Simi Valley Council Rejects Air Quality Guidelines

The Simi Valley City Council rejected the idea of imposing fees on developers whose projects generate pollutants, calling it unfair to levy a tax on new construction.

The council considered at its meeting Monday night adopting county air quality guidelines for new developments.

Mayor Greg Stratton expressed qualms about the proposed guidelines.

“We’re not sure that you can charge a few dollars . . . and all the smog goes away,” Stratton said earlier in the day.

Councilman Glen McAdoo said, “I would like a legal opinion as to whether this could be challenged as a discriminatory tax.”

Simi Valley council members said the fee would deter large employers from locating in the city.

A developer said Monday that a proposed $200-million mall could be jeopardized if the city adopted the guidelines.

The planned Simi Valley Regional Mall would have had to spend $5 million in extra fees, based on the amount of traffic it would produce, officials said.

“Obviously, for something like the mall, it’s going to mean a good sum of money,” Stratton said.

A plan for the mall has not yet been presented to the City Council for approval, but it would have been the largest development affected by the air pollution guidelines, officials said.

And, according to Kevin Kudlo, project manager for Melvin Simon Associates in Los Angeles, the fee could have kept the mall from being built. Kudlo’s firm and another development company, Homart, are putting together the plan for the mall.

The 980,000-square-foot mall, which would be located in the western part of the city, has been touted as a main destination for shoppers in eastern Ventura County.

Other business leaders voiced reservations about the fee in a Sept. 12 letter to the council. Simi Valley Chamber of Commerce President Lloyd Boland urged the city not to adopt the fees before they are reviewed by a transportation planning board, made up of residents and council members.

Simi Valley is the last city in the county to review the 7-year-old guidelines, said Mike Kuhn, a senior planner with the city. Those guidelines are followed by planners in other cities to assess the effect of new construction on the environment, he said.

The amount of air pollutants produced can affect whether a city ultimately decides to approve a development. Moreover, Simi Valley’s air has been deemed the worst in the county by the county Air Pollution Control District, Kuhn said. High levels of smog caused the air pollution district to declare Simi Valley’s air unhealthful three times last week.

The 1983 guidelines allow the county to charge fees to developers whose projects pollute. The money is deposited in a fund, which is to be used by the county for development of alternative transportation systems that would cut down on air pollution, such as car-pool programs.

If the city had adopted the guidelines, developers who had never before paid fees or have paid only small fees would have been charged 15 to 20 times more, Kuhn said.

Developers of a 332-unit apartment building, for example, would have been asked to pay up to $218,159 in fees to the city, according to a report on the proposed fees. Developers of a 206,000-square-foot community shopping center would have paid up to $1 million in new fees.