Ventura Boulevard Remedies Collide : Business Leaders Fire Back at Homeowners; Call for More Parking, Not Less

Business leaders have reacted to a homeowner-proposed ban on Ventura Boulevard parking by calling for a string of new city parking lots, possibly replacing libraries, fire stations, power stations and median strips.

At the same time, they persuaded a 21-member city advisory committee that is studying the boulevard’s problems to prohibit members from disclosing such proposals before the committee considers them.

The disclosure issue arose after an eight-point traffic control proposal from the Homeowners of Encino was publicized before the committee received it.

The homeowners association urged a prohibition on parking and daytime deliveries along the busy boulevard. It also proposed installation of fenced median strips in the middle of the boulevard, free parking in privately owned parking structures and assessment fees on businesses to help pay for street improvements.

Some committee members called those proposals premature and criticized committee member Gerald Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, for publicly disclosing them before the committee reviewed them.

“It’s the unfairness of being asked to comment on something unseen,” said Nelson E. Brestoff, a Woodland Hills lawyer who is a director of the Valley Industry and Commercial Assn., and who proposed the new policy.

Policy Called ‘Gag Order’

Silver decried the new policy as “a gag order.” He vowed after the meeting to continue “to keep an open public dialogue” on the panel’s work. “I don’t intend to make this a secret or closed process,” Silver said.

Brestoff countered the Encino group’s recommendations by releasing his own far-reaching traffic-control proposal at Wednesday night’s meeting, including the call for more parking lots.

The proposal suggests creation of a transportation authority that would consider relocating several city Department of Water and Power distributing stations, a fire station in Tarzana and libraries in Woodland Hills and Encino and converting those sites into public parking.

The authority could also use vacant land for parking lots and set up development agreements with churches, car dealerships and shopping centers to build public parking structures, his proposal stated.

The parking structures could be operated and financed as paid lots, according to Brestoff’s concept. Rather than banning curb-side parking, he said, added parking meters could help pay for the new lots.

Other business representatives offered somewhat similar suggestions during Wednesday night’s committee meeting, according to panel moderator Marc Woersching, a Los Angeles city planner.

The Encino Chamber of Commerce proposed construction of multilevel parking structures “on and off the boulevard” and the use of shuttle buses to carry shoppers and workers to and from their cars, Woersching said.

Center-Divider Parking

Suggestions offered by committee member Bill Hirsty, owner of Studio City Motors, included use of the boulevard’s center divider for parking, he said.

Those ideas, along with others to be submitted this summer by consultants hired by the city, will be studied by the committee before it adopts recommendations to be forwarded to the city Planning Commission, according to Woersching.

The City Council, in turn, will review the commission’s recommendations when it adopts long-range traffic and development controls for the boulevard in about a year and a half.

The citizens’s advisory committee was created four months ago by six council members whose districts include parts of the boulevard. Officials said council members attempted to set up a committee balanced between homeowner and business interests.

The committee’s new public-disclosure restriction could cause difficulty for homeowner representatives on the committee.

After leaving the committee meeting, Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. representative Fred Kramer hurried to his group’s monthly meeting to discuss his views about the boulevard.

“This is off the record,” Kramer cautioned his neighbors before explaining some of his ideas.

“It’s just between us friends,” replied one resident in the audience of 60.