Agoura Hills Rules Out Potential Freeway Bypass Road

Commuters’ hopes that Thousand Oaks Boulevard might someday become a freeway bypass between the San Fernando and Conejo valleys has run into an apparently permanent roadblock in Agoura Hills.

The Agoura Hills City Council voted unanimously Wednesday to take action that prevents construction of a four-lane section of the boulevard through a semi-rural neighborhood known as Old Agoura.

The vote means that an unpaved, half-mile section of the boulevard in Old Agoura will remain a narrow, bumpy stretch, dusty in summer and muddy in winter.

Council members voted to give up half the city’s 100-foot-wide easement for road construction on privately owned land through Old Agoura. The remaining 50-foot right of way will be wide enough only for a two-lane road flanked by horse trails.

Thousand Oaks Boulevard already is a heavily used four-lane thoroughfare extending 7 1/2 miles between the middle of Thousand Oaks to the center of Agoura Hills. An isolated half-mile portion of the boulevard also exists 3 miles farther east in the Malibu Canyon Park tract of Calabasas.

In 1971, county transportation experts acquired the 100-foot right of way for the boulevard through what is now Agoura Hills. They hoped eventually to link Thousand Oaks Boulevard with Victory Boulevard at the western end of the San Fernando Valley, 4 1/2 miles east of the Malibu Canyon Park tract, thus providing an alternate to the Ventura Freeway for east-west traffic.

The easements went to Agoura Hills when the city incorporated.

Now, City Manager David Carmany said, the boulevard may remain unpaved forever because Agoura Hills cannot expand its section of the road without the easements.

“We have no plans to pave it because it is a private road now. It would be up to adjoining property owners to improve it before we took it over,” Carmany said. “The property owners like it the way it is.”

Eighteen residents spoke during the council hearing in support of keeping the road as it is. Two favored widening.

Environmentalists opposed turning the boulevard into a freeway bypass because that would help the county’s plans to extend it eastward through federal parkland in Cheeseboro Canyon.

After county planners began mapping the boulevard route in the 1970s, the National Park Service acquired Cheeseboro Canyon Park, now a popular hiking and equestrian area, astride the proposed route between Agoura Hills and the San Fernando Valley.