Ventura County Star
by Kathleen Wilson

A bid to extend Santa Paula's eastern border for a 500-acre development won in a landslide Tuesday night.

The measure will represent the largest expansion into farmland since the open-space movement known as SOAR began more than a decade ago.

The returns showed voters favoring the measure by a lopsided margin of 82.6 percent to 17.4 percent. Limoneira Co., a Santa Paula agribusiness firm, plans to build up to 1,500 homes, a 100-unit assisted living center, stores, offices and a variety of public amenities on the property that has been farmed for a century.

"We're thrilled," Harold Edwards, president and CEO of Limoneira, said after the first returns came in. "That's a great result."

There was no organized opposition to Measure G, as supporters argued that the town with the lowest median household income of any city in the county needed growth.

"Nobody wants to see the loss of farmland, but the benefits to the town outweigh it," said John Chamberlain, marketing director for Limoneira. "People really want to see a more prosperous town for everybody."

County Supervisor Steve Bennett, one of the architects of Save Open-space and Agricultural Resources, said early in the night that he did not consider the lopsided vote a setback.

Since Ventura passed the first SOAR measure in the mid-1990s, voters across the county have repeatedly rejected large-scale development outside city boundaries.

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