Oak Park Activist Well Known for His Tenacity : Communities: Local Advisory Council’s founder makes just about everything that happens in the unincorporated community his business.

Oak Park’s unofficial mayor Ron Stark is not afraid to admit he can be a nuisance to others.

The first and founding member of the Oak Park Municipal Advisory Council even has a T-shirt emblazoned “Proud to Be an Oak Park Whiner.”

The 61-year-old retired engineer has made just about everything that happens in Oak Park his business.

“Whining has made this community one of the best in Southern California,” Stark said of the unincorporated community of 15,000 just east of Thousand Oaks. “We’re very proactive. We’re whiners, and the results are great.”

One of Oak Park’s original residents, Stark was an agitator from the start. He and his family relocated from Torrance in 1966 and were the 12th or 13th family--his memory is a little hazy--to move to the new community.

Within months of settling into his new five-bedroom home, Stark had stumbled upon his first big issue--the threatening news that a developer building along Kanan Road planned to pave over its grassy medians.

He and other residents quickly mobilized, founded a homeowners association and stopped the median pavers dead in their tracks.

Stark is ferociously devoted to protecting Oak Park’s interests. His tenacity has made him few friends in county government over the years.

“It’s hard for me to talk about him without swearing,” said Lenora Kirby, aide to county Supervisor Maria VanderKolk, who represents Oak Park. “He’s a pain in the ass.”

Ventura County public works Director Art Goulet puts it more delicately.

“Ron is a guy who has very strong opinions and is not afraid of expressing them or doing whatever he feels needs to be done,” Goulet said. “That is both a positive and negative statement. He’s a very persistent person.”

Hearkening back to the early days of Oak Park, Goulet gives an example of that persistence. New houses were going up all over the community, and as fast as they could be built, they were being sold. To control the proliferation of real estate signs, the county had limited developers to placing the advertisements in specific areas.

But Stark found signs cropping up in rights of way, on street corners, everywhere but in their proper places. One day, he ripped up a bunch and drove to Ventura, arriving in Goulet’s office with an armful.

“He wanted us to deputize him,” Goulet recalled. “He said since we didn’t have time to deal with the signs, that he would. But we couldn’t give him any authority, and we told him we would have to do it ourselves.”

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Instead of deputizing him, public works officials came to an agreement with Stark whereby he would notify the department whenever he saw an illegally posted sign, and the department would then write a letter to the offending developer.

Stark and his wife, Paulette, still live in the house they bought 28 years ago. Their three children are grown, but a daughter lives just around the corner.

The ranch-style house is filled with his wife’s collection of cows--ceramic ones, plastic ones, wooden ones, even stuffed cows in wedding garb. “They’re taking over the house,” he joked.

Since his retirement 3 1/2 years ago, Stark has turned his full attention to Oak Park causes.

“Now I have lots of time to make a nuisance of myself,” he said.

These days, the issues close to Stark’s heart are a little more complicated than real estate signs. With county libraries struggling under budget cuts, Oak Park residents have been lobbying to get a new facility. They now share space with the library at Oak Park High School, an arrangement they say is cramped and uncomfortable.

Another matter is the community’s unincorporated status. In June residents were given three options on a ballot measure designed to gauge public opinion: become a city, annex to the city of Thousand Oaks or stay as they are. Overwhelmingly, they voted for the status quo.

Oak Park residents want a ZIP code of their own to save residents from being charged Los Angeles County sales tax and insurance rates because they share Agoura Hills’ ZIP code. Their request has been rejected several times, but both VanderKolk and Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) have appealed to the U.S. Postal Service on their behalf.

When the VISTA bus service to the county’s cities began in July, Oak Park was left out of the loop, chiefly because county officials believed that the community would not generate enough ridership to warrant a stop.

Stark, of course, has opinions on all these issues.

Oak Park deserves that library, Stark says. He says the community will eventually have to become a city to protect residents’ tax dollars, and he believes Oak Park will prevail in the quest for its own ZIP code. He also insists that the VISTA bus is going to pull into town and screech to a halt any day now.

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So he writes letters, he makes phone calls, he goes to Municipal Advisory Council meetings, he checks sales receipts to make sure merchants are not accidentally charging Los Angeles County sales tax at Oak Park’s small shopping center. He zealously counts riders on VISTA buses to prove the service needs those Oak Park riders. Then, he reports his findings at meetings of the Ventura County Transportation Commission.

“They’re so tired of seeing my face down there,” Stark said.

But if his face is well-known by members of the Transportation Commission, it is less likely to be recognized in the very community to which he devotes so much time.

“The average shopper going to Ralphs (supermarket) in Oak Park might not know who Ron Stark is,” said David Ross, a longtime Oak Park resident and former member of the Municipal Advisory Council. “And that’s a shame.”