Ojai Activists Smart, Stubborn and No Strangers to Lawsuits : Community: Residents are educated and quick to protect their interests. Their latest battle is against a 98-foot radar weather tower.

By JEFF McDONALD

Jan. 16, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

It is a well-read, well-educated hamlet of a town that does not easily take no for an answer.

Its residents are more likely to vote than those elsewhere in Ventura County; they mobilize quickly, and they don’t take to those they consider a threat to the quality of life rustling through the Ojai Valley.

In recent years, Ojai activists have derailed a would-be landfill, squelched a petroleum plant expansion, felled a university site, muscled into a private golf resort’s development plans and filed numerous lawsuits to protect their interests.

Like it or not--and many clearly do not--citizen activists in the Ojai Valley have become a political force to be reckoned with.

“They’re very, very bright people,” said attorney Mitchel B. Kahn, who represented the waste management firm that last year lost a bid to open a landfill in Weldon Canyon. “Together, they make quite a formidable group.”

A higher percentage of Ojai residents hold college degrees and library cards than in Ventura County as a whole, according to federal and county statistics. In the last two elections, Ojai voter turnout has been four percentage points higher than the county as a whole.

Some say the mystique of the mountains looming above the valley contributes to the unity of its residents.

“It’s geographical,” said Greg Helms of the Environmental Defense Center, a Santa Barbara legal advocacy firm that handles lawsuits for several groups in the area.

“When you live in the Ojai Valley, you’re together in a kind of village,” he said. “It’s a sort of an Old America feeling about the community that lends itself to public participation.”

Mention the community of Ojai in the same breath as activism to officials at USA Petroleum and they clam up.

Oil company officials refused to comment, apparently still smarting from a citizens panel that 10 years ago succeeded in thwarting a planned $100-million expansion at the firm’s Petrochem refinery off North Ventura Avenue.

Those 96 acres have been up for sale ever since.

The latest political battle cry was sounded just last month, days after the National Weather Service erected a 98-foot radar tower atop Sulphur Mountain in the upper Ojai Valley.

The tower is one of more than 100 being constructed nationwide as part of a decade-long renovation project that weather service officials say will greatly enhance their ability to monitor thunderstorms, wind currents and other atmospheric conditions.

Information gleaned from the new system--designed to replace an aging tower in Los Angeles--will be shared with federal air traffic controllers and military brass to help track flight paths and plan strategy.

Therefore, “it is urgent that the Sulphur Mountain radar become operational as soon as possible,” weather service regional Director Thomas Potter said in a Ventura County Superior Court declaration filed last month.

But no one told those who live along the pricey ridge that the so-called “black orb” was coming.

Upper Ojai residents awoke one crisp morning in early December in the shadow of what looked to them like a huge black ball nesting above a thick steel scaffold.

Within days they stood in front of a Ventura County Superior Court judge arguing for, and receiving, a temporary restraining order prohibiting completion of the weather-tracking project.

In the weeks since, the government has condemned a portion of a driveway that leads to the site, threatened to arrest protesters and unleashed federal lawyers to ensure that the project is delayed no further.

On Wednesday, a federal judge sided with the government and refused to issue a restraining order blocking construction of the project. A hearing for further review of the case, however, is scheduled Jan. 31.

Opponents of the radar tower point to research that links higher instances of cancer, birth defects, leukemia and other maladies to the kind of low-level radiation emitted from the system.

“We have a highly educated community,” said David Hedman, an upper Ojai resident who fought the Weldon Canyon dump and is one of the plaintiffs in the weather station lawsuit.

“We know there is a direct causal link between health and environment,” Hedman said. “That’s probably one of the reasons we take things so seriously.”

To hear those fighting the radiation and other eco-legal battles tell it, the Ojai Valley is one of the last resting places of popular rule.

Nina V. Shelley, an Ojai councilwoman who served a stint in the U.S. Marine Corps, calls the local activist sentiment a mix of Old West tenacity and sheer grit.

“That’s what I operate with when I’m speaking for the community,” she said. “Don’t let go. Don’t even consider failing. You just have to believe the side you’re representing is the right side, and that’s the way it has to be.”

Ranch owner Kim Bonsall knows that doggedness from personal experience. She ran headlong into it last year when the Bonsall family was about to allow a landfill on part of its 6,500-acre spread in Weldon Canyon.

“I admire how quickly they got organized,” Bonsall said. “But I don’t admire what they said once they got organized. For any project that goes on, (activists) are very quick to say something negative before having all the facts in front of them.”

Bonsall is not alone. Many private attorneys and local officials also have been forced to answer to Ojai-based environmentalists.

“They do keep me on my toes, no doubt about that,” said Richard H. Baldwin, director of the county Air Pollution Control District. “They confront us by meetings, letters, what have you. Elsewhere in the county, that’s not happening.”

But confrontation can also be an asset, Baldwin said.

“There’s the business view I hear constantly, but we don’t hear the citizens’ view very often,” the APCD director said.

Assemblyman Jack O’Connell (D-Carpinteria) calls the Ojai Valley a model for effective activism.

“Often there’s a long line when I’m in Ojai,” said O’Connell, who occasionally visits each of the cities he represents to listen to citizen concerns. “They have an environmental consciousness I think is very healthy.”

Such consciousness, however, is not always healthy for builders and developers. Lawyers for the firm planning to build a private golf resort on a sprawling hillside above Meiners Oaks still hold a grudge against the citizen activists.

“There are some genuinely concerned people up there, but some of the activists would have us all living in tepees again,” said Lindsay F. Nielson, who represents Farmont Corp. in a lawsuit seeking stricter conditions on the golf course project. “They simply believe that any form of development is evil.”

Nielson, a board member of the Ventura County Taxpayers Assn., called many of the activist efforts misguided.

“Ojai does have a large number of people who are very environmentally in tune,” he said. “But they aren’t interested in what impact (a project) has on the economy of the area.”

Even a proposed university campus did not escape the purview of the ecological watchdogs. As soon as officials targeted the Taylor Ranch near California 33 and the Ventura Freeway for a state university, opponents concerned about air quality in the Ojai Valley went to work.

“They were planning for 20,000 students,” said Pat Baggerly, a Meiners Oaks resident and member of the Environmental Coalition of Ventura County that opposed the site. “And all that (smog) blows up this way.”

The long-awaited campus is now being planned for a lemon grove outside Camarillo.

There are still other elements in the mix of political and environmental awareness that marks the Ojai Valley. Many artisans and performers seeking refuge from Los Angeles have made the enclave home, propagating its reputation for eco-activism.

Celebrity residents “do help draw attention from the media, and that tells people what’s going on,” said actor Larry Hagman, who owns a 30-acre spread atop Sulphur Mountain. “But I don’t know that I’ve had that much impact.”

But for Hagman and others, the fight against the mountaintop weather station is merely the symptom of a larger, more suspect disorder.

“I think people are tired of being led around by the nose and lied to,” Hagman said. “When people ask to participate in government, they have to be allowed to do so.

“So often we’re not even asked.”