Cheeseboro Canyon : Federal Officials Scramble to Stop Roadway in Park

The National Park Service paid $8 million for Cheeseboro Canyon in 1985 despite knowing that Los Angeles County would have the right to build a road through it.

As a result, the superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is scrambling to stop what he calls an outrageous county plan to build a road along the canyon’s oak-studded floor.

County Department of Public Works officials say the extension of Thousand Oaks Boulevard from Agoura Hills through the park and eventually to Victory Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley would provide a necessary east-west alternative to the congested Ventura Freeway.

Although they concede that important obstacles remain to construction of the road, they have refused Park Superintendent Daniel R. Kuehn’s requests to give up a right of way through the park, which the county retained when the federal government bought the land.

The Park Service and the Trust for Public Land, a nonprofit group that negotiated the purchase, knew about the right of way, known as an easement, Park Service spokesman William G. Thomas said.

‘It Was a Blind Spot’

However, “They assumed that Los Angeles County wouldn’t take advantage of the easement to build a highway through a national park,” Thomas said. “It was a blind spot.”

“In hindsight, we probably should have tried to get the easement back before we got the property, but there was considerable pressure on us at that time to proceed. Obviously, to those who knew about it, it wasn’t that important,” Thomas said.

On Thursday, Kuehn mailed a letter to county Public Works Director Thomas A. Tidemanson requesting a meeting “to get the county to abandon that easement,” Kuehn said. Kuehn was told in an April 4 letter from a Tidemanson aide that the easement is “irrevocable and binding” and “should be retained by the county.”

Thousand Oaks Boulevard “would just devastate the bottom of that canyon,” Kuehn said. Between 50 and 100 oaks probably would be lost, and the road would block the Santa Monica Mountains wildlife corridor, he said. “It would just be an absolute disaster.”

“I will personally lie down in front of the bulldozers if this road is ever built,” said David M. Brown, a Calabasas conservationist and president of the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation.

“This would be about the most brutal rape of parkland that I could imagine.”

Margot Feuer, a Malibu conservationist and vice president of the Santa Monica Mountains Restoration Trust, said: “I certainly don’t understand how this could have been overlooked, as it seems to have been.”

The purchase was involved in controversy previously. Encino real estate agent Jerry Y. Oren, who sold the 336 acres to the Park Service in 1985, was convicted last year of wire fraud for inflating the $8-million price with a false bid. He has appealed his conviction.

Kuehn said he did not learn of the easement until last year. The easement was recorded in December, 1984, 11 days before the sale became final, National Park Service records indicate.

Easement Required by County

The easement was required of Oren by Los Angeles County, which had to approve his request to subdivide his land so that some of it could be sold to the Park Service, said Cecil Bugh, the county’s chief deputy director of public works.

The county required the easement because it wished to retain Thousand Oaks Boulevard as a roadway on its master transportation plan, Bugh said.

Thousand Oaks Boulevard is the second road to be planned for the national park. The Park Service already is negotiating with Potomac Investment Associates, a Maryland-based developer, for a land exchange that would add to the park’s holdings but would result in a controversial road providing access through the park to the developer’s project in Ventura County.

“It certainly seems like an inconsistent position,” Feuer said of the Park Service’s stance favoring the developer’s road and opposing extension of Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

“There is no way that one road is benign and the other road is not,” she said.

The developer’s road would not be visible from the canyon floor and would remove only a small number of oaks, Kuehn replied.

The extension of Thousand Oaks Boulevard has been on the county’s highway plan since the early 1960s, but recent developments indicate that the county is trying to make the road a reality.

Computer Study

The county Department of Public Works believes Thousand Oaks Boulevard, if extended eastward to the San Fernando Valley, would carry about 30,000 cars a day, Bugh said. The county has begun a computer study, to be completed in June, 1989, that public works officials believe will confirm the need for the extension, Bugh said.

“Thirty-thousand indicates there is a significant demand for such a route,” Bugh said. “We believe that it’s going to be very desirable, and from our position, a necessary route.”

Moreover, when the park was sold to the federal government, “it was with the proviso that the road would go through there,” Bugh said. “So in essence what they bought, as far as we are concerned, is the property with that road right of way set aside.”

Federal Law

The federal government cannot condemn the easement because federal law does not allow the government to condemn or buy publicly owned lands for park use, Thomas said.

At the park’s eastern boundary, a Sunnyvale developer has proposed building 120 single-family homes and about 1,700 apartments or condominiums on 490 acres, county records indicate. The county Regional Planning Commission has yet to schedule a public hearing on the development. But the development, if approved, would give the county a chance to require the developer to pay for extending Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

Steve Grossbard, a spokesman for the developer, Las Virgenes Properties, would not comment on whether the project calls for a Thousand Oaks Boulevard extension. But he noted that the boulevard is part of the county master plan. “Take a look at the map,” he said. “It’s there.”

Western Border

The county’s easement runs to the western border of the park, where the planned route of Thousand Oaks Boulevard crosses into the city of Agoura Hills. Within Agoura Hills, the boulevard has not been built for a stretch of less than a mile.

The city’s opposition to completing that stretch is the greatest obstacle to the county’s plan for the entire boulevard, because, Bugh said, the county cannot complete that key stretch without the city’s assent.

Some city officials suspect the county of using the recent Medfield Street controversy to pressure them to complete the city’s part of the boulevard.

Agoura Hills residents have quarreled over traffic congestion caused by the county’s closure this month of Medfield Street, a thoroughfare built without county approval by a developer 10 years ago. The county plans to sell the land the street occupies, and the city wants the money from the sale to be earmarked for its plan to ease traffic. County officials instead plan to put the money into the county road fund.

Two Plans

City Manager David N. Carmany said he suspects county officials would be more willing to allow the city to use the funds if the city allowed the county to build the gap in Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

“I believe they would feel much differently . . . if the city plan and the county plan were in sync,” Carmany said.

City Councilwoman Fran Pavley said county officials are “pushing tremendously hard” for construction of the boulevard. But the county’s plan for the boulevard is contrary to the city’s wish “to keep commercial traffic out of residential neighborhoods,” Pavley said.

Bugh described Medfield Street and Thousand Oaks Boulevard as “independent issues” and denied that the county was linking them or pressuring Agoura Hills.

City Action

Agoura Hills holds easements on the unbuilt stretch of Thousand Oaks Boulevard. Several residents have asked the city to vacate those easements, and the city’s action is pending while officials wait for the residents to provide legal descriptions of their properties, city Public Works Director Vince Mastrosimone said.

If the city agrees to give up its right to construct the boulevard on those properties, that would “pretty much put the kibosh on that plan that the county has,” Mastrosimone said.

The county’s plan for Thousand Oaks Boulevard would also require an environmental impact study and an opportunity for public comment, Bugh said.

“There are a lot of things that must happen before that route is constructed,” Bugh said.