Developer Put Under Pressure to Replace 104 Bulldozed Trees

In a case they call the worst tree destruction in Thousand Oaks history, city officials are negotiating for compensation from a developer accused of bulldozing 104 mature eucalyptuses last March that have been valued by a city expert at $311,000, authorities said Tuesday.

A limitation in local tree-protection laws has prevented the city from prosecuting the Davis Development Co. of Westlake Village, but a need for building permits is forcing the company to cooperate, said an attorney for the developer and a city planner specializing in trees.

“I told them they can’t enforce this, but you need to make things right with the city because they can make things tough on you, for lack of a better phrase,” said the attorney, Michael D. Martello, of the Thousand Oaks land-use firm of Cohen, Alexander & Clayton.

Replacing the lost trees and contributing to a fund for planting trees citywide are among the possible forms of repayment under consideration, said Thousand Oaks urban forester William Elmendorf, Martello and Kathryn C. McMenamin, another attorney for the developer.

Martello and McMenamin said another type of tree would be planted because eucalyptuses do not root firmly, fall easily, and are considered liabilities. Martello called the city’s $311,000 appraisal of the trees’ value unrealistically high, saying the big, valuable trees would probably be replaced by smaller, cheaper trees.

Charles Cohen, an attorney representing the developer, met with Elmendorf and other officials Thursday to discuss “a response that would be appropriate and acceptable,” said City Manager Grant W. Brimhall.

The issue remains unresolved, but a settlement is expected in the next several weeks, according to Brimhall, who described the bulldozing incident as a grave matter in a city that takes its name from a native tree and just adopted an ambitious plan to expand its urban forest.

“The community’s values have been aggrieved,” Brimhall said.

The eucalyptuses in question, some as tall as 80 feet and 40 years old, were felled March 27 on a site off the Ventura Freeway and Newbury Park Road. Planted in long rows as windbreaks, the towering eucalyptuses could be seen from the highway by motorists entering Thousand Oaks’ boundaries. They were considered something of a welcome mat to a city that treasures trees, said Brimhall and Elmendorf.

Davis Development, which wants to build a light industrial complex on the site, had a special-use permit requiring that trees be preserved at the time the eucalyptuses were bulldozed. But whether that permit was technically in effect--and therefore, violated--is a matter of dispute between the developer and the city.

Brimhall and Elmendorf said the now-expired permit was in effect on March 27. But Martello, a former member of Thousand Oaks’ legal staff, contended the permit had not yet been activated because construction had not begun. Martello said the bulldozing is not classed as construction.

After the incident, the city banned construction work at the site and has yet to issue new building permits, Elmendorf said.

Another legal obstacle to the city, said Martello, is that an ordinance designed to preserve oak trees does not provide protection for eucalyptuses. And a city policy aimed at preserving “landmark trees” exists only in the form of an unenforceable resolution, not an ordinance, he said.

Ironically, it was Martello who prosecuted the city’s last significant tree-destruction case, in which a Beverly Hills developer was fined $21,000 in 1986 for felling 27 young oak trees.

Because the trees were protected under the city’s oak-preservation ordinance, real estate investor Houshang Beroukhim was prosecuted and eventually pleaded no contest to charges that he ordered the trees’ cutting.

At the time, the case was considered the worst of its kind. But Elmendorf said the eucalyptus case is far worse because of the number of trees destroyed, their age, size and prominence, as well as the cost of replacing them.