ELECTIONS WESTLAKE VILLAGE CITY COUNCIL : Lone Challenger Pins Hopes on Development Issue

The lone candidate challenging two incumbents for a seat on the Westlake Village City Council hopes his opposition to a housing development on the shores of Las Virgenes Reservoir will put him in office.

Aside from the proposed project, few campaign issues to speak of have emerged in the tony municipality of 6,800, where political contests generally are polite and restrained, if not downright sleepy.

Daniel Murphy, running for one of the seats currently held by Mayor Kenneth Rufener and Councilwoman Berniece Bennett, opposes the large-scale project proposed by the Baldwin Co. on the hilly southwest shore of the reservoir, which provides Westlake Village’s drinking water.

“Most of that area is hillside and it will take nuclear blasting to make pads that are buildable,” said Murphy, a wholesale carpet distributor who lives near the site. “If they go ahead with it, there won’t be enough moving vans to get us out of here.”

The size of Baldwin’s project has yet to be determined, but the company’s property is zoned for 330 houses, Rufener said. It is one of the few undeveloped tracts of land in the 5.44-square-mile city. Murphy wants no more than 50 luxury houses built.

But Rufener and Bennett said that because the city’s general plan allows 330 houses, the council’s hands are tied unless it can find environmental or other reasons to justify reducing that number.

“You’d have the damnedest lawsuit on your hands if you did something like that without finding mitigating circumstances,” said Rufener, 71, who was elected to the council in 1987.

Bennett, 59, has served on the City Council since its creation in 1981. She said that since most of the city’s buildable land has already been developed, the council should act more as a caretaker of the community and work to provide new services. Toward that end, she said, Westlake Village is planning to open a 5,000-square-foot library after plans for a larger regional library near the city fell apart this year.

Murphy, 47, said his immediate concern is stopping the Baldwin project, but he also is calling on the city to build more parks and playing fields. Moreover, Murphy is also flirting with the idea of reinstituting a planning commission. Unlike most cities, the planned community doesn’t have one to review the projects proposed for the few remaining open parcels in the city.

Incumbent Rufener, meanwhile, said the City Council will need experienced lawmakers as it tackles issues in the near future. The next few years promise to be important for the city, he said, because the 131-acre site of a failed commercial-residential project, which now sits empty, could be developed.