MOORPARK : Street Near Highway to Get Noise Barrier

The residents of Sherman Way in Moorpark, whose back yards border the heavily traveled California 118, will soon get a new 8-foot-tall noise wall to shield them from the sights and sounds of highway traffic.

The City Council has approved spending about $100,000 to build a reinforced concrete wall on the north side of California 118 on a half-mile stretch from just west of Millard Avenue to Spring Road. This section of the highway is called Los Angeles Avenue in the city limits.

Sherman Way residents asked for the wall last summer, after city workers tore out city-owned trees and other landscaping during the construction of sidewalks and curbs on Los Angeles Avenue.

After the landscaping was removed, the only barrier between residents’ yards and the highway was a crumbling concrete block wall that varies in height from about three feet to six feet.

At its lowest points, the wall gives the homeowners little protection against highway sights and sounds and hardly any privacy. “You can see into their houses” from Los Angeles Avenue, Councilman Scott Montgomery said.

City officials have met with the residents several times over the past year and initially asked them to pay some of the cost of a new sound wall.

The residents refused, saying it wasn’t their fault the landscaping had been removed, Councilman Scott Montgomery said.

Caltrans also refused to foot the cost because of the agency’s policy against paying for sound barriers on highways that are surface streets rather than freeways, Montgomery said.

Because the new wall will improve the look of Los Angeles Avenue, it will benefit the entire city in addition to Sherman Way residents, Montgomery said.