CONEJO VALLEY HAS POTENTIAL TO BE NEW ATHENS.

Byline: Herbert Gooch Guest Columnist

The future is an ever-receding horizon but one with mileposts - in this case, the year 2000.

A millennium ago, Conejo was a valley of rabbits. Today it is a valley of Rabbits, Geos and SUVs. What will it be a millennium hence?

Given our relentless, reckless spoiling of the atmosphere and too clever invention of nuclear weapons, we may be lucky to return it to the rabbits as the highest living species available. But what is it now? And what is it likely to become in the next - forgive my self-interested myopia - generation?

A haven of decent living, provided we keep a balance between residential growth and business expansion, the one to settle the shrinking open space, the other to sustain the quality of life in the space we already enjoy.

This is not a place typical of America or California or even Southern California, for that matter. For starters, there are far too many Anglo wealthy and far too few crimes. It resembles more the middle-class suburban dream of the second half of the 20th century than what demographers tell us will be coming in the first half of the 21st century.

In Ventura County, the median housing prices recently announced were second only to Orange County as the highest in California. But the Conejo prices are far, far higher and accelerating as we write.

Growth is coming. The only chance we have to control it is to plan it. Without planning we have two possibilities, thick or thin. The tacky, dense sprawl which has covered so much of the neighboring San Fernando Valley or a thin, upscale, restricted growth - a golden ghetto. We should act to avoid either fate and seek consciously and deliberately to extend our middle-class, if atypical, character.

To protect our quality of life and keep a middling size and character, we should envision our possibilities and carefully plan. But how to plan when we seem to lack the vision and the means to make, much less implement, such plans?

Consider the following. The Conejo Valley, with its hub city of Thousand Oaks, has a population roughly equal to that of Athens during the rule of Pericles. It has the population size and resources - natural, civic and financial - to be great, to be, if not a shining city upon a hill, then certainly one within a valley.

But are its residents justly citizens or just residents? And is its government up to the task of leading?

Far too many residents are just that - people who don't work and fully live here. They are too often transient dwellers, commuters who do not invest their energy and loyalties in a community. They come for security from crime and the guarantee of good schools, roads and housing. As housing prices are increasing, we are faced with diminishing affordable housing - not just for the working class but the middle class itself. We must plan and make provision to ensure that people from all walks of life can live here.

The greatest challenge is to provide an infrastructure not just of housing, but of business and culture and parks and all that which make people want to be citizens, to invest not only their mortgage but their lives and families here as well.

We have a magnificent civic center, our own university, malls, entertainment centers, a bustling business community, first-rate schools and a world-class research and development center at the forefront of global business and science. We have the elements of greatness but we lack the vision and the means to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

It takes leadership both to envision and plan for the future.

Leadership is not merely a matter of having the right people, it is also fundamentally a matter of structure and organization. And in this respect, in place of political accountability and responsibility, we have an anarchy of conflicted and conflicting governing and planning bodies: city councils at odds with one another and themselves; an apparently dysfunctional county Board of Supervisors, and a plethora of elected officials and obscure agencies splintered into what few know the best of, but all suspect the worst of.

Would that we could develop a regional government, an entity capable of providing synergy, savings and vision for the future. Could we be another Athens? Is there anyone to whom the question even occurs? Are there enough citizens, not mere residents, who care, want and understand what a community is, much less what it might become?

We can be justly proud of what we are, yet humble in respect of what we might become. We lack the means to control our destiny without government, yet too many of us instinctively feel it beneath us to engage.

I like to think that just over the horizon of the millennium there will be a Conejo Valley which is an example of what can happen to a place when people engage and government leads - a haven of decent living for the next generation as well as our own.