Thank you Mayor Tennyson, members of the Council, staff, Commander Tennyson and the audience. I'm David Marin with Ventura County Civic Alliance. Every two years we publish this report and we are able to go around and share this with the general community because of the generosity of our sponsors several large ones, Ventura County Community Foundation, The Community Colleges of Ventura County California Resources, County of Ventura, Cal State Channel Islands, Lee Manera, the Port of Wainimi and also the Office of Education. So thanks to their generosity we can really share this around the county. Some highlights about the state of the region, The Civic Alliance as I said it's published every two years. We do list all of our sources in the back if anyone wants to dig deeper page 113 For members of the audience or anyone watching at home, you can read this or download it online at civicalliance.org and The Civic Alliance is a neutral unbiased 501c3 nonprofit.
So some highlights, this is not in the report. We could not include population stats because of the government shutdown when we were publishing the report but Camarillo your population over the last few years slightly higher you can see several cities have all declined including Oxnard there This is a little bit more detailed. So the County of Ventura, the green bars are the total population for that community, the county in this case and the blue is just the number zero to 17, our young people. So you can see that from 2017 to 2024 we lost 10,000 total residents in the County of Ventura. However, we lost 20,000 young people so that means our 16 and 17 year olds aged out of that chart And we're not replenishing it with enough young people.
I'm going to come back to that point over the rest of the conversation, but you can see the average age in Ventura County continues to get older. Here's what it looks like for the City of Camarillo. So on the good news is City of Camarillo is pretty much held even on the under 18s 14 500 The adults did go up a little bit. You're doing much better than other counties and you can see that the median age actually came down a bit before going back up, but 41.2 is much higher than the county average of 39.6 or just an older community.
Some highlights from the report, agriculture. Strawberries continue to be our top crop, $700 million. Agriculture is about a two billion dollar industry and one thing to keep in mind it's 3.3% of our economy in this chart but over the years it was much higher 5%. So our economy has grown but ag has stayed flat at about 2 billion and we all know it's very difficult water, labor, pest, the different things that make it so difficult to grow here in Ventura County Community engagement, you're elected officials so I'd like to share the stats about registration. Blue is Democrats, red are Republicans, green is the no party preference. So over the last 23 years, the Democratic registration went up slightly but the Republicans took a large hit across the time frame.
Most of those that they lost went to no party preference. And by city, so Camarillo is actually the closest as far as between Republicans and Democrats. There's only about a 3% differential between Dems and Republicans. Dems are the plurality in Camarillo. Simi Valley is the only city in the county that has a plurality of Republicans. And Oxnard and Ojai have actually a majority Democrat. Of course that's registration and not voter turnout.
So we have a lot of data in the report, some new numbers. If you're familiar with our older reports about nonprofits, we rank them as far as top assets, top revenue. But this chart I'd like to show because up here you can see that there's about 11,000 employees who work in the nonprofit sector in Ventura County. So I think we tend to take that for granted how many people are making up that safety net for us.
In the economy section, this is a difficult chart. There's several pages of this for goods producing service providing and government. The takeaway and you've heard me those of you who have been here two years ago we are seeing high paying jobs in areas like financial activities 112,000 IT 100,000 but those are the industries where we're losing workers We're gaining workers in areas like leisure and hospitality, but that pays a lot less. So certainly we need to recruit higher paying jobs. We need to retain those companies that are here now that are providing those high-paying jobs.
This is an overall growth in our economy sort of similar to the national gross domestic product If you're familiar with this from other reports or you go back and look, you'll see completely different numbers. And that's because every time we produce this report, we restate everything in inflation adjusted dollars. So you can see that back in 2007, we peaked at about a 72 billion dollar economy. We sank after the Great Recession. We sort of plateaued there. We came back a little bit, then we had the pandemic that dropped us back down but we still have been right around the 65 million 62 million while many other regions of the state and the country have seen significant growth so Ventura County just hasn't been able to get a burst of growth.
And that could portend problems if we have another recession, because we just don't have enough of those kind of industries that we want. Taxable sales Camarillo continues to do very well. Of course the outlet malls there was a little bit of a drop their auto sales certainly helps Ventura Thousand Oaks and Oxnard. Oxnart obviously as city manager and others would say it's the Amazon effect as far as how much sales tax they're collecting through that city.
And tourism, so Camarillo isn't quite as much tourism as places like Ventura and certainly Ojai but it's been stable, so that's positive. The Ojai numbers are off the charts there and that is the Ojai Valley in effect. When you can charge that much per night, you're really bringing in money. I would say to Camarillo's benefit though, it's great that we don't rely on a single source like Ojai does.
Education, I talked about the decline in the young people. This chart shows you the projections for enrollment. So the green is the higher grades nine through 12, blue is K through eight and you can see that we are just projected to decline. And just for a little information up here 1973 50 years ago, we had 419,000 residents We've doubled that in the last 50 years and we're starting to go down. But just keep in mind, we doubled in 50 years but if you look at the number of students, 50 years ago we were around 107,000 today we're around 122,000. We barely added 15,000 even though we doubled the size of our county so This is just obviously serious issues for most of our counties. Here's how it looks in the different school districts. Oxnard Union High School, the top line there is 2021-22 and the blue line on the bottom is 2024.
So the Oxnard High School District dropped from 18,000 to 16,900 Now, when you first look at Pleasant Valley Elementary it actually looks pretty positive. Like there's been some growth and that's great but Pleasant Valley Elementary or Pleasant Valley School District has more of these virtual charters than any other school district so they have a lot of students who really do not attend school. It's just they are the governing board for certain virtual academies. So when you take out those charter students Their enrollment also has declined from about 5,700 actually I should say increased slightly to 5,800. Now I'm often asked when I show this chart well isn't that because all of the parents are taking their kids out of public schools putting them in private schools or deciding to homeschool them and so although it's not in your reports I put in this chart showing that even the private schools have seen a decline over the years So it's not homeschooling, it's not private schools.
It's a lack of babies. That's why our schools are seeing these kind of challenges. There's a lot of data in here showing every school district in the county and every school as far as measuring how many of the students either met or exceeded the state standard for English in this example. And there's also math in there so you can see that when you give all these students the scores and they're averaged and well, they're adjusted across all of the boundaries for every school site and every class level We have a range of accomplished schools and schools that are doing a little less. Pleasant Valley actually is doing fairly good, I mean none of the schools get anywhere near 90%, but even across the county none of our schools are really getting anywhere near 100% students meet or exceed the standards.
So a lot of data there for you to look into. Land use and housing, so housing starts are up a little bit. We had the highest total since 2017. Homeownership in Camarillo continues to be a nice almost two thirds. So very positive for stable neighborhoods. The median housing price did go up to 1.1 million in June. It's always important to know which month we do the comparisons which was a hefty increase from 925,000 although it seems like numbers are starting to flatten out Apartment rents, very expensive across the county. Camarillo's no different. I'm gonna try to hustle through the last of these slides. Interestingly, Camarillo has the second highest water use per capita in the county for whatever reason that is. It's usually the warmer wealthier areas with the larger lots like Westlake and Thousand Oaks.
Port Hueneme and Oxnard are very low because they're sort of near the coast. So interesting data. This is the statistic that reinforces my points about the declining enrollment, the lack of children. Back in 1990 we had 19 births per thousand residents here we are in 2023 almost half 10.2 so and I say it to every council every group I speak to I mean there must be policies we can look at to make Child care more affordable is $15,000 for a toddler. Can we have easier regulation so families can create child care centers in their homes? Can we and EDC and First Five are all trying to work in these areas Can employers like yourselves and others offer more family-friendly services, flexible hours for young families? But we really have to find a way to have a recruitment campaign to tell young people that Camarillo or Wainuiomi Oxford, these are the places to come to raise your family.
And I think that's going to be an ongoing challenge until we do something about it. We included cancer rates. Interestingly, Ventura County is a little higher on these cancer rates when you look through it and if you look at the other large counties, you'll see that some of them are coastal. I don't know if that has any correlation or if that's just any causation or if it's just correlation.
Some people might argue we have higher rates because we have better detection. We have better doctors. That's one I can't answer. Is it better doctors finding the various cancers? Or do we just have much higher incidence? Ventura County continues to be the safest large county in the state. Very good news, Camarillo continues to be very good on the crime. Commander Tennyson and all of the team that are working in that area doing a great job. We did have an increase in violent crime.
Property crimes did decrease a little bit. In your reports you'll see that juvenile crime has actually crept up across the county. Surprisingly male and female juvenile crime is up And wrapping up here's food shares doing a lot of work in Camarillo 946,000 pounds homelessness is steady domestic violence little higher than some of the other cities. It was the highest in four years And transportation, we continue to see people working at home even though the pandemic is over. So we're still seeing and this just shows us how we sit compared to all the other counties. And with that thank you for your indulgement a little extra sorry about that.
