Melody Acres Effort to Fix Roads Hits Sour Notes

After more than 50 years of harmony, they’re starting to sing a different tune in Melody Acres.

That’s the name that old-timers call a square-mile Tarzana neighborhood developed in the early 1930s with mini-ranches, small orchards and truck farms.

These days, rambling ranch houses still line tree-shaded lanes that meander through an area north of the Ventura Freeway, between Corbin and Tampa avenues. The area has such a rustic look that film studios frequently use it for country settings.

But Hondas have become more common than horses. And the 412 families living in Melody Acres say they are growing weary of maintaining narrow country roads that are being increasingly used by outside commuters as a shortcut to the freeway.

Road maintenance has been residents’ responsibility since 1932, when a developer is said to have staked out the first of Melody Acres’ streets.

The developer, according to Los Angeles city officials, never bothered to take out a permit--or construct the roads to city standards. So except for emergency pothole-filling, city workers have stayed away from Melody Acres.

The result is a patchwork of thin asphalt spread 15 feet wide along Hatteras and Oxnard streets and Shirley and Calvin avenues--often with homeowners’ own shovels. And as commuter traffic through the neighborhood from nearby Warner Center has increased, the pavement has crumbled, leaving residents’ patience just as thin.

Melvin Avenue homeowner Jan Harde reached the breaking point when the street in front of his house passed that point--and a city trash-collection crew notified him they would no longer pick up his garbage unless he repaired the damaged street.

“I fixed it with four tons of asphalt,” Harde said. “It cost me $1,200.”

But Harde’s fresh asphalt had scarcely set when a parade of dirt-hauling trucks working on a Corbin Avenue storm drain project rumbled through Melody Acres and began breaking up the street again.

Rejected By City

After that, Harde and his neighbors asked the city to take over full maintenance of the streets. City officials refused, saying only roads that are properly built and pass a thorough inspection can be accepted as city streets.

Street engineers have informed the Tarzana residents that their best bet is to form a neighborhood assessment district and tax themselves to pay for new streets, curbs and gutters. A preliminary estimate suggests that about $12,000 per family would cover the construction cost, expected to be about $5 million.

That’s too expensive, according to the homeowners.

“I feel the public has had the benefit of these streets for 50 years. It’s a very important through-street area. They city has had the use of it. So we should start getting our fair share and benefit of taxes we’ve been paying,” Harde said.

The Melody Acres residents have been joined in their fight by the Tarzana Property Owners Assn. Joel Palmer, that group’s president, said city officials hinted a few weeks ago that research into old city files showed that the city actually accepted the streets from the developer.

Add to Plan

“Maybe the developer put one over on the city in getting them to accept those streets,” Palmer said Friday. “We think these streets should be put in the city’s next capital improvements plan.”

Susan Pasternak, a spokeswoman for City Councilwoman Joy Picus, who represents the area, said Picus is still investigating the situation, however. If it turns out that the city has no legal responsibility for the streets, “we want to work with residents to keep the costs down,” Pasternak said Friday.

Russ Larson, an assistant division engineer involved in street design for the city’s Bureau of Engineering, said the tract files from 1932, which would clarify whether the streets were built to then-city standards, are probably long gone.

Larson said that whoever ends up rebuilding Melody Acres’ streets could have a tough job designing rural-looking roads that meet the requirements of engineers and equestrians. They will probably need curbs and gutters--something the Tarzana residents do not want--for drainage control, he said.

And residents won’t be able to declare the streets private and fence them off without special permission of the City Council, Larson said.