Vote Against Housing Project Blocks Road Extension

Los Angeles County planning commissioners voted unanimously Wednesday against a controversial proposal for a large housing development and road extension in Calabasas, dealing the project a major setback.

The county’s Department of Public Works has sought to require the project’s developer to build a costly one-mile extension of Thousand Oaks Boulevard to the edge of a national park. To pay that cost, the developer said he needed to build 16 times as many housing units as allowed in the county’s land-use plan for the area.

But the Regional Planning Commission’s 5-0 vote rejected the idea of financing the Thousand Oaks Boulevard extension by allowing the density proposed in the Malibu Terrace project.

“We should not approve a development in order to get the roadways in,” Commissioner Sadie B. Clark said.

A lawyer for the developer, Las Virgenes Properties of Sunnyvale, said the company has not decided whether to appeal the commission’s decision to the Board of Supervisors.

Las Virgenes Properties had proposed building 1,700 apartments, 116 houses and 60,000 square feet of commercial space on 494 rugged acres west of Las Virgenes Road. The county’s land-use plan for the area permits only 112 homes there.

In an interview, Supervisor Mike Antonovich said Malibu Terrace “clearly was not compatible” with the county plan. “We were concerned that the density of the project was too great for what the property was zoned for,” he said.

Thousand Oaks Boulevard became an issue at the insistence of the Department of Public Works, which sees the extension of the unfinished road as a badly needed transportation improvement. The boulevard currently ends in the city of Agoura Hills and resumes at Las Virgenes Road. In between lie the Malibu Terrace property, the oak-dotted Cheeseboro Canyon within the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area and a semi-rural Agoura Hills neighborhood known as Old Agoura.

The county government holds an easement to run the road through the canyon.

Several Old Agoura residents were among the 30 people who showed up on a weekday morning to speak against the Malibu Terrace project. Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club also opposed the project, which they and the National Park Service say is a direct threat to Cheeseboro Canyon.

“What is before you is an outrage,” Old Agoura resident Jess Thomas said. “For the past two years, Public Works has attempted to pressure both Agoura Hills and the National Park Service into permitting construction of a road that has always been controversial and is a long way from being needed.”

Commissioner Clinton Ternstrom later alluded to the political and practical difficulties of building the road, which would require much grading to buttress unstable earth.

“The Public Works Department may very well be forcing an issue that can’t be accomplished,” said Ternstrom, who envisioned the possibility of the road passing through the project but coming to a dead end at the national park.

Dean D. Efstathiou, a Public Works engineer, maintained that the road is needed as an alternate to the Ventura Freeway.

The Public Works Department did not take a position on the project’s density. But William D. Ross, a lawyer for the developer, said the density is related to the estimated $20-million to $25-million cost of the required road extension.

The road was not the only controversial element of the project. It was also proposed in an area the county has designated ecologically significant. The designation, while not an iron-clad restriction on development, requires that proposals for such areas be scrutinized closely and that the areas be preserved if possible.

Ternstrom and Commissioner Betty Fisher said the land’s ecological designation figured strongly in their decisions to reject Malibu Terrace.

Ross said the commission’s action may prompt an attempt at a compromise among the developer, Public Works, and homeowners who do not want Thousand Oaks Boulevard extended.

David E. Gackenbach, superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains national park, said after the hearing that Las Virgenes Properties “may now come to us and discuss with us what might happen on the property.”

Gackenbach, who has said the planned Malibu Terrace development would severely disrupt wildlife in Cheeseboro Canyon, applauded the planning commission’s decision.

“It was just such an outlandish proposal,” he said.