojai City Council, and Ojai resident John Nava.

  In the end County Supervisor John Flynn changed his position (his Oxnard constituents had housed the previous west county landfill – it was someone else’s turn now, he said) and voted against the Weldon landfill, which doomed the project.

  The other big development proposal defeated in the 1990’s was the Farmont Golf Club proposal north of Hwy 150 and west of Rancho Matilija. The writer of this column was the main opponent of this proposal, which dragged on throughout the 1990’s. A lot of help came from Russ and Pat Baggerly, who also were both actively involved for over twenty years in keeping a close eye on our local government, and voicing their concerns. Another major ally was Ojai/Ventura Voice editor Jeff San Marchi, who printed over 50 articles about the Farmont proposal, over a decade. 

Most of the Farmont property eventually was purchased largely with funds set aside for open space preservation from a California voter-approved bond measure – and is now owned and managed by the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy as the Ventura River Preserve.

There’ll be an entire article sometime soon in the Ojai/Ventura View on the Farmont. The quick story goes like this – in the late 1980’s, Kagehisa Toyama, owner of a conservative radio station in Japan, initially proposed a Camp David West on his Ojai property, an exclusive, golf course and hotel for world leaders to meet at. County Supervisors voted it down as hotels are prohibited in open space zoning. Mr. Toyama then scaled it down to an exclusive golf course and clubhouse. Local opposition grew over the water needed for a golf course in an area of diminishing well capacity. County Supervisors voted for the project; opponents appealed to the courts. Eventually Mr. Toyama ran out of steam, and died before the property could be sold. The land was purchased by a New York developer, who later sold it (mostly) to the open space Ventura River Preserve and (partly) to a farmer who lives in Rancho Matilija. 

The first decade of the new century has been relatively quiet regarding big development proposals in the Ojai Valley. But as we saw with the creation of the “Stop the Trucks” Coalition, opposing dozens of gravel trucks from passing through Ojai from Lockwood Valley, Ojai residents are ever ready to protect their beloved valley.