I ALWAYS ENJOY being a fly on the wall at these citizen meetings spun off by the city. The interaction between the various factions represented at these gatherings is always fun to watch. Put some of our most opinionated citizens in one room and you can see the sparks fly. The View Protection Task Force was interesting, but this new Citizen Blue Ribbon Budget Committee is much better theater.

People arguing about taxes is great sport on this blog; it gets pretty heated. That's why you would think more of our citizens would be jumping at the chance to give public testimony to this 15-member citizen's panel charged with deciding whether or not to put a sales tax measure on the ballot in Ventura to help plug part of a $11.4 million hole in our city's two-year budget. It's been well publicized.

Yet tonight I watched the usual suspects up there saying their usual things. Most of these folks stand before our City Council nearly every Monday and they were back in action again at tonight's meeting. There were a grand total of five speakers and that included the one who stalked off because he was asked to fill out a speaker card first.

So I guess the task is left to the group assembled by the City Council and their alternates. It's a diverse crowd and represents the city and its opinions fairly well. But again, the outspoken few seemed to dominate the conversation.

THE FIRST FEW MEETINGS have been filled with a crash course on city finances. I am always amazed at how well our city's Chief Financial Officer Jay Panzica can explain these things. He recounts facts and figures in a simple, easy tone devoid of "cityspeak." I hope they keep him around. He's smart and we need him.

There was talk tonight of putting up a website for citizen comment, since they aren't attending the meetings. I would highly encourage this.

If you were to ask me -- and nobody did -- I'd say just put it on the ballot in November and let the citizens decide whether or not they want to pay extra for the city services they will soon be missing. If not, well that's democracy -- by the many.

The remainder of the Citizen Blue Ribbon Budget Committee meetings are March 18 and 25 at 6:30 p.m. at the Ventura Unified School District - Christa McAuliffe Room, 255 W. Stanley Avenue. For more information, go here.

WITH THE POSSIBLE EXCEPTION of our battling state legislators, you couldn't find a group of people with more divergent opinions than Ventura's View Protection Task Force. Thrown together in one room are representatives from each side of the city's pro- and anti-development factions. Yet the group gets along so well that an observer might jokingly wonder if meeting at the police headquarters has something to do with it.

That's not to say it's not a very opinionated group. This 15-member committee is tasked with the nebulous goal of defining exactly what a viewshed is and how to protect it. A passel of new planning terms have been coined since Venturans started fervently worrying about their views. Viewsheds, solar fences, and skypaving are now in the vernacular.

Our city's General Plan spells out in very loose terms that we value our views and access to sunlight from our homes, yet it wasn't until a group of Midtown residents started making a fuss about proposed multi-story infill development along Thompson Boulevard that it became a real issue. Now, many City Council speaker cards later, the council is serious about it. While a ballot initiative pushed by the Ventura Citizens' Organization for Responsible Development to address the issue is slated for this fall, council members who are attempting to complete an overhaul of city planning decided they couldn't wait that long for this issue to be addressed, so the task force was appointed to get a jump start on it.

To explain further, VCORD is seeking to draw up its own view plan, based on input from its own mostly hand-selected citizen's group, a move that our city attorney has already said violates our City Charter. Legal issues plague this initiative. If the council rejects VCORD's plan, it would go to yet another municipal election.

JUDGING FROM THE differing opinions surrounding the issue the night I visited the Task Force meeting, it is not an easy thing, this protection of views, and the focus that night was clearly on Midtown residents and their views. It was not until the end of the meeting that the east and west sides of the city entered the discussion. But for now, the goal just seems to be to protect views as seen from public areas throughout Ventura.

As it turns out, View Protection Task Force Chair Rob Corley said, the group has found that lowering building heights has little to do with protecting many public views. "A 10-foot building blocks just as many views as a 50-foot building. But taller buildings hugging the sidewalk really do cramp views of the hills and ocean."

Solar access has also been a touchy issue with many residents. The night I visited, Town Architects Torti Gallas and Partners ran their first-ever simulation program of how larger buildings at full build-out, following existing planning guidelines with cut-outs in the back, would impact the sunlight filtering into Midtown homes.

AND GUESS WHAT? Because of the way the sun travels in the sky, solar access in most of the city can be protected with some simple calculations and building guidelines, the models showed. Corley estimated the group will only spend perhaps $30,000 of the $110,000 allotted to them for professional services from Torti Gallas.

It would appear that designing buildings with clear setbacks from the sidewalk and cutouts in the back seems to be optimal for protecting flatland views of the ocean and Two Trees. The Task Force will report back with recommendations for adjustments to current planning guidelines some time next month.

But how this information will get incorporated into VCORD's initiative, should it pass, is still undetermined.

"Anybody who buys a house next to a commercial lot has some impacts," Corley said. "Protecting every inch of every lot in the city is unattainable."

It is clear to me that complicated tasks such as this are best left to planning professionals with appropriate citizen input and I hope VCORD takes the current Task Force's recommendations very seriously. But it is also clear that city officials need to better communicate with neighbors about the guidelines for adjacent projects and work harder to allay fears and mistrust.