The Boulevard of Broken Dreams : The Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan Was Dealt a Severe Setback by Mother Nature

A drive along Ventura Boulevard in the days after the quake provided a snapshot of the considerable damage sustained by businesses there. As Jeff Brain, past president of the Sherman Oaks Chamber of Commerce, put it: “We’ve got burned-out buildings, displaced tenants and not a whole lot of places to move them.”

The financial struggles those merchants will face in re-establishing their livelihoods weighs heavily on an important debate that will be aired again in the coming weeks. It involves the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan and its quarter-billion-dollar blueprint to tame the boulevard’s unruly growth, to ease its traffic and enhance the area over the next 20 years.

If that already seemed like an ungodly sum of money for one road in these tough fiscal times, it ought to appear even more exorbitant now, after the Northridge quake.

The financing mechanism for this plan, which was developed in the relatively flush 1980s, involved so-called trip fees. That was based on a rather complicated formula involving the number of new car trips generated by new projects. But the trip fees were a huge financial bite in the ensuing recession. They haven’t materialized in the amounts anticipated, and they have been protested by businesses and often waived by the Los Angeles City Council.

A better option that emerged last year called for a lesser reliance on trip fees and the establishment of as many as five benefit assessment districts along the boulevard that would distribute improvement costs more equitably among property owners.

That made much more sense, but it was also before the quake and a situation so grim that the president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. now says that “it could be years before these areas are rebuilt.”

Any revised plan for the boulevard will have to take such hardships into consideration. The new reality is that the Valley’s economy has been severely disrupted by a natural disaster. If the boulevard plan is not put on hold indefinitely, it will have to be scaled back further still.