Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley: Back Yard Rivals : Cities: Both have clashing personalities. Although they need to cooperate in area groups, fiery issues have driven a wedge between them.

Ask Thousand Oaks Councilman Frank Schillo to compare his city with Simi Valley and sooner or later, he starts talking trash.

He sidles into the topic warily, first piling on feel-good platitudes about regional cooperation and healthy competition. Then, bluntly, he dishes out the dirt.

Partisan and proud of it, Schillo boasts that Thousand Oaks outshines Simi Valley: Its citizens are more active in politics, more concerned for the poor, more supportive of the arts.

And a lot more dedicated to keeping their lawns green and their trees pruned.

“The way I personify the difference is that we have much more grass waste than they do because we require so much landscaping,” Schillo says, grinning.

His other claims might be a bit subjective, but this one holds water. Ounce for ounce, Thousand Oaks does generate more grass clippings than its cross-freeway rival--27% of its total trash is classified as yard waste, compared with only 19% of the refuse in Simi Valley.

Whether that makes for a better city, however, is open to debate.

And debate people do.

“I think Simi Valley controls signs better than Thousand Oaks and has a better hillside protection ordinance too,” said Supervisor Vicky Howard, a former Simi Valley councilwoman who now represents the city on the Ventura County Board of Supervisors.

“There’s more of a higgledy-piggledy look about development in Thousand Oaks--it’s not as well planned as Simi,” Howard added.

Those are fighting words for the folks in Thousand Oaks, who pride themselves on living in the best-planned city around. But Howard’s comments are deliberate, designed to squash the stereotype of Simi Valley as the scruffy, disheveled neighbor of well-groomed Thousand Oaks.

Unfairly, perhaps, Simi Valley suffers from a reputation as a city paved with tacky strip malls, blotted with ugly signs and peopled with tough-nosed, blue-collar workers.

“Those sleaze ball, beer-drinking, bowling alley-going people,” one Thousand Oaks business leader said with a laugh, then pleaded to remain anonymous.

Across the east county, Thousand Oaks has become known as a snooty, upper-crust enclave, far too finicky about design standards. Despite the city’s wealth, Thousand Oaks leaders often whine about their populace’s unmet needs and grouse that their constituents’ tax dollars subsidize services elsewhere in the county.

One restaurateur who has worked in both Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks said residents’ attitudes toward dining out reflect the cities’ clashing personalities. Fearful of offending his Simi Valley patrons, he insisted on keeping his name out of print.

“Simi is a meat and potatoes town, and (Thousand Oaks) is more of a health food kind of place,” he said. “I’m not sure the people in Simi know what good food is--over there, it’s price, price, price and that’s all they care about.”

Those are the stereotypes. But like all broad-brush caricatures, they often mislead.

For every jarringly purple muffler store in Simi Valley, there’s a straggly looking mini-mall along Thousand Oaks Boulevard. For every peeling plastic doughnut sticking out of a Simi Valley coffee shop, there’s a faded, barrack-like school in Thousand Oaks.

And Simi Valley has its ritzy developments--Indian Hills, for example, an upscale neighborhood on the northeast end of the city featuring views of the rock-studded Santa Susana Mountains and up-close glimpses of wildlife trekking through specially preserved corridors. In the half-completed Wood Ranch development, some posh homes have sold for as much as $800,000.

Further bucking the stereotypes, many of Thousand Oaks’ stores are mom-and-pop, blue-collar-type establishments, including more than a dozen auto-related stores along the downtown strip. There’s even a huge Kmart in the center of town--just a few blocks away from City Hall.

Simi Valley, of course, still boasts the only bar with bikini-clad women, where dancers in scanty Lycra triangles gyrate on a platform stage. Compared with Snooky’s, Thousand Oaks’ den of iniquity looks tame: the Red Onion restaurant, where poofy-haired teen-agers in tight shorts rock and roll under a flashing disco ball until 2 a.m.

But slowly, things are changing.

Even in straight-laced Thousand Oaks, the Red Onion recently established “California Hunks” night, a strip-tease in which male models rip off their shirts and pants, then flex their prodigious muscles and pose for Polaroids in brightly colored bikinis.

And the bastion of beige known as The Oaks mall may soon look a little less bland (or, some have argued, a little more tacky). After much hand-wringing, the City Council recently approved purple and green canopies to spiff up the drab earth-tone exterior.

In another dramatic departure from city norms, Thousand Oaks is building a multistory Civic Arts Plaza smack up against the Ventura Freeway. The combination auditorium, city hall and parking garage carries a $64-million price tag and an unmistakably urban look.

“In Thousand Oaks, they’re starting to loosen up,” said Scott Bailey, owner of Signature Signs, who has worked in both cities. “They’re willing to compromise a little more on their lofty aesthetic ideals.”

Meanwhile, in Simi Valley, efforts to preserve open space, build attractive parks and demand better-looking commercial and residential development have won praise from people impressed at how good the city looks.

“Simi’s come a long, long way,” Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce President Steve Rubenstein said.

Because Simi Valley lies far from the Ventura Freeway--and out of the way for commuters single-mindedly trekking from the west county to Los Angeles--many people don’t realize how much the city has changed, Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton said.

“For many years, through the early ‘60s, there was a concept of Simi as having the rapid-growing tract-home syndrome,” Stratton said. “We got out of that many years ago. But people don’t get into Simi too often, so they don’t know. When they do drive through, they’re always telling me, ‘We didn’t know you had such a beautiful city.’ ”

Changes notwithstanding, the 1992 census indicates that some of the long-standing stereotypes are still valid.

Thousand Oaks residents are, in general, richer, better educated and more likely to hold white-collar managerial jobs than their counterparts in Simi Valley. About 35% of Thousand Oaks’ adults hold college degrees, compared with 21% in Simi Valley. And per-capita income floats $5,000 higher in Thousand Oaks.

But these often-quoted figures hide some surprising truths.

“Clearly, in terms of sales tax income and the like, they have more money,” Simi Valley Mayor Stratton said. “But really, the cities are much more similar than they are different.”

In fact, Thousand Oaks’ population includes a higher percentage of people below the poverty level--4.2%, compared with 3.6% in Simi Valley. More impoverished children and senior citizens live in Thousand Oaks, and the city has proportionately more single-parent families.

As for income, the 16.5% of Thousand Oaks residents reporting annual income of more than $100,000 skews the stats considerably.

While the rich may be the most visible, in their posh Westlake, North Ranch and Lake Sherwood estates, Thousand Oaks also has a sizable number of lower-income residents. Nearly 9% of the population earns less than $15,000 a year, compared with 6.5% in Simi Valley.

And in every middle-class income category, from $30,000 to $75,000 a year, Simi Valley far outpaces Thousand Oaks. Although Thousand Oaks boasts more managers, professionals and white-collar bureaucrats, it also counts more agricultural workers among its population.

“Maybe we want to keep the image of ourselves as a wealthy city, but let’s look at the facts--we have the same problems as other cities,” said Schillo, who has served on the Thousand Oaks City Council for nine years.

Because the two cities need to cooperate in countless regional groups, political and civic leaders on both sides of Madera/Olsen Road are skittish about discussing the rivalry on the record.

Together with Moorpark, the cities “are the three majors in the east county, and we help each other,” said Thousand Oaks City Manager Grant Brimhall.

“Yes, majors do compete, but we don’t slash each other’s tires and we don’t send out mobs to topple each others’ mannequins.”

Focusing on the rivalry, Brimhall added angrily, is unfair.

In Simi Valley, Mayor Stratton agreed: “Too many people are trying to make too much of the disagreements we’ve had,” he said. “Yes, there’s a little bit of sibling rivalry, but it’s healthy--it’s not like massive warfare.”

Yet several contentious issues have driven a wedge between Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, especially over the past year.

First off, there’s the lawsuit over the Sunset Hills Boulevard extension.

When the Thousand Oaks City Council decided last year not to proceed with a proposed two-mile connector road between the two cities, Simi Valley officials slapped it with a lawsuit. The suit asks for $2 million to fund the cost of road widening and other street improvements that Simi Valley will have to undertake if Sunset Hills Boulevard is not extended.

Politicians from both sides insist the lawsuit has not soured relations between the two cities. But closed-door negotiations have dragged on for seven months, and some traces of bitterness have surfaced.

Simi Valley Councilwoman Judy Mikels called Thousand Oaks’ reasons for eliminating the proposed connector “hogwash.” And Stratton termed the decision “an unfriendly act.”

Never one to hold his fire, Conejo Valley Chamber President Rubenstein accused the pro-road faction of plotting to lure Thousand Oaks shoppers across the city border so they would spend sales tax dollars in Simi Valley.

“They’re asking us to pay for the road so we can hang ourselves,” he said bitterly.

Tension has also flared in recent months over protection of the Tierra Rejada Valley Greenbelt--a four-square-mile patch of agricultural and park land that, quite literally, divides Simi Valley from Thousand Oaks and Moorpark.

The Simi Valley City Council is seriously considering a developer’s proposal to build on his 138-acre parcel inside the greenbelt. Because the lot bumps up against existing homes within the city’s boundaries and is cut off from the rest of the greenbelt by soft hills, Stratton has argued that the land is “logically part of Simi Valley . . . not logically in the greenbelt.”

But that reasoning infuriates and alarms Thousand Oaks.

Development in the greenbelt would mark “the beginning of the end of something very special separating our three cities,” Schillo said.

Already, Thousand Oaks leaders are envious that Simi Valley has laid claim to the only incursion of development in the buffer zone to date--the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.

Although the tourist attraction and conservative think-tank technically lie within unincorporated Ventura County, the library carries a Simi Valley Zip code and is accessible mainly from Simi Valley roads--a coup “for which (Thousand Oaks) hated us,” Nancy Bender, executive director of the Simi Valley Chamber of Commerce, said with a touch of glee.

And indeed, Stratton cites the Reagan library as one of Simi Valley’s proudest accomplishments.

“There was competition for the Reagan library and we lost,” Schillo conceded--graciously, but with disappointment still evident.

Another sore spot concerns the county’s allocation of funds and services. Blaming weak representation on the Board of Supervisors, Thousand Oaks leaders say their taxpayers get ripped off because they are always called upon to subsidize services elsewhere in the county.

In the zero-sum game of scrambling for county dollars, any money that ends up in Simi Valley shrinks the pot available for Thousand Oaks--a point which infuriates Schillo, Brimhall and other city leaders. As just one example, they love to dredge up a longstanding beef about the flood control district’s use of their bond money to fund improvements in Simi Valley.

Even in Simi Valley, Mayor Stratton said he has to agree that Thousand Oaks does get shortchanged sometimes.

“We combine to get things from the county to come east of the Conejo Grade, and then when something gets landed here, it becomes more of a local tiff as to which city it will end up in,” Stratton said. “Once we win the collective battle to get something in this area, the supervisors duke it out.”

In yet another competitive joust, Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley each spring jostle for position atop the FBI list of the nation’s safest cities with populations above 100,000.

In 1992, the first year Simi Valley had a large enough population to qualify for consideration, Thousand Oaks took first and Simi Valley second. This year, Thousand Oaks dropped to second. But Simi Valley stumbled too, ending up fourth.

While the cities may fight for top berth on the low-crime list, the rivalry does not extend to gangs.

Most turf wars occur within each city. When they do look out of town, Thousand Oaks toughs tend to rumble with Camarillo, and Simi Valley gangs fight with Moorpark, said Lt. David Tennessen of the East Valley Sheriff’s Station.

Economic competition tends to generate the most sparks in the Simi Valley-Thousand Oaks rivalry, as the cities vie for businesses, jobs and sales tax dollars.

The intense struggle to shore up local economies worries Thousand Oaks Councilwoman Elois Zeanah, who fears developers pit one city against the other to extract sweet deals.

“It’s being used by development representatives and city officials as an excuse to fast-track projects,” she said. “It’s the attitude of, ‘We want to get this business before they do.’ ”

But others, like Simi Valley Chamber President Bender, see the competition as “normal and healthy” and good for the overall economic health of eastern Ventura County.

‘It’s not a mean-spirited, nasty or blind competition,” Thousand Oaks City Manager Brimhall agreed. “It’s as American as apple pie. And if we can’t get (a business to locate in Thousand Oaks), we’d like for Simi or Moorpark or Westlake to get them.”

And Simi Valley’s deputy city manager in charge of economic development, Jim Hansen, said he doesn’t even regard Thousand Oaks as his city’s main rival. Most businesses fleeing the San Fernando Valley end up choosing among Simi Valley, Valencia or Santa Clarita, he said.

Simi Valley often has an upper hand because its City Council “has collectively been very, very supportive of business,” Hansen said.

In an unwitting stab at Thousand Oaks--Hansen insisted he doesn’t pay attention to Thousand Oaks’ sharply divided council--he added, “It’s always reassuring for businesses to know that a City Council does not tend to split, 3-2, because in that case one swing vote could kill the project.”

Although skirmishes for new businesses continue, the biggest battle may have been fought almost 20 years ago when the Hahn Co. settled on Thousand Oaks for its new regional shopping center because of its proximity to the well-trafficked Ventura Freeway.

Bolstered by The Oaks mall and the Auto Mall, Thousand Oaks reaps almost twice as much sales-tax revenue as Simi Valley. For the upcoming year, Thousand Oaks has budgeted for $13.3 million in sales-tax dollars, compared with $7.1 million in Simi Valley.

The disparity shows up in each city’s general-fund budget, which accounts for all sales tax, property tax and motor vehicle tax income. Thousand Oaks’ budget runs to $34.5 million a year, whereas Simi Valley recently approved general-fund expenditures of $24.8 million.

“To me, it seems unfair because the mall has given Thousand Oaks the edge in providing things like city libraries,” Supervisor Howard said.

In a proposal sure to raise the ire of Thousand Oaks residents, Howard suggested that sales tax revenue from The Oaks be divided on a per-capita basis among all cities that send shoppers to the regional mall.

Simi Valley activist Steve Frank doesn’t like that proposal, but he agrees with Howard’s gripe. “There is no comparison between the cities,” he said, “because the people in Thousand Oaks got a mall and we didn’t.”

Aside from what urban planners have wrought, geography has also left an imprint on the two cities’ personalities.

Because it’s farther inland, trapped under an air pocket that seems to attract smog from both the San Fernando Valley and Oxnard, Simi Valley tends to be hotter, stickier and sweatier than Thousand Oaks.

On average, Simi Valley records 29 days a year exceeding federal smog standards, compared with only six a year in Thousand Oaks, said Kent Field, a meteorologist with the county’s Air Pollution Control District.

Although both cities are surrounded by mountains, Simi Valley is relatively flat, whereas Thousand Oaks boasts more hilly terrain, which some say lends a more picturesque air.

“Thousand Oaks is more sleepyish, more semi-rural” explained Bill Humphrey, a real estate agent who shows homes in both cities. “Just look on a map, and you’ll see more winding roads and curvy streets in Thousand Oaks. But Simi Valley is laid out more like a grid--north, south, east and west--so it’s more urbanized.”

Bristling at the image of Simi Valley as a block of hemmed-in squares, Supervisor Howard insisted that her city’s geography is actually a plus.

“Simi is ringed by picturesque mountains, so that gives us a feeling of separation that we don’t often get in Southern California,” she said. “Cities often run into each other--you can’t tell where Agoura Hills leaves off and Thousand Oaks begins.”

Simi Valley’s isolation fosters a sense of civic pride that boosters say is lacking in the east county’s other valley.

“Because of geography, we don’t meld easily to the east or west, so we’re very strong on community spirit,” said the chamber’s Bender. “That’s one of our main attractions.”

In praising that sense of community, Mayor Stratton credited the Neighborhood Council system, which requires developers to present projects to 15-member regional boards before moving on to the Planning Commission and City Council.

Because each board represents 25,000 people--a quarter of the city--large groups of activists tend to coalesce and work together, Stratton said.

In contrast, Thousand Oaks politics tend to dissolve into what Stratton called “little pockets of parochialism,” with gung-ho leaders galvanizing a given block into action without considering the larger neighborhood.

“There’s much more of a sense of commonality within the (Simi Valley) community . . . a much broader perspective,” Stratton said.

Thousand Oaks Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski has been urging adoption of a Neighborhood Council system in her city. So far, however, she’s been unable to overcome opposition from colleagues concerned about inserting more bureaucracy between citizens and their elected representatives.

Hammering home the theme of community spirit, Simi Valley residents insist theirs is a more “family-oriented” city, affordable enough to attract young couples and their offspring.

With 19 elementary schools, four junior highs, two high schools and an adult school, the Simi Valley Unified School District is the county’s largest. The town also boasts an extensive equestrian and pedestrian trail system.

“The two communities are very similar, but you still get more house for your dollar in Simi,” Stratton said. “We’re proud of being a really great family community. That’s our forte.”

Some artists sniff that this emphasis on family activities has distracted Simi Valley residents from “real” culture--the concerts, theater and dance likely to come to Thousand Oaks’ Civic Arts Plaza when it opens in October, 1994.

Wes Deitrick, a local producer and actor, said when he puts on shows for children in various Simi Valley auditoriums, they sell out. But when he tried to introduce serious theater, he was lucky to fill only a dozen seats. The same performances that packed the house in Thousand Oaks could barely lure a handful of spectators in Simi Valley, he said.

Like Deitrick, most individuals weigh the two cities by their commitments to specific fields--the arts, social services, affordable housing, landscaping. But politicians try to focus on the bigger picture, balancing the need to cooperate against the instinct to compete.

To mix things up, every once in a while a public figure engages some friendly mudslinging--or, at the very least, some shameless boosterism.

Take Pat Fredericks, president of the Conejo Valley Assn. of Realtors. She doesn’t shy away from expressing her opinion. And she comes down firmly on the side of Thousand Oaks.

“I can’t in clear conscience put down Simi because they’ve come a long way in improving their image, educational system and caliber of life in general,” Fredericks said politely.

“But Thousand Oaks will continue to be the place to live,” she boasted. “I think Thousand Oaks will always--let’s hope--be the premier city in eastern Ventura County.”

East County Rivals at a Glance

SIMI VALLEY THOUSAND OAKS POPULATION 102,982 109,214 RACIAL PROFILE Anglo 80.0% 84.0% Latino 13.0% 10.0% Black 1.5% 1.2% Asian 5.3% 4.7% Am. Ind. 0.5% 0.3% AGE PROFILE Under age 18 28.2% 24.7% Age 65 and over 5.3% 9.0% HOUSING PROFILE Owner-occupied 76.4% 73.7% Median value $233,000 $297,000 Renter-occupied 23.6% 26.3% Median rent/month $844 $840 Crowded dwellings 5.5% 3.7% INCOME PROFILE Median household $53,967 $56,856 Per capita $18,630 $23,682 Below poverty line 3.6% 4.2% EDUCATION PROFILE High-school grad 86.7% 89.8% College grad 21.1% 35.0% Professionals 30.0% 38.5% Work in other county 51.2% 41.9%

Sources: 1992 U.S. Census, State Department of Finance

Times staff writers Phil Sneiderman and Carlos V. Lozano contributed to this report.