Panel Postpones Decision on Reseda Boulevard Extension

After a bitter exchange between lawmakers, a Los Angeles City Council panel Wednesday postponed until Oct. 14 a decision on a controversial proposal to scrap a long-range plan for extending Reseda Boulevard to Mulholland Drive.

Before the council’s Public Works Committee was a proposal by Councilman Marvin Braude to turn over to adjacent property owners an 80-foot-wide city right of way, which runs for nearly two miles to Mulholland Drive from the point where Reseda Boulevard now ends in undeveloped land in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Councilwoman Rita Walters, chairing the committee, clashed with Braude after she expressed concerns that the proposal would not enhance public access to parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains north of Mulholland Drive.

“Ms. Walters, I am shocked by your ignorance,” Braude said.

Walters tartly replied: “I’m shocked that you’d stoop to this level of personal invective.”

Later, Walters said she wanted to study the proposal further at an Oct. 14 meeting of the committee before making a recommendation to the full council, which must decide the issue.

Abandoning the Reseda Boulevard right of way would effectively end the long-held dream of city traffic planners to extend Reseda Boulevard to Mulholland Drive, thus creating an alternate route for commuters who now travel along the crowded Ventura Freeway-San Diego Freeway corridor.

The abandonment plan is opposed by the city’s fire, transportation and planning departments.

Many hillside Encino residents, led by Madeline De Antonio, have complained that unless the Reseda Boulevard alternate route is provided, their own narrow streets will continue to be used by commuters as a shortcut around the jammed freeways during rush hours.

But Braude and environmentalists and parks advocates have urged that the city abandon its plans--leaving the two-mile gap undeveloped--to ensure that parkland surrounding much of the right of way remains as natural as possible.

“Do it--it’s great,” Susan Genelon, a Sierra Club representative, told the committee Wednesday.

De Antonio argued that Braude’s plan would sacrifice the interests of middle-class Valley commuters and homeowners in favor of Westside residents who fear the extension of Reseda Boulevard could eventually lead to construction of a new trans-mountain commuter route through their affluent neighborhoods, much like heavily traveled Laurel Canyon and Coldwater Canyon boulevards to the east.