Neighborhood Fights Plan to Bulldoze Oak Park Hillside

Bob Coutts can remember being lured into buying his Oak Park home off Deerhill Road by the promise of a small neighborhood park where he could have picnics and enjoy rolling, scrub-covered hillsides.

But now that the Rancho Simi Recreation and Park District has gotten around to building the park, Coutts is up in arms.

What rankles Coutts and other residents is the district’s plan to bulldoze 12.5 acres of hills, oak trees and rare plants to build ball fields and tennis and basketball courts off Deerhill and Doubletree roads.

“Coming here was a move to paradise,” said Coutts as he stood on a brush-covered hill only 300 yards from his house. “We feel pretty special about this place, and the park district wants to flatten it.”

Since the plan was introduced two years ago, Coutts and others have led a fight to keep the park from going forward with its plans.

“Parks are great,” he said. “But I don’t like parks that support league play, that support the interruption of our lifestyle and that bring in the tumult and the noise of the city.”

The fight has pitted Oak Park residents who say the community needs more sports facilities against environmentalists who contend that the park would destroy scenic hillsides while luring throngs of noisy outsiders into the quiet suburban neighborhood.

Park opponents have submitted petitions bearing 270 signatures to Ventura County supervisors, county Planner John Bencomo said. The opposition has gone well beyond the immediate neighborhood on Deerhill and Doubletree roads, he added.

Save Open Space, an Agoura Hills-based environmental organization, cites an environmental report that indicates the park would involve the destruction of 1.25 acres of wetlands, two rare plants and three oak trees and a grove of scrub oaks.

“We feel there is an alternative place for the ball fields,” said Mary Weisbrock, director of Save Open Space.

Local leaders say they find the opposition to building a new park startling.

“We’ve encountered similar opposition from time to time, but usually it hasn’t gone this far,” said Rancho Simi park Planning and Development Administrator Dmitri Hunt.

Valley View Park on Kanan Road, now under construction, would be the community’s first park with a soccer field, a softball field and a basketball court.

Deerhill Park would be Oak Park’s second park with sports fields and the first such facility in the eastern part of the community.

Even when Valley View, Deerhill and Indian Springs, a third park with sports facilities, are built, Oak Park still would be lacking facilities where adult and children’s leagues can play, Hunt said.

Now softball and soccer leagues “go to Agoura; they go to Westlake; they go to Thousand Oaks; they go to Newbury Park,” Hunt said.

According to a study of park needs for Oak Park, the community needs six softball fields but will only be able to build three at the three parks.

Instead of seven basketball courts, Oak Park will get five. And instead of nine tennis courts, the community of 13,000 people will have six.

“We’ve got another neighborhood on the other side of town clamoring for this kind of park,” Hunt said. “They’re saying, ‘We want it now.’ ”

That neighborhood, Hunt said, surrounds the proposed park called Indian Springs. It has been waiting four years for ball fields to be built at the site at Rockfield Street and Hawthorne Drive.

Tami Lawler, a resident of the neighborhood around Indian Springs, said her development will welcome the kind of park rejected by Deerhill neighbors.

She said her neighbors have been demanding more parks for years.

“Robert Coutts and Save Open Space with their extreme environmental views don’t care about children or our community,” Lawler said.

An anonymous flyer circulated in Oak Park criticized homeowners living near the proposed park for what it called an elitist attitude.

The flyer, distributed two weeks ago by an unidentified group of “concerned Oak Park parents,” dubbed Coutts and Save Open Space “open space bullies.”

“We’re very tired of hearing politically correct buzzwords such as ‘saving open space,’ ” the flyer said.

One community leader said he agreed with all the sentiments in the flyer.

“They’re crazy,” Ron Stark, a member of the Oak Park Municipal Advisory Council, said of the park’s opponents. “They want to shut down a park that will benefit 95% of the people here.”

But neighborhood association officials say the potential problems posed by the park are very real to people who live next to the site.

They say the park would attract drug dealers and rowdy teen-agers.

“It’s a park that’s going to attract people from outside the neighborhood,” said homeowner Judy Hunt. “I don’t know if I would feel safe sending my children there.”

Others criticized the plans as too dense. Most of the site will be devoted to ball fields, while only a small corner of the park will be left open for picnickers, said one resident.

“You’ve heard of trying to cram as many people as possible into a telephone booth?” asked Robert Cochran, another resident.

“They’ve tried to cram as many sports facilities as they can into this area and really left nothing for the neighborhood to enjoy.”