Ventura Boulevard Panel Divided Over Gridlock Plans

Members of a citizens committee searching for ways to prevent gridlock on Ventura Boulevard are wrapping up a 2 1/2-year study the way they started it: squabbling among themselves.

Homeowners and businessmen on the 20-member panel are about a month away from finishing their work and issuing recommendations that would propose that future growth along the 17-mile boulevard be tied to traffic congestion.

Committee members are considering suggesting that new construction be severely limited in areas such as Encino, where there already are frequent traffic jams. They are studying use of a “trip equation” as a way of forecasting how future development would add to existing congestion. The equation would determine traffic volume on the basis of the size of new buildings.

The committee’s preliminary proposal envisions that the boulevard can handle an additional 8.6 million square feet of commercial development and 30,000 more car trips a day by the year 2010. There are now about 19 million square feet of commercial development and about 70,000 daily trips on the boulevard.

According to the latest draft of the preliminary plan, developers along the thoroughfare should be required to pay a fee based on the estimated number of daily trips that their projects would generate. That money would be used for future traffic improvements on the boulevard.

But the homeowners and business representatives on the Los Angeles City Council-appointed committee are at odds over exactly how the calculations should be made, how much growth should be allowed and how much money should be collected.

Their rift surfaced Tuesday when both sides responded to a newspaper report that erroneously announced that the Planning Commission was meeting to consider the boulevard plan.

The report prepared for the meeting prompted fears by homeowners that businessmen, who form the majority on the panel, were bypassing final committee debate by taking the preliminary plan straight to the commission. The homeowners hurriedly prepared a “minority report” that called for an overall tightening of the recommendations.

“We feel some adjustments will make it more functional, realistically creative,” the dissidents wrote. Tougher requirements would “delay potential traffic gridlock and be more acceptable to residents and users of Ventura Boulevard,” they concluded.

Said Louise Frankel, a Tarzana homeowner representative who joined residential committee members from Encino, Sherman Oaks and Woodland Hills in signing the minority report: “If you’d been sitting with us two years listening to this, you’d have trepidations too.”

The committee’s majority members suggested that their upcoming proposal is plenty creative, however. In fact, said panel member Nick Brestoff, a Woodland Hills lawyer, the trip equation has the potential to eventually be used throughout the city to tame growth and traffic problems.

But planning commissioners refused to listen to either side’s arguments. They said the matter was before them Tuesday only as one of several generalized status reports on long-range Planning Department projects.

Richard Platkin, a planning staff member who is working with the committee on the study, said additional panel meetings will be scheduled when a revised preliminary draft of the group’s recommendations can be prepared.

The two sides apparently will have plenty to debate when they meet again.

The homeowners want all new buildings along the boulevard between Cahuenga Boulevard in Studio City to Shoup Avenue in Woodland Hills restricted to two stories in height to “preserve the rural and relaxed shopping atmosphere.” But the business representatives favor heights ranging from two stories in congested areas to six floors in lightly developed Woodland Hills.

Minority members want the number of trips that the boulevard can absorb by 2010 to be apportioned among the street’s five communities on the basis of a sliding scale that is one-third tighter than that suggested by the majority.

The minority wants developers to pay $5,000 for each trip generated daily by their projects as determined by that sliding scale. The majority favors a $2,000 fee.

The minority wants all existing business owners on the boulevard to be assessed a separate fee to help pay for traffic improvements, new parking facilities, better landscaping and street cleaning, police foot patrols and graffiti removal. The majority does not include such a proposal in its preliminary report.

Construction Ban

The minority wants a construction ban within half a mile of the most congested intersections. The majority says computerized signals, rush-hour parking bans and “traffic improvements for the corridor’s critical intersections” would allow for “adequate levels of service.”

The end-of-the-study acrimony is reminiscent of arguing that occurred when the committee began its work in 1987 and quickly became polarized into homeowner and business interest camps.

When homeowners initially proposed that bans on parking and daytime deliveries be considered for the boulevard and a median fence be installed to prevent traffic-snarling U-turns, businessmen reacted by calling for the construction of new municipal parking garages on boulevard land now used by city fire stations, libraries and electrical distribution stations. None of those ideas survived.

Planning Commission President William G. Luddy said the commission will not look at the committee’s recommendations until its members finally vote to send them to City Hall. Public hearings and workshops will precede any commission decision on the boulevard plan.

“I’ll be very interested to see how this plays itself out,” Luddy told the two sides.