Baseball: Ventura may be left holding the bag as two other cities balk at a game that’s not in their back yard.

Last spring, a cluster of officials from Ventura, Oxnard and Camarillo vowed to set aside their rivalries and work together to build a minor league baseball stadium somewhere in western Ventura County.

Less than a year later, the spirit of regional cooperation has not only suffered setbacks, but is also on the verge of foundering altogether. And the fate of the stadium itself hangs in the balance, with organizers scrambling to line up private benefactors to make up for lost public financing.

Such a situation is far from unusual when these three cities try to work together on a project, said Oxnard City Councilman Andres Herrera.

“It seems like it would be in everyone’s best interest to get together to devise a strategy for the west county, but all our efforts at that have failed,” Herrera said. “It’s unfortunate, but for whatever reason, the three cannot come to the table and have a reasonable dialogue.”

Camarillo dove out of the picture completely in January, with city officials saying their community did not stand to gain from the project.

So Oxnard and Ventura officials began casting about for private investors to help fund the $15-million project near the Ventura Auto Center. But except for the Hofer family, which has offered to donate the land for the stadium, no other benefactors have come forth publicly.

And now, Oxnard officials say that although they plan to stay involved with the development, they do not have any money to help pay for it.

“I don’t think Oxnard was ever in a position to commit public funds to this project,” Councilman Tom Holden said.

The drive to construct a stadium began last April when the president of the California League promised to deliver a Class A team to Ventura County if a ballpark was built.

A committee made up of council members and city staff from Ventura, Oxnard and Camarillo considered sites in all three communities.

Even before the committee selected the Ventura site in November, some officials threatened to abandon the proposal if the stadium did not land in their city.

“Do we get our money back if Ventura is not chosen to be the site?” Ventura Councilman Gary Tuttle said in May, just before the council voted to pledge thousands of dollars for a stadium feasibility study. “If it’s in Oxnard, are we really prepared to fund an Oxnard facility?”

But with the stadium now proposed for the barren field near the auto dealerships, Ventura officials are wrestling with entirely different concerns.

“It will be real tough for council members in Oxnard to say, ‘Oh, by the way, we will be supporting a stadium in Ventura so their auto center will gain sales,’ ” Tuttle said.

For their part, some Oxnard officials deny that economic competition has ever factored into their decision.

“It is immaterial,” Herrera said.

Whatever the reasons, officials from Camarillo, Oxnard and Ventura say they are all beginning to agree on one thing: If any public agency invests in the stadium project, it looks as if it will be Ventura, going it alone.

That’s the way he knew it would be from the start, Tuttle said.

“There’ll never be shared tax dollars and we’ll never work together,” he said of partnerships between Ventura and other county cities. “The minute a project site is selected in either city, the other will bow out.”