IN WAL-MART founder Sam Walton's autobiography, completed shortly before he died in 1992, he wrote that Wal-Mart would never open in a town where it wasn't wanted.

The Citizens to Preserve Ventura, a renamed coalition of grassroots and labor groups, is hoping to force Walton's business heirs to make good on his promise. The coalition has drafted the toughest big-box ordinance ever and is launching a petition drive to get it on the Ventura ballot as soon as possible.

"We've definitely taken it a step forward and made it more stringent," said Jim Alger, Regional Coordinator of the Tri-Counties Labor Foundation, whose organization is helping the Ventura group and organized a press conference today. "It's to stop Wal-Mart altogether and not just a supercenter."

The ordinance would prevent a major retail project that sells goods and merchandise -- primarily for personal or household use -- and whose total sales floor area exceeds 90,000 square feet and which devotes more than three percent of the sales floor area to the sale of non-taxable merchandise such as food.

The ordinance would apply citywide and not just in the Victoria corridor, where Wal-Mart has previously indicated interest in building a multi-story supercenter at the now-vacant K-Mart building.

"Most importantly, it prohibits a big-box retailer from sidestepping city process by 'piecemealing' a project, that is, opening up a smaller store now and expanding it later," said Das Williams, a Santa Barbara city councilman and legislative analyst for the Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy.

INTERESTINGLY, it would not apply to discount warehouse stores like Sam's Club or Costco. "We only want to stop the irresponsible ones," Alger said. Nor would it apply to any store which sells taxable items like electronics, furniture or sporting goods.

City officials have said that Wal-Mart has been silent of late about its intentions for the Victoria site. The company recently announced it would be slowing down the expansion of its supercenters and is rumored to be interested in pursuing much smaller stores which would not be affected by this ordinance. And the City Council recently took steps itself to limit the size of any one retail project along the busy Victoria corridor to 100,000 square feet.

It's very possible the Ventura group's efforts could be altogether moot. But as I watched them today fervently waving their signs under the bright Ventura sun, it was obvious they are up for a fight.

Update: Click here for the full text of the measure.

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THE CITY COUNCIL voted tonight to move forward with the adoption of an ordinance which would add a fee of $1.49 to business and residential phone lines to pay for the operational costs of the city's emergency communications center. The ordinance will be revisited a year after adoption to assess its impact.

The proposal drew fire for its novel approach to getting around the legal ambiguities surrounding the administration of this fee. To escape legal challenge, and to satisfy those with data and fax lines which will never be used for voice calls, the city will give residents the option of waiving the monthly fee. However, those who choose this option would need to sign a form stating that they will accept a per-call fee of $51.62 if the line is used to make a 911 call. Businesses with multiple lines would pay a flat monthly fee of $4.47 a month. "Good Samaritan" calls will be exempted from the $51.62 fee.

See the entry below for more details.

Critics, including the Star's editorial board, speculated that some residents might waive the fees to save money but later would hesitate to call 911 if indeed faced with an emergency situation.

CITY OFFICIALS seemed surprised today at the reaction the waiver clause generated. It all comes back to that often-used phrase of "being too close to a situation." While they saw the waiver as giving residents an additional choice that no other city in the state with this particular fee has given, some residents saw it instead as punitive and dangerous.

Communicating the labyrinthine ways of City Hall has always been difficult. Most residents are too caught up in their own lives to really study a situation and often react in knee-jerk fashion to grabby newspaper headlines. However, city officials would also do well to take more time to reach out and explain things more thoroughly. But will residents listen?

For more opinion on this proposal, check out Deputy Mayor Bill Fulton's blog and City Manager Rick Cole's blog.

What do you think? Post a comment below.

WHAT DO Arnold Schwarzenegger and the City of San Buenaventura have in common these days besides long names starting with an S? They both have floated proposals to increase fees to help bail out our public safety agencies.

While our governor is proposing a 1.25 percent surcharge on property insurance policies which is expected to raise $125 million to fund a larger state fire fighting unit, the City of Ventura is proposing to add a $1.49 monthly fee to household and business phone lines to cover the costs of its 911 call center.

Low-income users would be exempt. Businesses with multiple lines would get a break. Residents could also waive the monthly fee and choose a per-call fee of $51.62, which would not be charged if the subscriber was calling for emergency aid at locations other than his or her residence or business.

The fees are expected to cover 85 percent of the $3.3 million yearly costs of providing the 911 service to residents.

WHILE THERE is nothing more important than adequately funding our public safety needs, some have complained these fees are just an end run around raising taxes.

Raising taxes is not easy, and it shouldn't be. Our city's 2006 efforts to raise the sales tax by 1/4 cent to fund public safety fell just short of the 2/3 margin needed to pass. And any proposal to raise taxes on the state level needs an equal margin to pass in the legislature. This would require a few of the Republican minority to vote for it. And they have vowed as a block to resist. But, in most cases, a fee requires a simple majority vote in the state legislature. In Ventura, it just needs the affirmative vote of four council members.

So new fees are becoming the last resort of public officials looking for ways to increase safety budgets. In Ventura's case, the money which the fees will raise frees up other dollars in the city's general fund to hire three new firefighters and six more police officers, according to Assistant Police Chief Ken Corney. Three of those officers would be School Resource Officers which were sorely missed in our schools when the program was cut in 2004.

Some may quibble with the new fees, but the price we pay for inadequate public safety is much higher.

For the full text of the proposed 911 fee go here.

What do you think? Post a comment below.

I HAD to laugh a bit after the November municipal election when I heard complaints that the off-year contest didn't bring out enough voters and "our citizens just don't care." Nothing could be further from the truth in this little beach town. Citizen activism is alive and well when it comes to protecting the status quo.

If you look back at some of the most important land-use decisions made in the last 10 years for our community, all were initiated by groups of citizens passionate in protecting first our agricultural lands and then our hillsides from development.

Now we have two other groups working to save Ventura from development. In the name of view protection, the Ventura Citizens Organization for Responsible Development is battling at this very moment to keep anything higher than 26 feet from sprouting in much of the city.

And yet another group of citizens, the Stop Wal-Mart Coalition, aided by the grocery union, announced plans to circulate petitions to keep Wal-Mart out of the spot just vacated by K-Mart on Victoria Avenue.

IT SEEMS we have no shortage of citizen activism here. But how unique is Ventura compared to other cities? I asked Deputy Mayor Bill Fulton, an urban planning expert who has studied other cities throughout the state and nation.

"I don't think we are more passionate or active than other communities," Fulton said. "But we do go to the ballot more. Coastal communities tend to do this more than inland communities anyway, but in Ventura we have done it way more than most other cities. It's part of the culture."

Ventura Mayor Christy Weir has often noted the extraordinary passion found in this town. "I do know that many other city councils meet twice a month," she said, "and we meet every week, to give our citizens more of an opportunity to be heard."

Weir also mentioned the numerous neighborhood councils and the abundant citizen input on the city's Ventura Vision, General Plan, and various community plans as another way for citizens to be heard and stay informed.

But there is another group of citizens in the business community who have become more vocal over the years. They point out quite correctly that development fuels our tax base, which pays for city services. Stifle growth at your own peril, they warn.

But it seems many others just want their beach community to remain the sleepy town it has always been.

I heard this summed up best by a woman who stopped by a table I was staffing during our last ArtWalk Downtown. "I just don't want Ventura to turn into another L.A.," she said. "I live here to get away from all that."

What do you think? Use the comments section below.