Maturing City Carries Planner’s Imprint : Government: Matthew Boden generally shuns the spotlight, but those who know the community say the planning director’s influence is everywhere.

City councils come and go. Planning commissions come and go. Then there’s Matthew A. (Tony) Boden.

When Boden arrived in Camarillo in 1972 as planning director, he was only 30 years old. His new city was just 8 years old and still struggling to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up.

Two decades later, a maturing Camarillo carries Boden’s understated stamp.

“I’d say he’s singly the most important individual in how the city looks and feels,” said Bill Teller of Pardee Construction Co., the city’s largest builder.

Boden, City Councilman David M. Smith said, “is the keeper of the vision of what the people of Camarillo wanted their city to be.”

Camarillo’s population has nearly tripled to 56,000 since Boden came to town. And those who know the city well say his imprint is everywhere.

City councils have set the policy, but Boden has filled in the blanks. He inherited a skeleton, then provided the flesh.

“Tony doesn’t just take what developers bring to him and say, ‘Let’s take it to the council,’ ” City Councilwoman Charlotte Craven said. “He has his own ideas of what the people want this place to be. So he whittles things down and makes changes to where he thinks it’s acceptable to the community.”

Sometimes the developers complain, Craven said, “but I’m sure Tony takes that as a compliment.”

Actually, Boden--a large, calm man who rarely raises his voice and generally shuns the spotlight--is not so much complimented by the assertions as wary of them.

“That’s a lot of weight to put on one person. I never felt that way,” he said. “Some people have said I’m the guru of development here, but a lot of that would have happened whether I was here or not.”

Red-tiled and earth-toned, Camarillo is a patchwork of small shopping centers and sprawling housing tracts, of parks for recreation and parks for industry.

Meshing Colors

From the Good Nite Inn to In-and-Out Burger, the roofs mesh and the colors match in response to a strict design code that regulates everything from the framing of business logos to landscaping in parking lots.

Tiles, wood and stucco are the favored facades. And paint colors of brown and white are the norm.

Billboards are taboo. Signs cannot flash or move.

The goal is an atmosphere both rural and uncrowded and pleasant to behold.

“It carries forward that feeling people have when they visit resorts and feel good about it,” Boden said. “They said, ‘Why can’t we have a city like that.’ ”

Whether the result is good or bad is a matter of interpretation.

City residents seem to like the look and believe it has helped Camarillo retain a distinctive small-town flavor.

“They’re turning a little farming town into a nice little sophisticated city,” said rancher Gerald FitzGerald, a grandson of city pioneer Adolfo Camarillo. “I grew up when there was one grocery store and no choice, so I like the way it’s grown. I have no nostalgia for the good old days.”

Keith Turner, the county’s planning director, said he also believes that “Camarillo has developed a rather clean and architecturally distinct community. From an aesthetic and drive-through standpoint, I think things are in rather good shape.”

But William Fulton, editor and publisher of a Ventura-based planning industry newsletter, said he sees Camarillo as just another suburban city, indistinguishable from the blur of communities in Orange County.

“It’s shopping centers, parking lots, an arterial highway and walled-off subdivisions,” Fulton said. “It’s low-rise, auto-oriented and very suburban.

“It’s like 100 other communities in California,” he added. “If you put me blindfolded in that town, I wouldn’t be able to tell you where I was. And that’s the test of whether you have a place.”

In contrast, downtown Ventura has a distinct identity and serves as that city’s focal point, marked by a variety of activities that work well together, Fulton said.

“Deciding what color and roof design buildings should have is just nibbling on the margins,” he said.

Boden disagreed. He said Camarillo residents identify strongly with their community and like the way its early California and Mediterranean designs have tied the city together visually.

“I hear it from a lot of people,” he said. “After they visit other parts of the country, they come home and say they really feel good about living in Camarillo.”

No City Hub

It’s true, Boden acknowledged, that there is no real center to his city.

“That was the problem when I first started looking at the General Plan,” he said. “There was no downtown area to consider as your focal point.”

Old Ventura Boulevard had been the downtown for the tiny Camarillo farming community of the 1950s. But by Boden’s arrival in 1972, the district had been overshadowed by four scattered shopping centers, and two more already had been approved.

That not only crippled the old downtown, it made it difficult to lure a large shopping center to the city, Boden said. Residents still complain of the city’s small “shopettes” that force them to leave town for serious comparative buying.

Camarillo, which loses millions of dollars a year in taxes because of out-of-city sales, has approved construction of a manufacturers’ outlet mall to make up for the lost revenue.

Boden said the city also needs to work on providing more local jobs. But progress has been made, he said, since 40% of workers who live in Camarillo are now employed there--up from less than 10% two decades ago.

The veteran planner said his forte has always been the nuts and bolts of making a city work, not academic planning theory.

“I try to envision how it would be if I was living in that project,” he said.

Boden said he takes pride in projects that work out well, and feels personally responsible for those that don’t. “I’ve found that if you take care of the details, things tend to fall into place.”

He counts among his successes the Camarillo Business Center, a five-building office park that fronts the Ventura Freeway and--next to the city’s expanses of farmland--is Camarillo’s most noticeable feature to people driving through.

The center, begun in 1976, is distinctive because it was the city’s first large project that mixed so many of its preferred elements of design: meandering sidewalks, lush landscapes, public walking areas, deep setbacks from the street and the early California motif.

As a result, the office complex is four stories high, but not imposing.

But there are failures too. Boden said he allowed the large Pardee Building at Las Posas and Adolfo roads to be built much too close to the street.

And in the late 1970s, Boden fought a losing battle to block the Woodside Greens subdivision because it was south of the Ventura Freeway in an area master-planned for industry and agriculture.

“I think it’s a very nice subdivision,” he said. “It’s just in the wrong location.”

Boden never did make a formal recommendation on Sammis Co.’s now-defunct proposal last fall to put a 900,000-square-foot shopping center on farmland in the same area.

Opponents of the project said they believed that Boden favored it because it would produce $2.3 million in sales tax. But he said he thought it was “too massive” and made no recommendation because the situation was so political.

“It was clearly a political decision, not a planning decision,” he said.

City’s Watchdog

Generally, however, local residents say they see Boden as their watchdog, meticulous and diligent in exacting all he can from developers.

Bill Torrence, president of a homeowners’ group involved in the Sammis fight, said Boden is easy to reach and gives straight answers.

“He’s fair and he has a lot of integrity,” Torrence said. “He’s looked out for the city to try to get industry here. But he also recognizes the needs of the people.”

Some property owners say they resent what they see as Boden’s arm-twisting. “Everybody in this town treads lightly until they get their projects approved, then they start complaining,” said a landowner who asked not to be identified. “He holds a big stick. And if he doesn’t get precisely what he thinks the city needs, he holds up the project.”

Developers say the city’s standards have forced them to design their projects with extraordinary care.

“I’ve never seen a city so involved with the planning and development of their community,” said Teller, Pardee’s project manager in Ventura County. “They take extra pain and almost a personal responsibility to make sure they get what they perceive to be quality growth. I don’t always agree with them, but I don’t doubt their sincerity.”

Boden, who will be 51 next week, was a youth sports coach when his three children were young and is past president of the Pleasant Valley Baseball Assn.

A former president of the Planning Division of the California League of Cities, he was named Public Servant of the Year by the Camarillo Chamber of Commerce for 1992.

If he has enemies, Boden said, “they’re probably developers I just couldn’t support.”