Learning a Little About My New Home
Richard Gutierrez
Chief Financial Officer, Casa Pacifica
VCLA Cohort XXVII
Being accepted into this year’s Ventura County Leadership Academy has been such a benefit to me already. Being new to the area in the time of Covid has made getting to know my new home very difficult. When I learned of this program, I jumped at the opportunity to apply. It has not disappointed.
Session four started off great, with our first speaker Hilary Howard, (Cohort XXI), Executive Coach and Culture Change Consultant. The group revisited the results of our StrengthFinder assessments and had some additional discussion about what they are and how understanding them help us and others in our professional lives.
Our next speaker was Dan Drugan, Manager of Resources, Calleguas Municipal Water District. He did a great job of explaining how the district manages its responsibility of providing water to the supported communities. I learned a lot about how the state as a whole supports the different districts in California, how reliant we all are on the snow seasons in the mountains, the Colorado River and local water sources. After learning about the housing crisis, I was worried how there could possibly be enough water to supply new housing but then learned how conservation via better water housing fixtures and other water conservation initiatives has helped to reduce residential water use to the same levels they had been for many many years. I also learned that residential water usage was such a small percentage of over all water usage so if the house crisis is resolved it wont necessarily have a huge impact on the water crisis. We also got a great tour of the facility we visited and learned how water was processed and supplied to the community.
Sandy Smith, Project Manager, Sespe Consulting, Inc. joined us and spoke about the challenges of trying to deal with housing in our community. He shared how laws intended to help preserve agricultural and open spaces has made trying to provide affordable housing or any development in our community very challenging. I learned how without affordable housing for the residents of the community, the ability to add new housing stock, the costs to rent or purchases homes has increase to the point of driving people out of our community. It became clear that our community needs to reevaluate how it looks at land use and housing development to avoid ccontinuing to losing the young people that are the future of the community. The last half of the session helped me learn about a number of important things about where I now live, the beautiful city of Thousand Oaks. I learned about how the Conejo Recreation & Park District was formed and operates to offer such great amenities to the community. I hadn’t realized how many park and recreation options there were in the area. I feel very luck to have this and am looking forward to going out and using these areas soon. Likewise, I learned much about the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area and what it has to offer to the people who live here. I also learned how they mange these lands and deal with the aftermath of fires.
Finally I learned about how some of the services provided to our community are a result of committed private companies and consortium like Athens Services, a waste management company and the Broadband Consortium of the Pacific Coast. These organizations work on makeing our community more livable, while trying to address issues like protecting the environment and providing equal access to technology.All in all, it was a great day. There was so much packed into the day and so much more that I learned beyond what I have shared here. I look forward to future sessions and learn more about this great community.