Unrest Room : Project Leaves Encino Park’s Neighbors Flushed With Rage

Encino residents said Monday that a new public toilet under construction in front of their homes will soon send neighborhood tranquility down the drain.

“We’re going to hear every flush,” said Lori Spanoudis, who lives a few steps from the $80,000 restroom being built at the edge of Los Encinos State Historic Park.

Work on the new restroom, which will be accessible to the handicapped, began last week. State parks officials said it will replace an unattractive and unreliable 40-year-old restroom near the center of the park.

But Spanoudis and other Moorpark Street residents are demanding a halt to construction until an alternate site is found at the five-acre park. They said protest petitions, telegrams and letters are being sent to state lawmakers and Gov. George Deukmejian.

Aides to state Sen. Alan Robbins (D-Van Nuys) asked parks officials Monday to explain in writing why the restroom is being built so close to the houses. “I’m going to ask them to hold up further construction until we can figure out what to do,” said Sandy Miller, administrative assistant to Robbins.

Homeowners said they have not received an adequate explanation for the toilet from regional state parks officials in Newbury Park.

“The parks people say it will improve property values,” said resident Olga Kagan, whose driveway is opposite the restroom. “When I sell my house, am I supposed to advertise it as having a view of a restroom?”

Bud Getty, superintendent of Santa Monica Mountains area parks, said the new restroom will improve the park, which in turn improves the neighborhood.

“It’s not like we’re putting in an outhouse,” Getty said Monday. “It’s a clean, modern building we’ll be able to lock. The existing one you can open with a paper clip. It’s hard to maintain and it’s vulnerable to transients.

“There won’t be flies and noise. These toilets are not going to be amplified. They aren’t going to be speaker boxes that are going to pollute the neighborhood with noise.”

Getty said that parks planners did not want to build the new restroom where the current one is because the existing two-stall shed “intrudes on the historic scene” of the 138-year-old rancho, one of the San Fernando Valley’s first settlements.

Jim Combs, Los Encinos Park groundskeeper, said Monday that there are historic reasons for the restroom to be at the edge of the park grounds.

“I find artifacts such as square nails and bits of old china plates when I change sprinkler heads,” Combs said. “We wouldn’t want to put a sewer trench in across the grounds. The sewer line that’s in there now wouldn’t handle the new restroom.”

Moreover, Combs said, historic maps of the Los Encinos Rancho show that its original outhouses were located close to where the new restroom is being built. “They wanted them away from the house and away from the spring, which is on the other side of the grounds,” he said.

Combs said workers uncovered a rocky 100-year-old shed floor when they first began digging the foundation for the new restroom. The project was then shifted 30 feet west, and the ancient flooring was left uncovered to become a future park attraction, he said.

The shift placed the new site in Kagan’s sight.

“There’s no reason we should have to look at that place from our living room,” she said, fingering a copy of the petition she is helping circulate in the neighborhood.