Photo by Jen Edney
Special to The Star

El Rio resident Alex Ambriz, left, speaks with Denis O'Leary and his wife, Vivian Doty O'Leary recently. The pair were campaigning in the unincorporated area.

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of six articles profiling candidates for the Ventura County Board of Supervisors in the June 3 election, beginning with candidates in the 5th District.

Denis O'Leary stands in the middle of Wright Road in El Rio and says, "This is why I'm running for supervisor."

One entire block of the street, stretching for about 200 yards, is unpaved. To O'Leary, this is a symbol of all that is wrong with county government, particularly in the 5th District, where John Flynn has been supervisor for 32 of the past 36 years.

The county's infrastructure — the roads, sewers, streetlights and the rest — is subpar, he says, particularly in El Rio and the unincorporated areas that the county Board of Supervisors is responsible for. His message discipline is remarkable; during campaign debates between O'Leary, Flynn and the third candidate, Oxnard City Councilman John Zaragoza, O'Leary brings nearly every answer back to "infrastructure."

"I've seen unpaved streets, I've seen crime that I think wouldn't have happened if there were streetlights and sidewalks, and I've seen the debacle over the sewer system in El Rio," O'Leary said during a recent interview. The area is still on septic tanks, and property owners must pay about $20,000 to connect to the city of Oxnard's sewer system.

Flynn argues that O'Leary's critique is off-base and stems from a misunderstanding of what the county actually does. Unincorporated areas will never have roads and sidewalks that are as nice as those in urban areas, Flynn said, because counties don't have the road funds that cities have.

Wright Road is a particularly inapt example, Flynn said, because it is a private street, owned by the people who own the homes and other properties that line it.

"That's a phony issue," Flynn said. "If it were a regular street it would have been paved a long time ago."

That's probably true, according to Butch Britt, the director of the county transportation department. The department is not responsible for private roads, unless the Board of Supervisors makes a declaration that there is a public benefit in repairing a particular private road. The board could also buy the road from its owners, but Britt said that usually only happens to roads that are already in good condition.

If the residents of Wright Road want it paved, the usual process would be for them to take up a collection among themselves or form an assessment district. The price tag for paving that stretch of road could be anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000, Britt said.

O'Leary said he realizes that the road is private, but he thinks the county should pay to pave it anyway, because it's in such a low-income area. It's also a through street, he points out, surrounded by other paved roads.

O'Leary, 48, walked Wright Road on a recent Sunday afternoon, knocking on doors and asking the residents for their votes in the June 3 election. If no candidate gets more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two finishers will advance to a runoff in November.

Campaigning door to door

The people O'Leary talked to were polite, and happy to hear about his platform of more money for roads and sewers in their neighborhood. None had heard of him before, though, and they weren't ready to commit their votes just yet.

"This isn't easy, but I've been enjoying it," O'Leary said, as he left a house where a large dog had menaced him through a chain-link fence. "I've been getting a really good response."

O'Leary, a middle-school teacher in El Rio, admits that he's the underdog in the 5th District race. As an eight-term incumbent, Flynn has better name recognition and an existing base of support; so does Zaragoza, who has served on the Oxnard City Council since 1996.

The other two candidates are also outspending O'Leary. As of March 17, the end of the latest campaign finance reporting period, O'Leary had raised a little over $3,000 in donations and loaned $9,000 to his campaign.

Flynn had about $18,000 on hand, and Zaragoza had close to $23,000.

To make up for that disadvantage, O'Leary said he plans to rely on door-to-door campaigning as well as the reputation he's made as a school board trustee. He's an elected member of the Oxnard School District Board of Trustees, where he points out that he represents nearly as many constituents as the 5th District supervisor does.

Helped change school scheduling

O'Leary said that one of his proudest accomplishments on that board was leading the movement away from a staggered year-round schedule in the district's schools, which will be complete next year.

His wife is a teacher's aide in Ventura, and his three sons all attend different schools in Oxnard, so at one point, the family had five separate school schedules and five different vacations.

The rest of O'Leary's public profile has come through his work as an activist for Latino causes. Though he's not Latino, his wife is, and he is fluent in Spanish. For the past eight years, he has been a leader of the League of United Latin American Citizens, and he also has represented the United Farm Workers and a statewide group of bilingual teachers.

O'Leary said his goal is to win outright on June 3, but he also acknowledged that his best hope is to try to finish in the top two and force a runoff in November.

If he wins, the $119,000-a-year supervisor's job will be a big step up from schoolteacher. Still, he said he has no interest in serving as long as Flynn has. A ballot measure that will go before the voters in November would limit supervisors to three terms, and O'Leary said that even if it fails, that's all he would want to serve.

"I don't want to be the next John Flynn, sitting there for 32 years," he said. "I want to be Denis O'Leary, and get the job done in 12 years."