Fillmore Ca

A hiker in the foothills near Fillmore found the body of a man between the ages of 30 and 40 floating in Sespi Creek on Saturday morning, Ventura County sheriff's officials said. Homicide detectives at the scene were treating the case as a suspicious death. They described the man as heavyset with a 4- to 5-inch beard and long brown hair pulled back into a pony tail. He was wearing a green jacket, green shirt, faded blue pants and white tennis shoes.

In a move intended to create more usable space downtown, city officials are transforming a shuttered citrus packing plant into quarters for firefighters and public works employees. Work will soon begin on the second phase of the $1-million renovation project that will provide a combined fire station and public works yard at the former Fillmore-Piru Citrus Assn. fruit-packing plant.

Two Fillmore residents were arrested Saturday on suspicion of drug possession with intent to sell after an early morning probation search turned up eight pounds of marijuana, authorities said. The 28 probation searches, which are done about six times a year in the Fillmore-Piru area, included members of the Ventura County sheriff's and probation departments as well as state parole officers, said Sheriff's Sgt. Paul Richards of the Fillmore station.

Fillmore officials and slow-growth advocates have reached a compromise on a proposed development boundary for the city, avoiding another showdown at the ballot box. Mayor Don Gunderson and Councilman Evaristo Barajas created the agreement with members of a slow-growth group that had been gathering signatures to place an anti-sprawl measure, known as SOAR, on the ballot for March.

Backers of an anti-sprawl measure for Fillmore filed a second SOAR plan Monday they hope to qualify for the fall 2002 ballot. "Citizens of Fillmore deserve the right to vote on major development proposals . . . just like citizens in the rest of the cities in Ventura County," said Councilwoman Patti Walker, a principal backer. The city's first Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources measure lost last year when a rival, less-restrictive initiative split the vote, and both were defeated.

Hundreds of gravel trucks rumble up to Fillmore's busiest intersection each morning, forming a noisy, dust-spewing line that stretches two blocks long. The trucks already pose a safety risk for schoolchildren trying to cross Highway 23 where it meets Highway 126, Fillmore officials say. And the danger will grow if the gravel operators' request to double the number of truck trips is approved, several speakers told the Ventura County Board of Supervisors at a special meeting in Fillmore this week.

Now that the threat of fire has ended, city officials here have begun to worry about a new danger--flooding. They are so worried that they have declared a state of emergency even before the rain has begun falling. City officials in this farming town of 13,000 hoped that would clear the way for state disaster aid, but state officials say the folks in Fillmore are getting ahead of themselves. You can't get disaster aid, they say, until you have a disaster.

A relentless brush fire has consumed more than 9,700 rugged acres of canyons and foothills in the Santa Clara Valley but shifting winds drove the flames away from the homes they had threatened on Tuesday. Schools in both Fillmore and Piru reopened Tuesday, although most physical education classes and recesses were held indoors.

The Fillmore and Western weekend passenger train may have put the city of Fillmore on the map, but there's more where that came from.

A break in a decades-old pipe spewed crude oil into an irrigation system south of town Saturday morning, but emergency crews stopped the gooey flow before it reached the Santa Clara River. The dark oil lay in thick pools at the bottom of ditches alongside orange groves in the Bardsdale area 1 1/2 miles south of Fillmore, flowing as deep as two feet at some points.