Little benefit in delaying Ahmanson decision again. (From the Newsroom).

EVEN with what was supposed to be a decisive vote scheduled for Tuesday, Dec. 11, the debate over whether to build thousands of new homes at Ahmanson Ranch dribbles on.

As you can read elsewhere in this week's issue of the Business Journal, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors is

scheduled to meet Tuesday, discuss and finally vote up or down on whether to give final approval to the project. This is a vote that, for some people, has taken nearly a decade to get to and yet it's still questionable whether there will actually be a decision made before you get your next issue of the Business Journal ... or maybe the one after that ... or the one after that.

If you plan to go to that Tuesday meeting (and don't get the idea I'm trying to encourage you), you can expect a long night. Democracy, as practiced by most American city councils and boards of supervisors, allows everybody who wants it the chance to speak their peace--just one more time. So, look for all five Ventura county supervisors to sit for several hours with frozen smiles as citizen after citizen trudges to the microphone to tell them what they've already heard.

The chances are good that there will be more speakers ready and willing to take their three or four minutes at the podium than will reasonably be possible for any human being to sit through. So at some point around midnight, the supervisors will recess the meeting until the following evening. And on it will go.

That is if the most recent request for an injunction or the filing of a lawsuit doesn't pulls the Ahmanson issue off the supervisors' agenda before we even get to Tuesday. The most recent strategy is to insist that traffic on the 101 has increased so dramatically since the last study on it was done that it is no longer relevant.

That, of course, could be true--and many of those previously unaccounted for cars are likely driven by commuters who bought homes in the last few years in Oak Park or Moor-park or even Camarillo because something closer (like around where Ahmanson Ranch is?) was not yet available.

But it doesn't matter. I'm deep into my second decade as a reporter covering suburban land disputes. The story being written here is the same one many of us have written before. All that changes is the proper noun in front of Ranch, the names and faces of the principal characters and the justification propelling development opponents as they seek just one more injunction. When it wasn't the traffic, it was the spineflower. And before that, when it wasn't the spineflower, it was still the traffic.

There's nothing new about this long, drawn out drama made up of environmental impact reports, marathon public input sessions, accusations traded in the press and meetings, votes and decisions postponed and then postponed again. Developers and anti-growth advocates both understand these are wars of attrition that are won by whoever's left standing.

Developers most often win in the long run because they build these delays into their plans from the start. Meanwhile, the opposition is typically staffed by volunteers with few resources, who don't have a plan but hopefully a good lawyer or two, and a passion that ebbs and flows with time. That come-and-go part is usually the killer. In the case of Ahmanson Ranch, we are now into our second or third generation of opponents, so developers have not been as easily able to sap the enthusiasm as they might be accustomed to.

The most recent generation of Ahmanson Ranch foes includes Linda Parks, whose political career began just over five years ago with a successful albeit standard grassroots outsider-busting-in campaign for a seat on the Thousand Oaks City Council. Her voting record there, as both a council member and mayor, struck a vein with many of those who have moved to Thousand Oaks in recent years and decided they should be the very last allowed in.

Parks' pro-environment, anti-development, anti-City Hall platform (which is pretty much the political mainstream among the electorate in her part of Ventura County) helped get her elected last month to the board of supervisors, a body she will officially join later this month.

Now, some members of the current board have not officially declared how they might vote on the Ahmanson issue if there is such a vote this week. But the planning commission, whose members are appointed by the board members, voted 3-2 in favor a few weeks ago. If the appointees are working in concert with the appointers, Ahmanson has a chance unless a vote can be delayed long enough for Parks to take her seat.

So, what happens this week up in Ventura means something.

Meanwhile, the San Fernando Valley's housing crisis--and it doesn't matter what income level you find yourself in--doesn't get any easier to resolve. We all know that housing prices break a new record every time new numbers come out (good news if you already own one of those homes, but very bad news if you want to buy one). Sure, much of that is attributed to low interest rates, but a lot of people need and/or want to live here--and there just aren't enough houses for them to buy.

Sitting Ventura County supervisors need to understand that those commuters they believe are going to clog up the Las Virgenes Road interchange of the 101 are coming their way no matter what. If they don't buy at Ahmanson, they're going to buy at one of the freeway ramps a little farther north.

If Ventura County politicians really are worried about urban sprawl, capping it at Ahmanson Ranch makes more sense than trying to do it in Camarillo or Oxnard 10 or 15 years from now.

This week would be a good time to declare victory.

Michael Hart is editor of the San Fernando Valley Business Journal. He can be reached at mhart@sfvbj.com.