Residents Start Cityhood Drive in Calabasas

A committee of homeowners from the west end of the San Fernando Valley launched a “City of Calabasas” campaign Thursday night, speculating that the move could be both economically and politically rewarding.

About 25 community leaders said they will study the feasibility of incorporating a hilly, sparsely settled, 12-square-mile area bounded by the City of Los Angeles on the east, Agoura Hills on the west, the Ventura County line on the north and Mulholland Highway on the south.

The leader of the group cautioned his colleagues, however, that a lengthy study would be needed to determine whether such a city could support itself--and whether independence would be approved by the areas’s approximately 6,000 residents.

If the committee finds cityhood feasible, an incorporation vote of the whole area could take place within two years, the committee’s acting chairman, Louis Melson, told the gathering in a Calabasas savings and loan meeting room.

“Local control is one of the big reasons for considering it,” said Robert Hill, president of the Calabasas Park Homeowners Association. He said state tax revenues would be another advantage of cityhood. “The negative is, it’s another layer of government,” Hill said.

Plans for the incorporation effort were begun in October by Melson and other residents, who said they were concerned that the affluent 2,800-home community might be gobbled up against its will by the neighboring cities of Agoura Hills and Los Angeles.

Agoura Hills then was seeking to establish a new “sphere of influence” that included Calabasas’ most-western neighborhood, Malibu Canyon Park. State law defines such spheres as the ultimate probable boundaries of a city.

“The thinking of the people in Calabasas is a little different than the thinking in Agoura Hills,” Melson said as he announced plans for the cityhood campaign last fall. “It’s like comparing Encino with Tarzana. There’s a difference in land values.”

Three other Valley-area towns have won municipal independence in recent years: Westlake Village in 1981, Agoura Hills in 1982 and Ventura County’s Moorpark in 1983.