Agoura Hills Woos U.S. Park Service

The National Park Service may soon move its Santa Monica Mountains headquarters from a three-story office suite in the cement canyons of Ventura Boulevard to cheaper quarters in a slightly more serene setting to the west.

The Park Service wants to leave Woodland Hills and rent offices somewhere in a 13 1/2-mile corridor between Calabasas and Thousand Oaks, said Daniel R. Kuehn, superintendent for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

The Agoura Hills City Council on Tuesday invited the Park Service to make its new home in that city. The five-member council unanimously voted to send letters to the General Services Administration and to Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) urging the move.

Agoura Hills Mayor Fran Pavley suggested that Kuehn might even rent space in the same building in which the 5-year-old city of 20,000 people rents space for its City Hall.

Would Bring Business

City officials said the park facility would attract business to Agoura Hills’ restaurants and the three motels under construction, while providing recreational opportunities for residents and learning opportunities for students.

“We’re very delighted to hear that somebody wants us,” said Jean Bray, public information officer for the Park Service.

The Park Service is seeking to rent 12,600-square feet of office space for a visitors center and suite of offices, Kuehn said. Ideally, the new center would contain an auditorium where park visitors could attend talks by naturalists, and view films, slide shows and exhibits about park attractions, Kuehn said.

Kuehn said the Park Service hopes to move by Oct. 1, the beginning of its fiscal year.

Since 1981, the Park Service has rented office space at $1.30 a square foot a month at 22900 Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills. The office and a tiny visitors center are spread out on three floors, an awkward arrangement, Kuehn said. The office has 38 full-time employees and several more seasonal part-time staff members.

The building’s owners, Dan-Co Properties Inc., plan to raise the rent by 10 cents a square foot in August, Kuehn said.

‘Silly Not to Move’

“We know there’s relatively inexpensive office space along the Agoura freeway corridor renting for less than $1 per square foot,” Kuehn said. “It would be silly not to move.”

The federal General Services Administration would negotiate the contract and pay rent on the new headquarters, whereas the Park Service now pays its rent out of operating funds, Kuehn said, because the GSA was not involved in renting its present space.

Funds now spent on rent could be used to increase park ranger activities and for other public programs, the parks official said.

The Park Service early this year asked the GSA to hunt new quarters in the area between Hampshire Road in Thousand Oaks and Parkway Calabasas in Calabasas.

The area is considered ideal because rents are relatively inexpensive and it is at the approximate midpoint of the recreation area, Kuehn said.

“With our land-managing responsibilities, logistically, it’s closer,” he said.

The Park Service had hoped to build a new headquarters building on the 218-acre compound formerly occupied by the Church Universal and Triumphant at Las Virgenes Road and Mulholland Highway in Calabasas. But Soka University of Tokyo bought the land for $15.5 million for an American campus last summer.

Network of Preserves

Created by Congress in 1978, the recreation area is a network of county state and federal preserves, interspersed with private holdings, encompassing 150,000 acres extending from Griffith Park in Los Angeles to Point Mugu State Park in Ventura County. Eventually, the recreation area will own 36,000 acres and have easement rights to another 15,000 acres.

Recreation-area holdings near Agoura Hills include Cheseboro Canyon, a hilly, oak-dotted 2,500-acre tract just east of Agoura Hills, and the Zuma-Trancas area in Malibu, where the Park Service owns 4,000 acres and plans to acquire another 3,000.

Although the Park Service is trying to be closer to its rustic domain, Kuehn said, it also wants the new office to be within a half mile of the Ventura Freeway. “In Southern California, that’s how people get here,” he said.