Simi Initiative Would Tie Growth, Traffic Flow

A Simi Valley slow-growth group filed an initiative with the city clerk’s office Friday that would require builders to make greater efforts to solve traffic problems, a proposal strongly resisted by the City Council.

The initiative was filed by Fight Ill-Favored Growth and Horrible Traffic, also known as FIGHT. The plan would bar building permits to developers until they paid for measures to keep traffic moving smoothly within a 1 1/2-mile radius of their projects.

City Council members have criticized the proposal, saying city employees are already at work on solving growth-related traffic problems in the draft of a city general plan.

Councilman Glen W. McAdoo called the slow-growth group “a few aspiring political wackos” in a speech to the council two weeks ago. “When this initiative is fully understood, this group will be even more of a laughingstock than it is now,” he said.

“It is not the way to solve this problem.”

Council Opposition

“All five City Council members are against it, I can guarantee you,” Councilman Bill Davis said.

FIGHT spokesman Paul La Bonte responded that the council is making the dispute “a real emotional issue” instead of implementing controls on growth to forestall worse traffic congestion.

Some of the measures the initiative proposes, such as the widening of streets and construction of new ones, are already in effect but do not have to be completed until after projects are finished and occupied, La Bonte said.

The initiative, however, requires builders to arrange for completion of the improvements before beginning a development project, he said.

The initiative would also require the city, before allowing further development, to draft a traffic plan that would spell out how it would keep traffic flowing at major targeted intersections.

Preliminary reports by city engineers said that such an initiative would spur a minimum six-month moratorium on construction.

The initiative exempts a proposed $40- to $50-million shopping mall that could be built within the next five years on about 120 acres north of the Simi Valley Freeway between 1st Street and Erringer Road.

“Obviously, the mall will have an impact on traffic. But we thought it was appropriate to bring that up during the public debate” on the mall construction permit, La Bonte said. “The mall is such a big issue that it warrants a separate debate altogether.”

3,800 Signatures

The slow-growth group needs to collect 3,800 signatures to qualify for the November ballot.

La Bonte said he believes that the proposal has the community’s support, citing a poll of 3,000 people at Simi Valley supermarkets in which 90% said that traffic had grown worse in recent years and is “a serious problem.”

Critics of the slow-growth initiative have pointed out that Mike Stevens, who is promoting the initiative along with La Bonte and schoolteacher Fred Harrison, was a member of a group called Citizens for Managed Growth and Hillside Protection that placed two initiatives on the ballot in 1986. Those initiatives were aimed at slowing residential housing development within the city and severely restricting hillside development.

Both slow-growth initiatives were defeated by a less-restrictive initiative placed on the ballot by City Council.

Stevens ran for City Council that year but lost.

McAdoo said the backers of the new initiative do not want the city to solve traffic problems because they want to be able to use the issue in the November election, when three council seats will be up for grabs.