Development of Porter Ranch Resurrects Private Street Issue

A proposal for massive development in Porter Ranch is resurrecting an old question: Should the city try to open a private segment of Winnetka Avenue that now goes through a gated community in Chatsworth?

The answer, city officials say, is the same as it has been for the past 20 years.

“The chances are slim to none,” said Greig Smith, chief deputy to Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents the area.

But that prognosis has not slowed some area homeowners, who want to see the private stretch of Winnetka Avenue opened to help ease traffic problems expected to result from the proposed $2-billion Porter Ranch project.

A developer wants to build 7.5-million square feet of commercial space and about 3,000 residences north of the Simi Valley Freeway. The commercial area would include a shopping mall the size of Northridge Fashion Center and office buildings up to 15 stories high.

Winnetka Avenue, if it were opened north from Devonshire Street and through the gated Monteria Estates to the freeway, would lead directly to the heart of the commercial center.

Public Hearings

At two public hearings on the Porter Ranch proposal this year, residents of Northridge and Chatsworth have persistently suggested that the stretch should be opened to relieve traffic on other crowded arteries such as Tampa, De Soto, Corbin and Mason avenues.

“Winnetka would basically be directly south of the heart of this regional center,” said David L. Peltz, a Chatsworth resident and member of a group called PRIDE, which opposes the size of the commercial proposal. PRIDE meant Porter Ranch Is Developed Enough. Although the group abandoned that name as too anti-development, they kept the acronym. “It is the logical main north-south entrance,” Peltz said. “To have all the traffic that is supposed to be using Winnetka diverted to Corbin and Mason simply because those people in the estates don’t want to be disturbed is ridiculous.”

City officials say there are many complex problems with opening Winnetka from Devonshire to the freeway, a distance of about a mile.

The winding section is and always has been private. So making it a public thoroughfare would require a condemnation in which the city would pay the estate residents fair market value for the property. An estimate in the mid-1970s put that cost at $8 million, but now the price could be more than double that, Smith said.

Bernson, who was unavailable for comment last week, has opposed the idea since he was elected in 1979 because of the damage it would do to the rural character of the estate area.

“From an environmental-impact point of view, you’re talking about a major impact that would be very difficult to mitigate,” said Ralph Valenzuela, an official of the city’s Bureau of Engineering.

Raymond Mulokas, president of the Monteria Estates Assn. and member of a Bernson-appointed citizens committee that helped draft the proposal for development in Porter Ranch, said opening the private stretch would place an unfair burden on his neighborhood, which already may have to endure blocked hillside views and noise from the project.

“No one community should be sacrificed for the sake of another,” Mulokas said. “That estate area has every right to exist in its community, in its totality.”

The Porter Ranch proposal does call for extending Winnetka north of the freeway. Unused on- and off-ramps at Winnetka and the freeway would be improved and opened.

That freeway interchange is expected to be a heavily used entrance to the proposed commercial center, said Frank Fielding, a senior city planner. If Winnetka were open between the freeway and Devonshire Street, it probably would become the most logical entrance from surface streets as well, possibly turning the freeway interchange into a gridlocked intersection, he said.

“That bridge is only so wide,” Fielding said. Routing traffic along other north-south routes is preferable, he said.

The issue of opening the private stretch of Winnetka was a “major concern” at a February public hearing on the Porter Ranch proposal, according to a report last month by the Department of City Planning. But because Mason and Corbin avenues would lead directly to the development, opening the private portion of Winnetka would not be necessary, the report said.

Dismissed Idea

It dismissed the idea of requiring Porter Ranch Development Co. to pay for opening the private road, saying that “would require extensive purchase of private land by the developer with no guarantee that the property could be purchased.”

Moreover, Fielding said, “It’s a political question. There’s a lot more to this than just numbers of trips on streets.”

The Monteria Estates area has been home to some of the Valley’s wealthiest residents for more than 50 years. The community contains about 60 estates with values ranging from $1.5 million to $12 million. Its residents include actor Chad Everett, supermarket executive Bernard Gelson and professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.

Mulokas, an avid supporter of the Porter Ranch project, said his neighborhood surely would oppose the proposed development if it included the opening of the private stretch.

When planners, the citizens committee and Porter Ranch Development began discussing the proposal in 1987, an extension of Winnetka was dismissed partly because the developer “didn’t want to open that can of worms,” said T.K. Prime, a senior city transportation engineer.

Indeed, officials concluded that such a proposal would be so politically infeasible that they did not ask the developer for traffic studies to test their belief that Winnetka, if opened between the freeway and Devonshire Street, would be overloaded by Porter Ranch traffic, Fielding said.

“Now I wish I had,” Fielding said. “It would have given me some good arguments.”