Debate Over Ahmanson Ranch

I am pleased to see more organizations and more individuals getting involved in the fight against Washington Mutual’s plans to develop Ahmanson Ranch.

However, it is going to take all the cities affected by this development to speak out. It is going to take all the residents to contact their city, county and state officials to let them know their feelings on this project. It is going to take the city, county and state officials to come out and voice their objections to this project.

Residents of the areas affected will have to live with the traffic, pollution and destruction of our beautiful hills. The spineflower and red-legged frog will disappear again forever, as will Washington Mutual, once this project is completed. Washington Mutual will go back to its corporate headquarters in Washington state. We will have to live with the mess it has created.

So all of you who live in L.A. city, L.A. County and Ventura County, start making those phone calls and sending your letters to the officials you elected.

What we do now will affect future generations.

Sharon Cohen

Westlake Village

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On Nov. 11, you published a letter from Eric M. Bender of Oak Park, in which the self-described former home builder and real estate developer asked: “Where do all these project opponents expect people to live? Shop?”

Eric only has to go a few miles from Oak Park, across the still-pristine Ahmanson Ranch, to get to the San Fernando Valley, where thanks to home builders and real estate developers, the Valley has places to live and shop from mountaintop to mountaintop. These developers paved the streams, bulldozed the valley and dynamited the hillsides.

Because of profit-driven development plans, the environmental value of Ahmanson Ranch has only grown as it serves as the last area refuge of the once thought to be extinct San Fernando Valley spineflower, the endangered red-legged frog and numerous other plants and animals that once thrived in the Valley.

We don’t need to pave and develop everything, we don’t need the traffic and the pollution. Let’s save a bit of the natural environment for posterity. Ahmanson Ranch is the wrong place for this development. Washington Mutual needs to stop this project and let the public purchase the land for inclusion in the Santa Monica National Park system.

Paul Nicholson

Thousand Oaks

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In your newspaper, supporters of the Ahmanson Ranch development have resorted to name calling!

Save Open Space, the Ventura Environmental Coalition, Ventura County’s Environmental Defense Center and the other groups opposed to this project represent thousands of ordinary Los Angeles and Ventura county residents.

For a decade, we have been unpaid volunteers working to preserve the unique headwaters property of Ahmanson Ranch, just as the Native Americans left it for our children and future generations.

We applaud the help from Martin Sheen and Rob Reiner.

They too are donating their valuable time to save Ahmanson Ranch from Washington Mutual bulldozers and traffic our infrastructure cannot support.

This region is the film capital of the world, but we are losing filming to Canada with its wide open spaces.

Ahmanson Ranch has a long film history, including the historic film “Gone With the Wind.”

If Washington Mutual has its way, Ahmanson Ranch, which has the last large wide open spaces in the region, will indeed be gone with the wind.

Check www.ahmanson.org for the Ahmanson Ranch film history and the truth about the planned destruction of this irreplaceable ranch.

Billionaire Seattle-based Washington Mutual unsuccessfully tried to shut down this Web site to stifle our free speech.

Mary E. Wiesbrock

Agoura Hills

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I’m perfectly willing to admit that I am a smoker, thus I lack any love for Rob Reiner. It’s the truth.

I can also admit that, in being a military brat and veteran myself, the opportunity to ride my father’s coattails and connections to celebrity status was never an option in my life. As such, I can again admit that I am sickened whenever “celebrities” like Reiner attack the basic American rights that my family strode to protect.

Ventura County residents can only wonder why Reiner has neglected to take a similar stance on L.A. County’s Newhall Ranch. How easy it must be for Beverly Hills denizens such as Reiner to overlook how difficult it has become for noncelebrity drones in Ventura County to find an affordable piece of the American pie. And how lame it is of Reiner to pretend he knows anything about the California Environmental Quality Act other than the propaganda the fans of the Soviet Monica Mountains Land Conservancy fed him.

To people other than the opponents of growth, CEQA is only an instrument intended to bring up the environmental damage that a given project will cause. By no means was it ever intended to be the instrument of obstruction and delay that judges sympathetic to the “I’ve-Got-Mines” have turned it into. California’s Supreme Court seemed to have made this pretty darn clear in its “Concerned Citizens of Goleta Valley v. the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors” ruling in 1990.

The truth is a good thing. The opponents of Ahmanson Ranch should try to share some!

Bruce Roland

Ojai