COUNTY REPORT. Coming of Age : East Gains Population, Clout : Urbanization: Thirty years of growth have turned a bucolic backwater into a political and economic power, in some ways eclipsing the west county.

When he was a child, Larry Janss would count the deer that showed up each morning under his window at the Conejo Ranch.

“Twenty-seven was the biggest herd I ever counted,” he said. That was Thousand Oaks in 1957.

Across two ridgelines in Simi Valley, enrollment in the school district finally reached 325 in 1955, and growth looked certain enough to guarantee permanent jobs for teachers.

“We just couldn’t think of all those orange and walnut orchards being housing tracts,” former eighth-grade teacher Patricia Havens recalled. “But now they are.”

Today, Havens teaches an endless stream of new Simi Valley settlers the history of their adopted valley. In Thousand Oaks, Janss owns only six acres of the 10,000 that were his family’s ranch. Nearly 100,000 people live on the rest.

And after three decades of growth on top of growth, eastern Ventura County has emerged from its past as a bucolic backwater--and bedroom community for Los Angeles--to become a political and economic equal to the traditional powers of the Oxnard Plain and Ventura coast.

The county seat remains the city of Ventura, amid the old money and big farms, but the east county has eclipsed the west in several ways.

Ventura County is known nationwide for its hilltop library opened in Simi Valley last year to memorialize former President Ronald Reagan.

When President Bush attended a 1990 fund-raiser for future Gov. Pete Wilson, it was held in Thousand Oaks, not Ventura. And big-money supporters from nearby Hidden Valley helped put on the show.

Politicians note that although the Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Moorpark areas have just 37.5% of the county’s population, east county residents make up 43% of registered voters.

And about half the county’s “high-propensity” repeat voters come from the east county, the adjacent Santa Rosa Valley and east Camarillo area.

As a result, three of the county’s four members of the state Legislature and Congress are from the east county. All are conservative and Republican.

“For a while there, Ventura County knew what it was,” said John Doherty, aide to Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ventura) and once a Thousand Oaks journalist. “It was oil and agriculture and small towns. And it was based in Ventura.

“But now, the center of gravity has certainly shifted eastward. And it’s clear the east county has its own identity--it’s more sophisticated, wealthier and it pretty much runs the show.”

As the east county has grown from 14,000 residents in 1960--just 7% of the county total--to 251,000 today, it has come of age.

Once a political no-man’s land ignored by leaders in Oxnard, Ventura and Ojai, it now has the power to demand an equal share of county services and increasingly is getting them--a new courthouse, a new sheriff’s station and two new parks.

“The east county is no longer the ugly, unwanted stepchild, which was how it was treated for a long time,” said Republican Rep. Elton Gallegly, former mayor of Simi Valley. “It has certainly come into its own.”

Indeed, Ventura County’s regional reputation as an affluent county with little crime and good schools is based in significant part on the upscale demographics of the east county.

Standing alone, the west county reflects the income, racial diversity, crime rate and housing characteristics of California as a whole.

In the east county, the estimated average household income is $60,000 a year, compared with $45,000 in the west. The east county is 81% white; the west is 57%.

Eastern Ventura County also ranks high in its percentage of adults with college educations. And census figures on occupation, education and income due out next month are sure to reinforce the east county’s image as a haven for white-collar professionals.

Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley have the lowest crime rates of the 195 cities in the nation with populations of at least 100,000. Moorpark has the lowest crime rate in the county. The rates in Oxnard and Ventura, by comparison, are twice as high.

Home prices in Thousand Oaks and Moorpark, where median values approach $300,000, are the highest of any of the county’s 10 cities. And they join Simi Valley as the most expensive places to rent a house or apartment. Just one dwelling in 20 is too crowded, compared with one in seven in the west county.

Conversely, although the Conejo and Simi valleys have more than one-third of the county’s population, just one-eighth of the welfare recipients come from there.

The east end is the home of Ventura County’s only four-year university, Cal Lutheran in Thousand Oaks. And leaders in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley and Moorpark are pursuing plans for performing arts centers.

“The east county has these wonderful planned communities that have just catapulted it forward,” county chief administrator Richard Wittenberg said. “What has emerged is a level of sophistication at least equal to the west county.”

Madge L. Schaefer, a former Thousand Oaks councilwoman and county supervisor, said her city “has everything but the ocean world, and we do have the (Westlake) yacht club to make up for that.”

However, there are those who say that for all its energy and prosperity, the east county is the bland mayonnaise on a spicy Ventura County sandwich.

“The east side clearly has grown,” said County Supervisor John K. Flynn of Oxnard. “But the west end is really more interesting. It’s more racially and culturally diverse. It’s vibrant. It’s strong. The county seat is here, and most institutions still are basically here.”

As for the east county, Flynn said: “It’s a pretty sterile area. It’s not as interesting.”

A west county official who requested anonymity said of Thousand Oaks: “Honestly, they’re very wealthy, very Republican and very snobby. They’re elitist. That’s where they’re coming from.”

Elaine Freeman, a longtime Simi Valley businesswoman, finds the characterization an amusing reversal of roles that testifies to the changing positions of the east and west.

“That’s the rub,” she said. “The west county has always had this superior attitude and, since things have changed, there’s some discomfort with that.”

Although essentially a series of bedrooms for Los Angeles commuters for years, the east county has now made its mark in job-short Ventura County, where one of every three workers must commute elsewhere for employment.

Industrial developments flocked to Simi Valley and Moorpark in the 1980s after the Simi Valley Freeway was finally connected to the San Diego Freeway. Simi Valley’s Bugle Boy Industries alone has 1,600 employees and is one of the county’s largest employers.

Drawn by the leafy boulevards and expansive parks of Thousand Oaks and Westlake Village, numerous corporate executives have also moved to the Conejo Valley, bringing their companies with them.

Billionaire David Murdock--whose 1,100-acre Arabian horse ranch is a centerpiece among the celebrity estates in Hidden Valley and whose exclusive Sherwood Country Club presents one of the Professional Golfers’ Assn.’s most successful charity tournaments--has begun to move his Dole food company to Westlake Village just outside the county.

“We’re not seeing as much of an influx as we did a couple of years ago, but CEOs and presidents of companies still prefer to move to the Conejo Valley, and they bring their companies with them,” said Cathy Condon, an office leasing agent for Grubb & Ellis.

Amgen, the country’s biggest biotechnology company with 1,300 workers, is still expanding in Thousand Oaks, a growth that partly offsets the loss of jobs caused by the closure of Northrop’s Newbury Park plant last year.

The allure of the Conejo’s craggy mountain backdrops--and the freeway convenience of both the Conejo and Simi valleys--have combined to make the east county a formidable economic presence.

Office and industrial space in the Simi and Conejo valleys, including the city of Westlake Village just over the Los Angeles County line, nearly matches that of the west county. The east county has one-third of Ventura County’s jobs, many in highly skilled occupations. And property value in the three east-county cities nearly matches that in the seven cities of the western county, despite 120,000 fewer people.

But for many east county residents, the area’s draw is not jobs, since about half still commute to the Los Angeles area. The payoff comes in what they find when they get home from work.

“People who value the quality of family life have moved to Ventura County,” said Una Kuan, a U. S. Census Bureau analyst who lives in Thousand Oaks and commutes to work in Van Nuys. “These are family communities. There is less smog, and education is good.”

The new boss of the FBI’s Los Angeles regional office came to the same conclusion last summer when he moved from Washington to Thousand Oaks.

“I read the (school test) scores before I ever go on a house-hunting trip,” Charlie J. Parsons said. He liked what he saw at Los Cerritos Intermediate and Westlake High schools, which his two sons now attend.

Parsons was also impressed by the fact that about half of the region’s 550 FBI agents--and scores of other law enforcement officers--live in Thousand Oaks and Camarillo.

Professional relocation agencies have also discovered the east county.

When Sandy Hildebrandt and her husband, an economist at Rand Corp., moved to Ventura County six years ago, she told agents that she wanted to live in a small community that was close enough to Santa Monica so that her husband could drive to work.

They placed her in Oak Park.

“They had these huge posters all color-coded for income level, where kids would go to school and the time it takes to commute,” she said. “Kanan Road was the furthest point out for people working in the city. It was someplace we could afford and where our children could have the same kind of life they had in Fairfax, Va.--where they could walk to school.”

Since then, both children have graduated, one as student body president and valedictorian at tiny Oak Park High School, said Hildebrandt, manager at the Stagecoach Inn Museum in Thousand Oaks.

“I’m just very happy with the community I find myself in here,” she said.

Data from the 1990 census underscores the east county’s family orientation. Family households were 78% of the area’s total. Two-thirds of east county families are headed by married couples. And 76% of east county dwellings are occupied by their owners, compared with 58% in the west county.

An important part of the east county’s strong sense of well-being is its geographical separation from the foul air and urban ills of the Los Angeles area, which lies immediately to the east.

Commuters to the Los Angeles area say they can feel the tensions of the day evaporate as they climb back into the valleys of the Simi Hills each evening.

“When I come over those hills and see the view of my valley, it’s just a warm feeling that says you’re home,” said Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton, who works in Chatsworth.

If mountain passes give east county residents a psychological break from the turmoil of Los Angeles, the Conejo Grade has long worked the same way for residents of the Oxnard Plain who still shy away from the eastern half of the county.

“Personally, I think the Conejo Grade is a mental barrier. I go to Oxnard and Ventura much more often than I go to Thousand Oaks and beyond,” said Charlotte Craven, a Camarillo councilwoman.

“It’s more than a hill,” she added. “Once you get past the grade, you get into more traffic and congestion, and your air quality changes a bit. Put it all together and you just tell yourself, ‘Ugh.’ ”

That tendency to see the east county as different and apart--as an extension of Los Angeles--has troubled area residents for decades. But they admit that there wasn’t much to consider at all until recently.

“When I started representing east Ventura County back in 1961, there wasn’t any east county to speak of,” Lagomarsino said. “There was a two-lane (Highway) 101 and Jungleland in Thousand Oaks, and in Simi Valley there were a half-dozen prominent families.”

As the east county boomed in the 1960s and ‘70s, its new leaders chafed at the lingering perceptions that they said made Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks afterthoughts in countywide decision-making.

“There was just this perception that the county stopped at the Conejo Grade and that we were a part of Los Angeles County,” said insurance agent Bob Larkin, former president of the Simi Valley Chamber of Commerce.

“When the east county spoke up, people in Ventura kind of said, ‘Who’s out there?’ ” recalled Mike Sedell, assistant city manager in Simi Valley.

Simi Valley officials said it was that approach that allowed their community to grow into a tacky 61,000-resident housing project for poor Angelenos before it was finally incorporated in 1969.

“When I moved here 23 years ago, they called it Okie West, Okie Valley, Slimy Valley and Seamy Valley,” Larkin said. “The county let developers get away with murder.”

At one point in the 1960s, billboards advertised cheap Simi Valley homes for $1 down. The subdivision sold out, but most of the houses were boarded up or torn down long ago.

The city’s Strathearn Historical Park sits directly behind an aging K mart. “Right behind the K mart, don’t you hate it,” historian Patricia Havens said.

Thousand Oaks became a city much sooner, in 1964, when it had just 20,000 residents, and fared much better because of a futuristic master plan implemented by Edwin Janss Jr. as he sold off the Conejo Ranch to developers.

But Thousand Oaks City Manager Grant Brimhall said his city has hammered the county for nearly three decades to recognize east county contributions and to provide better services.

“There have been strong feelings over the years that there has been a sharing of costs without a sharing of benefits,” Brimhall said. “There have been some situations where the east county was gouged to benefit the west county.”

East county politicians list the historical wrongs allegedly done their cities by the powerbrokers of the west. Always noted is a Thousand Oaks library, which the county promised to build but didn’t when tax-slashing Proposition 13 forced at least $1.5 million to be redirected in 1979, Brimhall said.

But since 1980, the west end’s view of the east has changed.

Part of the reason, Sedell said, was the election of County Supervisor Maggie Erickson Kildee of Camarillo, who replaced an incumbent from Ojai. With the change, the five-member Board of Supervisors had two members from the west, two from the east and Erickson Kildee as a mid-county mediator.

A large new County Government Center was built in Ventura in the 1970s. But in the ‘80s, many county construction projects were in the east county, including a sheriff’s station in Thousand Oaks and a library in Moorpark.

However, the new $11-million East County Courthouse symbolizes both progress and the frustration the east county still sometimes feels when dealing with the west.

Opened last year, the five-courtroom facility is still virtually empty, except for the ongoing Rodney G. King police brutality case moved from Los Angeles. A court commissioner works there part-time and a second commissioner will start next month. But all of the county’s 27 Municipal or Superior Court judges work in the Hall of Justice in Ventura.

Simi Valley attorneys say they must drive an hour each way to court, and their clients pay for the wasted time.

“The judges say they can’t take away from what they’re doing up there (in Ventura),” lawyer Neil Harrison Lewis said. “But quite honestly, the under-the-table reason is that most of the judges don’t want to drive to Simi Valley.”

When judges were rotated into the old one-room courthouse, they would receive an “I Survived Simi Valley” T-shirt, Lewis said. “They were making fun that they had to go to Simi Valley to serve.”

Superior Court Presiding Judge Steven Z. Perren said the T-shirts were a kind of war zone humor prompted by the heavy workload in Simi Valley, not a slap at the city.

None of the Superior Court’s four civil judges have been assigned to the new Simi Valley courthouse because scattering the courts would require the hiring of more support employees, and tight budgets won’t allow that, he said. Transferring judges who handle criminal cases would be more complicated because of security, he said.

“It’s not plunk a judge down and try a case. It’s a bit more complex than that,” Perren said. “But it is inevitable, if for no other reason than space, that we will end up putting more people out there.”

A sign of increasing east county influence was the county Transportation Commission’s switch of position last year to allow completion of a connecting road between the Simi Valley and Moorpark freeways despite the failure of a bond issue, officials said.

“In the last five or six years, we’ve become a real participant in the county,” said Supervisor Vicky Howard, who represents Simi Valley and Moorpark. “We’ve become respected.”

It is a respect that Larry Janss and Patricia Havens say is warranted.

They have watched their Conejo and Simi valleys change dramatically in four decades, and they are generally satisfied with the transformation.

“We had some problems, but now we have a real solid community and a sense of community,” Havens said. “You see 100 kids playing soccer in the park. And last year when I taught the history of Simi Valley in adult school, 50 students enrolled.”

Janss, 41, said he likes to wax nostalgic with his 7-year-old son.

“I say, ‘Andrew, over there is where your daddy used to play in the old grain silo.’ That’s where the May Co. is now. And I say, ‘Over here is our old well.’

“But the people here appear to be good and well-meaning. They’re industrious and have built a solid city,” Janss said. “I’m proud to be a part of Thousand Oaks.”

East County at a Glance

POLITICS

Population: 37.5% of county total.

Registered voters: 43% of county total.

Representation: Rep. Elton Gallegly and Assembly members Cathie Wright and Tom McClintock all live in the east county.

Party affiliation East County GOP: 55% Demo.: 32% Other: 13% West County GOP: 41% Demo.: 45% Other: 14%

FAMILIES

Family households: 78.8% east; 74.4% west.

Married couples: 66.4% east; 58.6% west.

Avg. household income: $60,000 east; $45,000 west.

Over age 65: 6.8% east; 27.7% west.

Welfare recipients: 14.2% of cases in county.

Racial makeup East County White: 81% Non-white: 19% West County White: 57% Non-white: 43%

HOUSING

Median monthly rent: $844 east; $654 west.

Owner-occupied: 75.5% east; 57.7% west.

Overcrowded: 4.9% east; 14.6% west.

Property value: 3 east-end cities have 48% of 10-city total.

Median housing value East County: $267,423 West County: $224,626

EDUCATION

Enrollment: 38% of county’s public school enrollment.

District size: Simi Valley and Conejo Valley are county’s largest.

Test scores: Conejo Valley and Oak Park score highest in county.

Dropout rates: Oak Park and Conejo Valley have county’s lowest rates.

Limited English / Percent of students who speak limited English East County: 4.7% West County: 20.1%

CRIME

Violent crime: West is 2 1/2 times higher.

Property crime: West is 1 1/2 times higher.

Low crime: Moorpark has county’s lowest crime rate. Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley are nation’s two safest large cities.

Rising crime: 1991 crime up 7.3% east; 14.8% west.

Crime rate / Crimes per 1,000 people in 1991. East County: 32.2 West County: 54.6

East County Population, 1950-90

1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 Moorpark 1,146 2,902 5,160 7,798 25,494 Simi Valley 5,000* 8,110 60,680 77,500 100,217 Thousand Oaks 1,243 2,934 34,940 77,072 104,352

* Population for Simi Valley in 1950 is an estimate

Source: U.S. Census Bureau

The Reporters

This County Report was written by staff writers Daryl Kelley, Carlos V. Lozano and Psyche Pascual. Kelley covers county government and development issues for the Ventura Edition of The Times. Lozano covers Simi Valley and Pascual reports on Thousand Oaks.