What Council Doesn’t Know Hurts Builders

SIMI VALLEY —  After a heated, hourlong public hearing, the City Council firmly, decisively nixed plans for a drive-thru something or other.

Council members don’t know precisely what project they killed, because the developers wouldn’t divulge details, including the type of business planned, a company name or possible floor plans.

They would only reveal that the mystery project would have been a 2,700-square-foot business (with drive-through window) at the intersection of Los Angeles Avenue and Stearns Street.

Perhaps it would have been a bank or a burger shack. Or maybe a coffee kiosk or a drugstore.

Lacking details, council members and residents feared the worst.

“Is this a stealth McDonald’s? I don’t know, but it could be,” Mayor Greg Stratton said before the unanimous rejection of the planned whatever-it-was. “Maybe it’s a drive-through bank--that would be something else entirely.”

In the end, it was the vagueness of the project that killed it.

“This is putting the cart before the horse,” City Councilman Bill Davis said before he and his colleagues refused to approve a special use permit for the Brand X business. The Planning Commission had refused the project at a June 18 meeting, but developers Lloyd Maitland, Robert Faber and Ali Boukhari appealed that decision.

The council further told city staff that they aren’t interested in seeing other speculative projects. If business owners want to build something, council members told City Manager Mike Sedell, they will have to pony up specifics.

Monday’s decision came after five residents spoke against the nebulous commercial establishment, which they suspected was a fast-food restaurant.

Giving the developers the go-ahead would set a terrible precedent, Marilyn Richardson argued at the public hearing.

“This is like handing a blank check to a developer,” she said. “This is a very dangerous path for the city to go down.”

A former planning commissioner himself, Maitland argued that the project met or exceeded all city codes. And really, he posited, aren’t many development proposals speculative in nature?

The secrecy surrounding the project wasn’t intended to annoy city officials, Maitland said Monday. He and his partners were merely gambling that securing a special-use permit in advance would help lure businesses to the ailing site, which was a gas station 25 years ago.

In fact, he added Tuesday, a buyer was about to close escrow on the site--a buyer who asked that the developers keep mum about his plans.

So the mystery project will remain a mystery.

“As a matter of fact, it wasn’t a restaurant,” Maitland said. “Now you’ll never know [what it would have been], but I can tell you it’s not going there.”