Ventura River

A national environmental organization is moving into Ventura County to keep an eye on pollution in the Ventura River, a push that comes in response to the alleged illegal dumping of tons of sludge on land north of the city. Santa Barbara ChannelKeeper, an arm of a nationwide environmental watchdog group founded by Robert Kennedy Jr., is expected to begin a 12-month monitoring program of the Ventura River watershed, its first major push into Ventura County, program manager Jessie Altstatt said.

Water and debris rushing down the Ventura River in recent flood years have scoured the river bottom, exposing portions of a buried Chevron oil pipeline and raising fears among environmentalists that a split in the pipe during a flood could devastate the delicate estuary. Although a Chevron engineer downplayed the severity of the situation, the company outlines the potential dangers of leaving the pipe exposed underwater in its application to the city of Ventura to fix the problem.

"There are two words that have shaken up people in this family the most-- transient and homeless ," said Jacque Shubert, whose son's life was washed away last week by the raging Ventura River. "He was neither," Shubert said quietly. To Jacque and Lois Shubert, William Lee Shubert was not the 31-year-old homeless man described so dispassionately by the media, the one caught sleeping in the river bottom when the water rose in storm-driven fury.

For those who had helplessly looked on over the years and wondered what could be done, the flood that destroyed the river-bottom shantytown last year was nothing short of a miracle. More than 100 homeless people lived in the Ventura River bed before violent storm waters ripped out their squatters' camp in January 1995. Since then, city and county agencies have rallied like never before to provide the riverbed settlers with shelter and social services.

Ventura officials unveiled plans Wednesday to relocate 30 displaced residents of the Ventura River bottom to Camarillo State Hospital, a major step in a recently launched effort to help the former riverbed dwellers back on their feet. The city this week signed an agreement to lease a 13,000-square-foot complex on the hospital grounds, a sprawling campus at the foot of the mountains just south of Camarillo.

It had been nearly 85 years since a tiny songbird known as the least Bell's vireo sang from the thickets of the Ventura River's banks. But last spring, after a sand and gravel quarry in the riverbed fell silent for the first time in decades, at least one and possibly two pairs of the endangered birds returned to nest along the river.

With water in the Ventura River still plentiful, a coalition of water leaders is moving to speed up planning about the river's future before a new drought that could make regional cooperation more difficult. The major users of the river plan to huddle Tuesday with environmentalists, resource agencies and landowners in an effort to draw a plan to manage the river so that all needs are met now and in the event of the next drought.

After months of refining maps, negotiating with landowners and talking to avid bikers, joggers and equestrians, city officials unveiled the final route of the planned Ventura River Trail at a public hearing Thursday night. "This is it," project engineer Albert Carbon said. "Ninety percent of it lies on the railroad right of way. The remaining 10% we had to work out with the property owners."

Although it is his property, federal and local officials still say F. John Appel broke the law when he dumped tree branches, logs and other material into the Ventura River over a four-year period. But Appel, 51, contends that "bad neighbors" and overzealous prosecutors are out to make an example of him. A jury on Monday was asked to decide whom to believe after listening to more than two weeks of testimony in Appel's felony trial.

A decades-long push to restore the Ventura River estuary is now on the fast track after the California Coastal Conservancy announced that it expects to fund the first $400,000 of the program in June, Ventura officials said. Workers could begin as early as July on the first phase of the restoration: digging up invasive plants that are choking out native shrubs and replacing them with native plant species.