Farmers and ranchers in Ventura County have pushed back against a new wildlife ordinance that they consider a severe overreach of local government — one they say unreasonably restricts how they manage their land and run their businesses. In March, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors passed the Wildlife Corridor Ordinance by a 3-2 vote, aiming to protect the movement of wildlife between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Los Padres National Forest through territory along the Santa Clara and Ventura rivers and from the eastern border of the county to the Ojai Valley. The ordinance places strict restrictions on impermeable fencing, nighttime lighting, construction of structures and brush clearance within the corridor’s overlay zones, which comprise a total of 163,000 acres. Business and property owners in these zones feel the restrictions are too heavy and are protesting the ordinance’s passage without adequate environmental review. Business advocacy group Ventura County Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business, or CoLAB, has sued the county over the ordinance. Business impact The ordinance bans the removal of any vegetation within 200 feet of the edge of any “water features.” These features include natural dips and valleys of any size that could, at any time, collect running water — even miniscule gullies that only trickle for an hour after it rains. Rancher Bud Sloan, president of CoLAB’s board, said these dips and valleys are part of Ventura County’s mountainous landscape and are simply unavoidable for the region’s landowners. It is now illegal for Sloan to conduct routine range management on massive swathes of his property without approval from the county. “I’ve just lost 440 acres, and nobody paid me a dime,” he said. “I can graze them, but I can’t maintain them. I can’t take care of weeds and plants, and if I do, I have to get a discretionary permit.” Discretionary permits require the county’s planning department to approve activity on a case-by-case basis and apply to everything from clearing brush to raising a barn to extending a fence. Every discretionary permit issued by the county must pass an inspection under the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA. These inspections can take months and are massively expensive, as it is the applicant’s duty to pay for a biologist to conduct an environmental impact review. Olive farmer Mark Mooring, who also sits on CoLAB’s board and runs Buon Gusto Farms outside Ventura, called EIRs a “kiss of death” for a business owner. “To clear a few hundred feet of brush might cost thousands,” said Sloan. Structures present another major point of contention. The ordinance contains a new compact development standard requiring any new structures — worker housing, stables, barns, sheds and the like — to be built within 100 feet of the primary structure, which is typically a farmer’s home. Such a standard will certainly prevent farms and ranch operations from expanding in the future. “I don’t want my horses to be 100 feet from my home,” said Mooring. “We’re an organic operation that uses sheep for weed control — you’re telling me those pens have to be 100 feet from my home or from where I’m processing food products?” Other restrictions prevent landowners from using barbed wire fencing — a necessity for cattle ranchers — and from putting up nighttime lighting that may deter criminals. And if property owners want to do these things, expensive discretionary permits loom in their future. CEQA bypass Normally, a law such as the Wildlife Corridor Ordinance is required to undergo an environmental review process under CEQA before becoming law. But Ventura County, in a bid to pass the ordinance as quickly as possible, skipped this key environmental review. A section of CEQA states that proposals are exempt from review if it can be seen with certainty that they will not cause harm to the environment, but Lynn Jensen, executive director of CoLAB, said this is not the case for the wildlife ordinance. “In the end, they rushed it through. They never did an analysis. They never even wrote a paragraph explaining their claims,” said Jensen. “You can’t put this much land under this many restrictions (without environmental review).” On behalf of those affected, CoLAB, along with the California Construction and Industrial Materials Association, filed a lawsuit against the county in late April seeking to force the ordinance through a CEQA review. Such a review, CoLAB contends, would expose the ordinance’s many environmental consequences that the county overlooked in its rush to pass the law. From there, the group may seek amendments that would make the ordinance safer and more manageable for landowners or push to get it thrown out entirely. “Rather than taking the required time to study the issues … the county instead hastily drafted and enacted an ordinance in a manner contrary to law and that does not even accomplish its desired objectives,” reads the lawsuit. Most notably, Jensen said, the ordinance’s restrictions on brush clearance make it impossible to adequately prevent and fight the spread of wildfires—an ever-growing threat in arid, windy Southern California. “Fires that have come through here in the last two years have been devastating to the habitat,” she said. For Sloan, the rancher who heads CoLAB’s board, this restriction hits close to home. He lost 63 cows and a bull in the Thomas Fire that roared through 280,000 acres in Ventura and Santa Barbara County in December 2017. “There was such an overgrowth of brush and the fire department couldn’t keep up with it. When it became a perfect storm with 80 mile per hour winds, that’s why we lost 600 or 700 homes in Ventura,” he said. Mooring, of Buon Gusto Farms, found himself directly in the path of the Thomas Fire. “If I hadn’t stayed and fought with my own firefighting equipment, I stood a good chance of losing some of my olive storage and my commercial kitchen where I process and fill bottles. There’s a big chance I’d have lost that and my home,” said Mooring. About 119,500 of the wildlife corridor’s 163,000 acres lie within state responsibility fire hazard zones. Outside of CEQA, CoLAB contests that the ordinance violates constitutional rights to due process and equal protection due to exemptions granted to some properties but not others. In addition, CoLAB maintains that the laws won’t help wildlife movement in the region. “We hired a biological consultant to look at the data,” Jensen told the Business Journal. “The consulting biologist said the main problem (for wildlife movement) was roads and freeways, not private parkland.”
