Proposal to Extend Reseda Boulevard Criticized : Tarzana: Activists claim landfills and housing tracts could be the result if the road is linked to Mulholland Drive.

Called “Reseda-to-the-Sea,” it was to have been a cross-mountain highway linking the San Fernando Valley and Brentwood. On Tuesday, protesters called it the road that wouldn’t die.

At a Tarzana news conference attended by 50 environmental and community activists, several speakers criticized Los Angeles city officials for failing to keep their pledge to kill the road plans. Protesters fear the thoroughfare, if built, could spawn housing tracts or even trash dumps in virtual wilderness areas of the Santa Monica Mountains.

For reasons not fully explained, city officials never vacated the road easement after the City Council voted in 1977 to kill the roadway plan. The road was to have climbed from the end of Reseda Boulevard over the mountains, to descend through Rustic Canyon to Sunset Boulevard. Along the way, it would cross Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts lands identified as feasible landfill sites.

When the route appeared recently on maps of the Brentwood-Pacific Palisades District Plan, many Westside and Valley activists were convinced it was no mere oversight.

“After 14 years” of waiting for the easement to be vacated, “I’m entitled to be paranoid about it,” said Carole Stevens, who is chairwoman of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy board but who spoke as a private citizen.

City Councilman Marvin Braude, who represents the area and drew some protesters’ ire, said he asked city planners in November to correct the maps. In an interview Tuesday, he insisted that the road “has been effectively killed” and “there is no risk whatever” of it being built.

“We’re never going to build the roadway,” agreed City Engineer Robert Horii, who said the easement was not vacated because that “wasn’t a high priority to us.” Horii said the job of vacating the easement--which includes holding a public hearing for adjacent property owners--is under way.

Protesters also criticized the city for requiring a developer of houses in the hills above Tarzana to extend Reseda to Mulholland Drive, purportedly to improve fire safety.

Harlan Lee & Associates has been ordered to connect Reseda to Mulholland, although that means paving the road across state parkland. Work has been temporarily halted due to objections from two state parks agencies.

Before the news conference, Braude’s office was picketed by about 20 people protesting his support for the Reseda extension.