Mark Burley
Council member, Santa Rosa Valley Municipal Advisory
“Let me tell you what it takes. It takes one or a very few people to be extremely persevering. This stuff does not happen fast. The average person does not have the time, or effort, or mental inclination to deal with it. It doesn’t take very many people to make the change, but it takes an awful lot of ‘stick-to-it-iveness’ That’s really the big story and most people are too busy or don’t care enough to deal with it.”
Casey: I’m Casey Cannon from Harvey Mudd.
Sebastian: Hello, I’m Sebastian.
Mark Burley: How are you.
Sebastian: Pretty well.
Mark Burley: Good.
Casey: We are hoping you could tell us a bit about your background and what you identify as some of your most important initiatives or projects or other hurdles or instances of change that you have been involved in. We are just gathering stories from local leaders who have experience promoting sustainability and bringing change to their community.
Mark Burley: Ok, I will be happy to do that. My background is that I moved to Ventura County, Santa Rosa Valley, in the end of 1993. Before that I would say that I was not particularly involved in being an activist or a community activist or an open space advocate. I would say that a lot of things I do are “environmental” but I don’t go around calling myself an “environmentalist,” I think of myself as more as a community activist who wants to keep Ventura County and specifically Santa Rosa Valley as nice as possible. That has involved being involved in lots of environmental causes, some of them have been outside the local area too. Do you want me to give you a rundown of all the things I have been involved in and then you can…
Casey: Ya, and then we could have follow up questions.
Mark Burley: Maybe then you can pick out the ones that you think are the most interesting or important for what it is you are trying to record.
Sebastian: Ok, definitely, that sounds great.
Mark Burley: I moved from Studio City, Los Angeles. When I arrived here in Santa Rosa Valley, one of the first things I thought was this was a very beautiful area and who is working to protect it and keep it the same as it is and the same quality of life and the same rural and equestrian feel because I think that we are all aware that a lot of areas of southern California have become totally urbanized over the last 50 years. Having come from an area that was totally urbanized and knowing what has happened in Orange County. Basically it has become all residential housing. It was farming and it was open space and its very little now. There’s a certain amount of parks, but its very little now. I got involved with a local group that was representing the valley here. It was not a part of the government but it was a group that advocated for Santa Rosa Valley and that was called the Santa Rosa Valley Community Association. That was just a way for people to have a forum within the valley and to somewhat connect with the cities nearby and the county. There was a board and I was voted onto that board and was a chairman.
So that was the first thing that I got involved in. The next thing that I sort of was involved with, but not central to it, was this fight to save the Ahmanson Ranch. This was a large piece of land that is on the border between Ventura County and Los Angeles County. It’s north of the 101 freeway, in the area north of Las Virgenes. This was a huge open space area with quite a lot of endangered animals. There was a plan for Ventura County to develop a whole new city there. There had been people who had been fighting against this for many years. It was originally owned by Home Savings of America and bought out by another bank. There was a lot of involvement from people who are community activists to try and stop this. I got involved with that and produced some radio commercials for them. My business life is that I’m a television producer. That was eventually successful. So what happened was the state bought that land and it is now a state park. It is available for anybody to go there.
Then the other thing that I got involved with big time in the late 90s was SOAR which stands for Save Open space and Agricultural Resources. I think this is perhaps why I was recommended to do this because I was very much involved with SOAR back then and am again now and I’ll tell you more about SOAR. SOAR is an initiative that was put on the ballot. Originally they had a similar sort of initiative up in Napa County then it was brought down here by 2 or 3 activists who were the leaders SOAR: Steve Bennett, Linda Parks who are both now county supervisors but who were not at the time, and Richard Francis who’s a lawyer who wrote up the initiative and did the legal side of it. So the basic idea behind SOAR is that it protects or maintains the zoning for agricultural land, open space land, and rural land at the same zoning. Those are different kinds of zoning that have to do with different size of the lots. What would happen in the past was people who were farming would be tempted to take their farmland and turn it into housing. There obviously is a huge amount of money involved in that. The money that that land is worth as farmland is a lot less than when you break it up into lots for houses. However if you continue to do that, then farming becomes less and less viable. First, Ventura County’s biggest economic engine is still farming and secondly its one of the most fertile areas in the country and in the world and has a lot of really good farmland. What the initiative in simple terms meant was that the Board of Supervisors, which is 5 people, are not able to rezone that land unless it goes to a vote of the people. So farmer Joe had 800 acres and he wanted to make it into housing, and it was zoned agricultural, that would have to go to a vote of the people of Ventura County and they would have to vote on whether they wanted to approve splitting that land up into housing, which, of course, its pretty difficult to get people to agree to that. I think there may have been one case where something was agreed to and it was something to do with a religious institution. Very few, maybe 2 or 3 times, has it gone up for a vote and basically its always been voted down. This started in the city of Ventura and they voted this SOAR initiative in which is why the city is a part of it because its more complicated than what I just said. The city of Ventura voted in a SOAR initiative for the city and that was in about 1994 or 5. Because at that time I was interested in what they were doing I wrote to Steve Bennett who was on the board of directors of SOAR and said, “If you ever take this county wide, I would like to be involved.” I didn’t hear anything for about 2 years and thought this isn’t going anywhere and then they decided to roll it out as a county wide initiative.
The reason why its more complicated than I just said a second ago is that what SOAR does is it not only maintain the lots or open space or agricultural lands in the unincorporated county which is one initiative, but then each city has an initiative called the CURB boundary. What it does is it stops the city from growing out into the unincorporated areas and taking that land and then rezoning it subsequently. So you have to have both of these things at once. You have to maintain the cities the size they are and at the same time you have to control what is going on out in the unincorporated areas. We had an initiative for every city and a county wide initiative. I’ll get into a little bit more of the details of the process of what is involved in actually doing that because we are actually going through it again. I joined them and got onto their executive committee for SOAR and basically dealt with Santa Rosa Valley and Camarillo areas. That was my involvement with SOAR and that was like 2 or 3 years and it eventually passed. I’ll talk a bit more about SOAR later if you like and what we’re doing now because it’s coming back in 2016.
Then I became involved with a number of other groups. One was called Save Our Ring of Green, which was trying to stop development up on Mountclef Ridge which is up here in Santa Rosa Valley. It’s actually between Santa Rosa Valley and Thousand Oaks. Thousand Oaks actually has a “ring of green” around them. And this was right in the ring of green, and this was zoned some time ago and then they forgot about it, and suddenly somebody realized it was available for building and so they wanted to build and it would have actually built Thousand Oaks over Mountclef Ridge. Not very many houses, but then it would have touched onto the development in Santa Rosa Valley. And it happens that at the same time they were doing a study about wildlife corridors especially with relationship between the Santa Monica mountains and connecting further north to the Los Padres Forest eventually. Particularly this is an issue for the mountain lions. The mountain lions need to have connectivity to larger areas of environment otherwise they will get stuck in the Santa Monica Mountains. Although it’s a fairly big area, it leads to one group of mountain lions being stuck in there if there’s not this wildlife corridor connectivity. They would then have no genetic diversity and that would not be good for the mountain lion population. What you want is for the mountain lions who are at the top of the food chain to be able to connect to the Los Padres Forest and the central parts of California and be able to get down there. It happens that this particular corridor runs right along there, it runs through Wildwood Park, and so to make a long story short they were going to put 4 houses which would have totally blocked it off and we managed to get the city to buy 3 of the lots so that left the wildlife corridor open and the builder put a house on the fourth of the lots. So I regarded that as three quarters of a success but it kept that wildlife corridor open. In fact, totally off the side, just yesterday, people up in Sacramento have agreed to create a connection that goes under the freeway near Lindero Canyon so that that creates another part of the wildlife corridor so that the wildlife can cross the freeways. That’s part of the big problem is the wildlife being able to get across freeways. In some parts of the world they actually have bridges that go across the freeways that animals can go through. They have one where animals can go under near Rocky Peak in Simi Valley and animals will go through there and connect to other wildlife areas. So that was Save Our Ring of Green.
Sebastian: Can I actually ask you a quick question? You mentioned how Sacramento got involved recently, when you were originally trying to get the wildlife corridor saved, did you try and get some larger state government help to preserve it or was it mostly a city effort?
Mark Burley: It was mostly a local city effort. They were the ones who had the power to approve or disapprove the permits to build there. We did try to get involved with some larger groups like the Nature Conservancy to try and see if they would put money up to buy this and consequently protect it, but we did not have much success with that and actually what happened was the city of Thousand Oaks has a fund for open space acquisition and I think this is one of the things maybe you were interested in which is how you get these things to happen.
Casey: Exactly.
Mark Burley: In this particular case, we lobbied the city council. We started when it came up to the planning department, then I think when the permitting process got kicked to the city council, we made as much noise as we can, took out advertising, etc. Especially when it comes to election time to try and persuade the city council to vote to buy this land which they eventually did and make it into open space conservancy that belongs to the city. So that was done mainly by political pressure. It’s a good thing for politicians to be able to say they saved this piece of corridor when it comes to voting time. Thousand Oaks actually has an awful lot of protected land, its pretty good. They do have this Ring of Green in their general plan, but somehow or other there had actually been a confusion about zoning since it had been zoned one way in the city zoning and it had been zoned a different way before the city had become incorporated at the county level. The original zoning from the county level that actually triumphed over the city zoning, so you can’t actually take away the zoning from somebody, there are rules and laws about that sort of thing. But that I would say was mostly political pressure and getting people to write in and go to meetings and so on. We did actually even after they bought the 3 lots we actually also sued to try to get the 4th lot not to be developed. We had some issues that we thought they were going against the rules within the city rules. We lost that in court and eventually decided that it was not worth going any further. We went through 2 lawsuits in the superior court and the judge didn’t agree with our position and then we just said ok we got three quarters of it, that’s the best we can do.
One of the things I sort of started and managed to succeed with was Santa Rosa Road. It runs right through the middle of our community. The community was not very well designed originally because to get from anywhere to anywhere else within the community in Santa Rosa Valley, you have to go out of one development onto Santa Rosa Road and go onto the next development. There are very few side roads and there’s none that run the whole way through. Actually where Casey’s family lives there’s a bit more connectivity of the roads, but in general, it was not designed. When the development happened it happened a little bit here a little bit there. One farmer sold his land, another farmer sold his land. There was no overall plan to make it a smartly designed community. So that is sort of a knife through the middle of the community. Up until the early ‘90s, the road was designated in the general plan of Ventura County to be a 4 lane road. It’s currently a 2 lane road. Are you familiar with what a general plan is and how that works?
Casey: I don’t think so.
Sebastian: Not particularly.
Mark Burley: Every county and every city has a general plan, which is a plan of how the municipality or the area is going to be developed. What is included in that is what is allowed and what’s not allowed. This is a blueprint for the development or non-development of each entity. That includes a huge amount of law about what you can do and what you can’t do. There’s all sorts of things like grading, how much land you can grade away if you’re going to build a house or not build a house. It has things like the designation of what roads are and how big they’re going to be. There’s a huge amount of rules and they’re all connected to the general plan. If you are working with the county or a city, you can use the general plan as a tool or a weapon, depending on how you look at it, to get what you want. In the case of that Save Our Ring of Green thing, that area that they had where they were building was designated on their general plan as open space and designated as a part of this Ring of Green. So we were using that as our argument, although as I said there were other rules that were sort of grandfathered in.
So this road was designated as a 4 lane road. I don’t think anybody knew that in this valley, I mean I was surprised when I found out. The last thing we would want is a freeway running down the middle of our valley. It’s bad enough as it is. And the more you widen the road its going to attract more traffic down here, which is not really great for our quality of life in terms of what we’re looking for. When I heard this, I spoke to the supervisor at the time and said “Can we change this to a 2 lane road?”. This was a supervisor that we had previously who was not particularly helpful to us. And she said first of all it would cost a lot money, plans to do it in the future, don’t worry about it, its not going to happen. Then a bit later, our politics changed which came with another supervisor. We got in a supervisor who was much more community supportive, Linda Parks on the board of SOAR, so I had known her. Anyway, so I brought this up again. Look we want to change the designation on the road from 4 lanes to 2 lanes. It’s not quite as simple as that, whenever you do anything of major significance, there is law in California that you have to go through an Environmental Impact Report. This is something that is a very common thing for any development or changes of the general plan, all of that sort of thing has to go through an Environmental Impact Report. Those are not cheap, they take a lot of work by people who specialize in Environmental Impact Reports. This, by the way, comes under state law, and law which is called CEQA. This is something that if you’re interested in this whole area you need to know about and learn about. That stands for California Environmental Quality Act.
Casey: Do those reports go to the EPA too?
Mark Burley: They don’t go to the EPA because that’s at a federal level. They may go to the EPA, but the EPA is not involved at all. Anything that is a development or change has to have, through CEQA, an EIR, Environmental Impact Report. Like on this Save Our Ring of Green, there was an Environmental Impact Report. If there was going to be, if somebody was going to take 20 acres of farming and make it into housing, there would be an EIR. Now the EIR looks at everything. It looks at effects on farming, it looks at effects on traffic, it looks at effects on endangered species. They have to go and test, they’d have specialists go out and see if there’s endangered animals or endangered plants. So if any of those exist, you can’t develop it. Of course, that endangerment is usually, maybe always, but usually, decided at the federal level, which is what you were just asking about. There’s these various plants that are very common that are called, well I would say they are endangered, but they commonly come up in these things, called Lyon’s Pentachaeta and other plants like that, and if that’s found on your property, that has to be protected. That area has to be protected and you can’t develop on it. Not necessarily the whole property. Then they look into flooding, they look into water availability. So this CEQA document, or the EIR, is generally, even for a very simple one, is liable to be 30 pages long. For a longer one it could be hundreds of pages long. So this all involves huge amounts of highly paid specialists doing this. So you can imagine how expensive it gets to do an EIR. Especially if its for a big big project. So that is again a tool that conservationists can use to either get something stopped or slowed down. The Ahmanson Ranch had a huge EIR, huge. And of course they’ll start and do an EIR and then they found there was this species called the Red Legged Frog on the Ahmanson Ranch that lived on the high top ends of where the Malibu Creek starts all the way up there. And its a very, very rare animal. And that meant that they couldn’t develop in that particular area. Sometimes there will be an environmental report where they basically say everything is ok, we don’t have to do anything, which is called a Mitigated Negative Declaration or MND. If that’s the case once the environmental report is done then if it’s declared an MND and that’s approved, you can go ahead with the project. If you do an environmental report, you can have the second level is the environmental report will say, “Oh, This is OK, but you have to do this, you have to take 500 acres of land and make it into open space, you have to save the lands Lyon’s Pentachaeta you’ve gotta feed the red-legged frogs, etc.” So, that’s the second level which is, where there are “mitigations.” All of those mitigate the project. Or, sometimes… they look at whether prime farmland is being used used up in the project: then you may have to then preserve other farmland indefinitely. And then the third level of it is that the EIR says that this project cannot be mitigated its going to have a negative impact on the environment so they can’t move forward.
So that is the law of California, but it’s a huge tool of people who are working to protect land. So, to get back to where I digressed from a minute ago which was the road, in order to have changed the general plan on the road, they would have had to have done an EIR and then change the general plan. So that would have been hugely expensive. So what we did: first of all, we got various people to write in and say that we want to change this. We sort of slowly snuck it in. The road department was totally opposed to us doing this, which, by the way, they also were for that traffic signal thing, I don’t know if, Casey, you were ever familiar with that part that your father was involved with?
Casey: Yeah
Mark Burley: Anyway, first we persuaded the Board of Supervisors to vote to consider the changing of the road during what was just coming up. Every 10 years the general plan has to be updated, so they have to update the general plan. The county looks at all aspects of the general plan. So the first thing we did was to get them to agree that this was going to be part of what they looked at. So that was a over a year to get them to agree to that. Meanwhile the road department’s saying, “No, no no. We want it to be available in case we need more space,” because, of course, all they care about is how much traffic they can move around, which is their job. So we got them to agree to put it in the 10 year review. So then a report came through in this 10 year report process which basically said that it wouldn’t have a huge amount of impact at this point and we had to show that there were enough other places for traffic to go. When you’re dealing with traffic issues, you have this thing called level of service. So that basically means how well the road is working: that cars are not backed up. You are not allowed to create a plan which, according to the traffic experts, is going to drop the level of service below a certain level. So if it’s a level of service F, you’ve flunked. So we were able to show that the level of service was going to be better than that. It got included in the general plan, and there was a side vote on whether they were going to agree to change the road from 4 lanes to 2 lanes in the general plan. Then, all of our community then lobbied to get it changed. Luckily, the Board of Supervisors, when it came to the vote, voted to agree. So now, that road is designated as a 2 lane road and will be “forever,” or until somebody tries to push it back the other way, which would be quite difficult because the community pressure would be huge at this point. So, it’s a lot more difficult to move something the first time. To then change it back would be very difficult for them. They would have to go through all that. So that was something that I was involved with, and, its funny because, I would say that 95% of the people who live in this valley have no realization that that either happened or what the significance of it was, but it was a big deal.
Sebastian: So quick question, of the people that did know, did you have a lot of public support for this plan?
Mark Burley: Yes we had a huge amount of public support within the valley. We got a lot of people to write in. This was before email blasts, it was more physical mail. We sent letters out to everyone in the valley. There’s only about 1,000 or 1,200 home in the valley. But I would say the support within the valley, of the people who knew about it was about 95%. The one thing people hate about this valley was the road, and how noisy it was, and how dangerous it was. And actually subsequent to this there was a whole other push with the county in order to get them to put traffic signals in and slow the traffic down through the whole valley. By that time they had created this thing called the Santa Rosa Valley Municipal Advisory Council. It is actually an official body of the County of Ventura. The purpose of the council is to make recommendations to the Board of Supervisors and other county officers about what we want in Santa Rosa Valley. There are 5 members of the board. Originally we were appointed, but then after that we were elected. You run for a 4 year term. That is actually a formal part of Ventura County government. That was started by the supervisor for us and we got going. One of the first things that the MAC, as we call it, did was to lobby to get these traffic signals put in at various places along the road that would slow the traffic down and give an opportunity to people who come off these side roads that I talked about earlier to get into this traffic. In rush hour there’s a lot of people going from Oxnard and Camarillo and they’re heading to Thousand Oaks and Simi. Most of the day it’s fairly quiet, but during peak hours it’s very busy and very dangerous. Again that was a fight with the road department, because they didn’t want to have that because their job is to get the traffic to go as fast as possible. It was the same sort of thing. This was more under the involvement of the MAC. We had a sub-board that was involved with it. Casey’s father was involved with that side of it. They did studies and they did an EIR and it eventually got approved and they put these signals in, and it’s made a huge difference to how it feels in this valley. Anything that’s a development or an improval comes to us, the MAC. There’s not that much development but there’s these things called “conditional use permits” which allow to people to do certain things on their property and they come to us and we give our opinions about whether we like it or whether we don’t like it. Sometimes they listen, sometimes they don’t. We shall see.
The other thing that I have been involved with is the trail system in the Santa Rosa Valley that is a non-motorized trail system. Basically it was developed for horses but people walk their dogs on it and people dirt bike on it and so on. It’s a very complicated system that runs through the whole valley. We’re lucky it developed at all, because there was no plan for it. What tends to happen is that as communities get more developed, and this particularly happened in the area north of Malibu which was a big horse area, is that as the place gets more developed the trails get cut off. Somebody says “This is my land, the horses can’t come across here anymore.” So that was potentially happening here. In fact, what really got us started going with that was that one of our trails got cut off because somebody developed it. So then we started this non-profit called Santa Rosa Valley Trails Inc. which has a website srvtrails.com. So we’ve done two or three things. First of all, a lot of people don’t want trails on their property because they’re afraid they’re going to have liability. We have an overall insurance policy that we provide. We can take easements for a trail. Then that means that Trails Inc., with its insurance policy, insures that homeowner against any problems. There is actually a huge amount of protections under the law in California, that people don’t know about, for trails, but that’s beside the point. What we try to do is persuade people to give us easements on their property, and then we will maintain the trail and keep it open, and insure it. One of the other things that we’ve been doing with this group is to create a trail plan for the whole valley, which we’ve sort of done now, that we then get incorporated into the general plan for the county. So, we’re very close to the end of that: that’s been about a 5 year journey. We’ve created the plan, we did an EIR, which we raised the money to pay for, and just last night we approved the final version of it to go the Board of Supervisors who will then vote on it in December and if they vote yes then they will then incorporate it into the plan for the County. Then if anybody then develops a certain property they can say, “OK, but there’s a trail here, this is planned. Why don’t you keep that trail in and give it to Trails Inc?” So that’s another thing that I’ve been involved with.
Casey: How did you go about making your charity? It seems like it could be a pretty involved process.
Mark Burley: You have to hire a lawyer. First of all, you have to incorporate. That’s not very difficult. Incorporation is relatively simple and you probably actually don’t need a lawyer just to incorporate. Once you’ve incorporated you apply to the IRS for what’s called 501(C)3 status, which is full on charity status. I don’t know if you’ve ever given money to a charity and they send you that receipt and it says we’re a 501(C)3. There’s other “non profit” statuses like political things and so on, but if you’re a full charity the main benefit is that, for anybody who gives you money, it’s tax deductible, which of course is a big deal in terms of fundraising. Most people give to some charities or other and then they get their tax deduction. There’s all this paperwork you have to fill out for the IRS. I think that took somewhere between 2 and 3 years before the IRS said “OK, you are now an approved charity.” So you get this letter from them called a letter of determination. That is your proof that you are a charity. In fact, I think if you go on our website and you go in the area called corporate information, then there’s a whole bunch of things including our fundraising and all that sort of thing, and included on there you can see the letter of determination. So, unless you have anything else I will go through what the SOAR initiative is going to do for the next 2 or 3 years if you’re interested.
Casey: OK, so we’re interested in how ideas can spread between different locations among the local level or local to national levels and such. So, you mentioned that Steve Bennett and Linda Parks and some other people brought the SOAR initiative from Napa and I was wondering if they lived in Napa and done the same thing there or if they had just heard about it in Napa and if other counties have looked at Ventura county for an example for making initiatives about open space.
Mark Burley: So, starting with the very beginning with Napa, No, it’s not my understanding that anybody lived in Napa. Obviously they heard about Napa. They were all people who, as I am, were interested in protecting open space and agricultural land etc. So, they didn’t specifically go to Napa or come from Napa. Also, there was a different politics in Napa, which is that there’s a huge amount of money in the wine business, and the farmers up there were very into protecting their land because it’s worth so much money. So, I don’t know how the Napa initiative works, but it’s basically the same idea. When we came down to here, to be honest with you, the farm community was opposed to SOAR the first time around, maybe less so now. They were opposed to it because in the back of their minds they always want to think, “Oh I can cash this out.” So on an individual basis that might be beneficial to them, but in terms of a farming community, its the kiss of death, because you need to have a certain size of the farming community to be able to support all of the things that go around the business which is you know fixing tractors, and fertilizer. All of these things are part of the business of agriculture. If you get to a certain size then they die off and then it just implodes and it’s gone. I’m not sure I’m quite answering your question although I’ll just jump forward to the other. There was an attempt in San Luis Obispo county to do the same thing as we did here and they failed. They probably failed because they did not have enough organization or enough backing and enough money.
Sebastian: Did they reach out to your organization for any help?
Mark Burley: I don’t remember about that specifically, not to me anyway. They might have spoken to Steve or Richard. They might have reached out to Richard Francis who writes the initiative. You have to be really really careful because the wording has to be legal. What happens is that if the initiative passes, somebody is going to appeal the initiative. It’s going to go to court and if there’s any wording in there that doesn’t fit in with other laws or is “taking somebody’s property rights” (there are laws about you can’t just take somebody’s property rights away) then it would have gone down. It actually went all the way to the supreme court of the United States. When I say that it was upheld here at the appellate court level. It was upheld at the superior court level. The U.S. supreme court refused to hear it, which is basically them saying we agree with the decision that’s made down below. I’m not sure that we have a huge amount of outreach to other groups or that we are firestarters for this sort of thing. I think that on a legal level, that happens a lot, that people from other areas look at the way an initiative was written, how it succeeds in the courts and then if its been successful and upheld in the courts they are liable to use similar legal language because they know that it can withstand that kind of scrutiny.
Just to give you a rough idea of what we’re doing now (it started last year, 2013) for the SOAR initiative, just to give you an idea of all the things. We are planning to go on the ballot in November of 2016. The reason we are planning to go then is because it’s a presidential election and you get the biggest turnout. Although it’s a nonpartisan, not a Democrat-Republican issue, you tend to get more Democrats and more open space advocates. Actually, it succeeded pretty handily last time, by about 66%, which is very high. The reason why its coming up again in 2016 is that you can’t get a law that you say goes forever. You have to have some sort of a window on it. There’s legal requirements about it. The question we had the first time was “How long should we put it out for? Should we put it out for 10 years, 15 years 20 years?” The longer you put it out for the more you get flak from the opposition say “Oh, it’s locking in everything. Who knows what it’s going to be like in 20 years.” So we picked on a 20 year window. Now we are extending it from now to 2050. That seemed just like a good time to extend it to. So this is what happened. In 2013, we basically got the SOAR executive board together and started figuring out what we needed to do between now and 2016. What we’ve been doing this year is raising money, although its not all actual money. A lot of it was raising pledges. So we get people to say “OK we’ll give this amount in 2014 and this amount in 2015 and this amount in 2016.” So we now have like a half a million dollars worth of pledges in the bank ready to go to support the campaign. The other things we’ve been doing is getting ready to get volunteers together because what will happen next year is we have to go out and get people to sign the initiative which takes volunteers. Everything we do is “grassroots.” We don’t pay people, students to go out for a dollar a signature. A lot of these big initiatives are billionaire-funded initiatives where people come from out of state. We don’t do that. We do it all with people who are volunteers. You have to raise something like 70,000 signatures. It’s a huge amount. So we’re raising the money, we’re getting the volunteers ready and we’ve been hiring people to upgrade our social media structure, which didn’t really exist before. So now we have a facebook, instagram, twitter, and pinterest. And we have to hire someone to do that because it takes a lot of work to make it look semi-professional. And next year we have to rewrite the initiative which Richard Francis will do. We also have some issues about whether there are any changes to what we had before, or exemptions. There were certain discussions originally with cities about where their boundaries are. One city would say “We want this little bit here, can we draw the boundary around there?” for whatever reason. So there’s negotiation. Those boundaries were created at one point and now there’s a new discussion about whether they want to change it or not. That all then has to get incorporated into the actual wording of the law, and that all has to be done before you can go out and get people to sign signatures because they’re signing signatures that’s based on what this exact law addresses.
So that’s what will happen next year, and then in 2016 we’ll be doing a lot of outreach and promotion and using the money that we’ve raised to put out flyers and all of those things you get in the mail to promote it. Back in the 1990s there were a lot of people that were really opposed to it. There’s still some hesitation on the part of the Farm Bureau and farmers. There’s actually a group that is being formed-I won’t say to oppose SOAR per se, but that’s certainly one of their jobs. They have what I regard as the right-wing-my-land-I-can-do-whatever-I-like-with-it cowboy attitude, “Nobody tells me what to do.” There is that, although here’s what happened last time. A huge amount of money came in from outside Ventura County from Orange County building companies and the BIA, which is the Building Industry of America. They came and they outspent us 10 to 1
Casey/Sebastian: Wow.
Mark Burley: and they still lost by that huge margin, which tells you something about what the people in Ventura County want. What I was going to say was that now, there’s not a politician anywhere in the county, either at the city level or the county level, who doesn’t say “I support SOAR.” You basically can’t elected without it. The whole zeitgeist has changed. Back in the day, there were a lot of people who said, “No we don’t support SOAR, and it’s going to be terrible for the county.” Of course, the sky didn’t fall and Ventura County’s pretty much still going fine. Hopefully that “opposition” won’t put up quite the fight that they did before. Better to just live with SOAR the way it is. It’s not really killing them, but we can’t be prepared for that. We have to be ready, which is the problem that they had in San Luis Obispo. They weren’t ready, they didn’t have enough money, they didn’t have enough volunteers gathered, so they lost. You have to spend a lot of time and effort making sure every t is crossed and every i is dotted in terms of your plans to get that vote in November of 2016. Alright, I have to be somewhere in half an hour so just tell me what other questions you have and I’ll be happy to answer.
Casey: I think I’m good.
Sebastian: Yeah, this was very thorough.
Mark Burley: Alright, now you can go out and be an activist. Let me tell you what it takes. It takes one or a very few people to be extremely persevering. This stuff does not happen fast. The average person does not have the time, or effort, or mental inclination to deal with it. It doesn’t take very many people to make the change, but it takes an awful lot of “stick-to-it-iveness” That’s really the big story and most people are too busy or don’t care enough to deal with it. Feel free to email me if you have any specific questions.
Sebastian: OK. We’ll also get a transcript of this interview and send it to you for final approval
Mark Burley: Woo-hoo!
Casey: Thank you so much for talking to us.
Sebastian: Yes, thank you.
Mark Burley: You’re welcome. Good luck. When do you have to have the paper in by?
Casey: The original due date was Monday, but its going to be extended.
Mark Burley: OK, well that gives you a little extra time. Good luck with it.
Casey/Sebastian: Thanks, bye.
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