Ventura's Manager Demands 'Smart Growth'

Greek essayist Plutarch, quoted in Ventura's new General Plan

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After reshaping Pasadena and reviving Azusa, urban design guru Rick Cole is helping transform Ventura by demanding that developers follow a new growth plan for this once-sleepy seaside community.

City manager since April 2004, Cole startled even Ventura City Council members by insisting that builders of three major projects think again about proposed new neighborhoods he saw as either "incoherent," bland or inaccessible to the public.

"Rick made a decision to come in and grab three projects in midlight and turn them all around," Councilman Bill Fulton recalled.

"Some of us on the council had mixed feelings about that," said Fulton, a planning expert and author. "But Rick thought it was important to send a message that this was what we would demand from now on. And he was right."

From the historic downtown to Ventura Harbor and the suburban east end, Cole has pressed developers to provide a variety of homes and stores that not only fit together as neighborhoods, but complement the city.

"We tapped on the breaks and said now we're going to build them right," Cole said recently at City Hall, pointing out perceived flaws in the old projects and noting virtues of the new ones.

"Design matters enormously in the making of great places," Cole said. "We have to design for what fits the land and its surroundings. That's my passion."

Cole, 52, has become one of the nation's best-known advocates of so-called smart growth -- the clustering of homes, stores and offices in pedestrian-oriented communities -- and new urbanism, which promotes denser housing in self-sustaining cities as an alternative to suburban sprawl.

As mayor and city councilman in Pasadena during the heart of its economic revival in the 1980s and '90s, Cole is credited with helping to save the historic Old Town business district and pulling together divergent groups to plot a long-term strategy for growth.

Then, as city manager in Azusa for six years, Cole gained attention for breathing life into a tired blue-collar San Gabriel Valley community by persuading developers to build the city's first new stores, houses and industrial parks in decades -- and for including hundreds of residents in the planning process.