Offices of 2 New Cities Show Upward Mobility

Officials of Westlake Village and Agoura Hills aren’t just bragging when they say their young cities are on the move.

Administrators of the neighboring cities west of the San Fernando Valley are moving their respective city halls out of shopping center storefronts and into new office buildings.

Westlake Village’s four city staff members packed up and moved this week to an office building about 100 yards from the old City Hall in the First Neighborhood Shopping Center.

Their new, 3,900-square-foot office contains Westlake Village’s City Council chambers and is more than twice the size of the previous City Hall space.

The Agoura Hills City Council, meanwhile, voted this week to move City Hall from the Reyes Adobe Plaza to a new office building about half a mile away.

Agoura Hills’ council chambers and offices for 11 city employees will be housed in 6,000 square feet, which is more than twice what the current City Hall has.

Before picking the new site Wednesday evening, Agoura Hills council members said they considered alternatives, including sharing a headquarters with the Las Virgenes Unified School District at a Kanan Road school campus.

City Manager Michael Huse said it would have been “more cost-effective” to expand the current quarters than to move. But the shopping center is “certainly not a proper setting for City Hall,” he said.

Felicity Kidd, an Agoura Hills administrative aide, said the target date for her city’s move is April 1. Because of the time required to prepare the new offices, “It looks unlikely now that we’ll make that, however,” she said Friday.

The new offices for Westlake Village, which was incorporated in 1981, will be at 31833 Village Center Road.

The new offices for Agoura Hills, which was formed in 1982, will be at 30101 Agoura Road.