Key Supporter in Reversal : Agoura Hills Building Moratorium at an End

Agoura Hills’ controversial building moratorium was abruptly called off Tuesday night after a key City Council supporter refused to extend it through the end of the year.

Councilman Jack W. Koenig said the city’s “credibility” would suffer if the 6-month-old moratorium were extended. He said officials had promised builders it would be a short-term measure.

City staff members had urged the extension to give officials time to adopt a first-ever zoning ordinance for the 3 1/2-year-old municipality.

Public hearings on the proposed ordinance are scheduled to begin Aug. 21. Planning Director Paul Williams said work on the ordinance is about three-fourths finished--delayed in part by a lengthy review of zoning needs by city planning commissioners.

The moratorium was imposed Feb. 4 by a 4-1 council vote. Nearly $183-million worth of construction had been built in the eight-square-mile city since it was incorporated in December, 1982. In approving the six-month freeze, officials had said it would allow them to work on the ordinance without being deluged with new building requests.

‘We Gave Out Message’

“We gave out the message we’d try to wrap it up in six months,” said Koenig, who was elected last fall in a sweep of City Hall by slow-growth advocates.

A similar four-fifths council vote was required to extend the moratorium, but other slow-growth council members were unable to change Koenig’s mind. Councilman Ernest Dynda, who opposed the moratorium in February, also voted against an extension.

Councilwoman Darlene McBane said a moratorium extension was preferable “to living the next 40 years with bad projects. We started out to do a job and we should see it finished.”

Several homeowners also called for continuing the freeze until permanent zoning is adopted. “I’d like our standards to be law,” said one of them, Mary Weisbrock.

But others, including land consultant Frank Lussier of Thousand Oaks, disagreed. Lussier complained that it was morally wrong to rope individual property owners into the council’s “political war with developers.”