Tony Biasotti

Special to Ventura County Star

The city of Ventura will prohibit restaurants from using plastic foam cups and containers and may extend the ban to coolers and other products sold in stores.

The City Council voted 6-0 in favor of the ban on Monday night, with Councilwoman Sofia Rubalcava absent from the meeting. Rubalcava and Councilwoman Christy Weir had asked the council to consider the ban.

Staffers in City Hall will now write an ordinance prohibiting restaurants, gas stations and other food purveyors from using expanded polystyrene foam — commonly known by the brand name Styrofoam — as packaging for takeout or dine-in food and drinks. Cups, plates and other containers would have to be recyclable or biodegradable. At Weir’s request, the council voted to also consider applying the ban to products sold at other retail outlets.

Ventura will join the cities of Santa Barbara, San Diego, San Francisco and more than 100 other California localities in banning polystyrene containers. The goal of those bans is to reduce the amount of polystyrene litter in the environment. The substance is light and breaks up easily, which means it can easily be blown out of trash cans, and it makes up a noticeable chunk of the debris found on Ventura beaches.

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City Council member Cheryl Heitman said she finds the amount of polystyrene litter on the beaches near her Pierpont home “very disturbing.”

“What’s even more disturbing is when I see a seagull with a piece in its mouth,” she said. “I want to run up and take it out, but I know you can’t do that.”

Weir said she would like to see the city model its ordinance after Santa Barbara, which stresses warnings and education over fines and other enforcement measures. Weir said that in Santa Barbara, the polystyrene ban has not been as controversial as the ban on plastic straws, because with polystyrene, “there are economical alternatives, nontoxic, compostable alternatives, and it’s not a hardship to restaurants.”

Church of Scientology apologizes for balloon release

In another matter related to pollution, the City Council heard an apology on Monday night from the president of the local Church of Scientology, which had a grand opening Saturday for its new church and offices in a building just off of Seaward Avenue, along Highway 101.

The church released a large number of helium-filled latex balloons as part of the event. Mayor Matt LaVere, writing Monday on the Facebook page of his campaign for Ventura County supervisor, called the balloon release “outrageous conduct” that was “expressly forbidden” by the city.

Debbie Cregan, the president of the Church of Scientology in Ventura, apologized for the balloons, although she told the council they were included in the group’s city permit for the event.

“This is not the way we wanted to introduce ourselves to the community,” Cregan said. “We are here to apologize. … We have been doing beach cleanups and starting tomorrow we will be doing daily beach cleanups.”

LaVere responded that in Ventura, “I think you’ll see a community that voraciously defends its natural environment.”

After the meeting, City Manager Alex McIntyre said that LaVere and Cregan were both right, in a sense: City officials did tell the church not to release the balloons.

However, the church did list the balloon release in its permit application, and the city approved the permit. It was an oversight on the city’s part to approve the permit without specifying that the balloon release should have been removed, McIntyre said.

The incident angered some community members and environmentalists, who said deflated balloons are already commonly found on beaches and in the ocean, causing potential harm to marine life.

“We found this display of ignorance for our environment incomprehensibly offensive,” said Laura Oergel, president of the Surfrider Foundation Ventura County chapter, in a statement.

Tony Biasotti is a freelance writer for The Star. Staff writer Wendy Leung contributed to this report.