Ventura County Civic Alliance delivers good news and bad in State of the Region Report

Ventura

The Ventura County Civic Alliance's 2019 State of the Region Report, released Wednesday, contains both good and bad news for Ventura County.

The good news includes very low unemployment, being one of the safest counties in the state and declining alcohol and marijuana use by 11th-grade students.

The bad news includes "anemic" economic growth, a housing shortage and rising homelessness.

"There's always good news and bad news with these reports," the biennial report's author, Tony Biasotti, said in an interview after he gave an overview of the document at a breakfast at California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks.

"I don't want to harp too much on the bad news, but the fact remains that Ventura County's economy is either in recession or very close to recession the last few years," said Biasotti, a freelance journalist whose work occasionally appears in The Star.

"The good in the report is a lot," he said. "The unemployment rate is super low. And we're seeing a lot of really positive social indicators. It's a low-crime county. Stuff like teen smoking and teen pregnancy and all those things are not only low, but are declining.

"The bad things are mostly the economy and everything else is really all right," he said.

The 126-page report says it's not easy to answer the question, "how is our economy doing?"

"By some measures, it is remarkably healthy," the report says, noting that the county's 2018 unemployment rate was a very low 3.8%.

"The county has added jobs every year since 2011," it says. "The demand to live here outstrips the supply of housing."

Yet, by other measures, the county's economy is weak, the report says.

It notes that according to the Center for Economic Research and Forecasting at California Lutheran University, the county's economic output shrank in 2016 and 2017, when adjusted for inflation, and was projected to contract again in 2018.

"Negative economic growth is the standard definition of a recession, and it's happened here while the state and nation hum along with steady growth," the report says.

The county has had sustained employment growth, "but that has been relatively meager, not topping 1.5% annually since 2013," the report says.

"And the jobs we create aren't always the ones we need for a balanced economy," the report says. "Low-paying sectors like hospitality and food service are expanding, while manufacturing and other high-paying industries shrink."

Housing shortage

The county has a housing shortage due to, in large part, much of the county being off limits to development due to abundant acreage devoted to farms and ranches, national forest and coastline, the report says. SOAR – Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources – is a set of laws that give voters the final say on most development projects planned for open space or farmland, the report notes

"Despite these challenges, some progress is being made," it says.

The county's housing starts – the number of new homes permitted to be built – reached a 12-year high of 2,565 in 2017, according to the report.

Homelessness in the county has risen for the past two years, the report says.

In 2017, the county's homeless count was 1,152. That increased to 1,299 in 2018 and 1,669 in 2019, according to the report.

The Ventura County Continuum of Care Alliance, which oversees the count, offers possible explanations for the increase, including rising rents, displacement due to homes destroyed by recent wildfires, and a more thorough volunteer effort to locate homeless persons on the day of the count, the report says.

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Second safest county

On the plus side, the county is the second safest county in California among the state's most populated counties, the report says.

In 2017, offenders committed 21.4 serious crimes in the county for every 1,000 residents, according to the FBI and the California Department of Justice. Of those 21.4 serious crimes, 2.6 were violent crimes, while 18.8 were property crimes.

"Ventura County is very safe," Biasotti said in his overview. "... Moorpark had the lowest crime rate" in 2018. "... Ventura always has the highest crime rate."

During a panel discussion following Biasotti's presentation, moderator David Maron, vice-chairman of the civic alliance, asked one of the panelists, Ventura County Sheriff Bill Ayub, why he thinks the county is so safe.

Ayub replied that his office "continuously ... strategizes how we can drive down crime in our communities."

He also cited his office's "innovative use of technology," hiring the "best and brightest," and community support.

"And a strong effort on the prevention side," he said.

The other panelists were CLU economics professor Jamshid Damooei, the report's researcher; Harold Edwards, president and CEO of Limoneira; and Tracy Perez of United Staffing Associates.

In the report's section on teen substance abuse, it notes that "cigarettes, marijuana and binging on alcohol and other drugs all became less popular in most Ventura County school districts between 2013 and 2018, while electronic cigarette usage rose in some districts and fell in others."

Those conclusions are based on surveys of 11th-grade students, the report states.

Despite the report's pluses and minuses, Damooei said, to applause from the audience, "I couldn't think of a better county to live."

The audience included a number of public officials, including Ventura County CEO Mike Powers and Ventura County Transportation Commission Executive Director Darren Kettle.

To download a copy of the 2019 State of the Region report, go to https://civicalliance.org/2019-state-of-the-region-report

Mike Harris covers the East County cities of Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, as well as transportation countywide. You can contact him at mike.harris@vcstar.com or 805-437-0323.

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