Council Rejects Buffer Zone for Wetlands : Thousand Oaks: Developers call proposal vague, but backers say it is long overdue. Measure is sent back to staff for revisions.

After a vitriolic six-hour debate, the Thousand Oaks City Council early Wednesday rejected a proposed ordinance that would have banned development within 50 feet of the city’s wetlands.

More than a dozen developers and building industry lobbyists spoke against the proposal, calling it vague, repetitive and discriminatory against a few landowners.

Most of the speakers, however, were residents who said the ordinance was a long overdue step needed to protect fragile habitats that have been swallowed up by development.

Mayor Elois Zeanah and council member Jaime Zukowski, who were on the losing side of the 2-3 vote, said they were outraged by the result.

“This shows a tremendous lack of courage,” Zeanah said. “We all know that the big developers, attorneys and lobbyists give heavily to the council members. Obviously, their money has paid off.”

As Zeanah spoke, Councilwoman Judy Lazar shook her head, saying: “Oh, my, my!” Councilman Alex Fiore added: “This is pure rubbish.”

Councilman Frank Schillo and Lazar said later that they had not taken money from developers.

Schillo suggested that the proposal be sent back to city staff for wholesale revisions that would address the numerous questions raised during the debate. The council passed Schillo’s motion unanimously.

Had the ordinance passed, it would have created a 50- to 100-foot buffer zone around existing wetlands and riparian lands--the sensitive growth areas that surround wetlands.

The ordinance underwent months of review, both by the public and earlier this month at a Planning Commission meeting, where the commission voted 3 to 2 in favor of it.

At Tuesday night’s council meeting, City Planner Gregory Smith defended the ordinance he wrote as a pioneer measure that had been well considered. He said it was consistent with state and federal laws, and had been deemed by the city attorney to be defensible in court.

But several times during the meeting, he was criticized--first by developers, then by council members--for what they said was imprecise language in the measure.

“I read this ordinance and was somewhat disenchanted with the language,” said Dale Ortmann, a Conejo Valley civil engineer. “I support the ideas in the ordinance, but it just has too many ambiguities.

“If you want to adopt an ordinance like this,” he told the council, “at least put yourself in the position where you know what it says and you can defend it.”

Others were less diplomatic.

“This ordinance is vague, ambiguous, arbitrary, unconstitutional and unfair,” said David DiJulio, an attorney for a landowner whose property rights would have been affected by the proposal.

DiJulio also contended that the ordinance was unfair because only eight property owners would be affected, according to city officials.

“You’re denying the rights of people to use their land,” DiJulio said. “And if you’re really interested in the environment, why have you exempted everyone but these eight developers from having to live up to it?”

DiJulio, like several others, said he believed that the purpose of the proposal was not to protect wetlands, but to stem further development in Thousand Oaks.

The argument, in part, helped sway Fiore, who called the ordinance “the worst kind of micro-management.”

“It certainly is discriminatory,” he said. “Here we have picked out eight or nine parcels of land that this will impact. We put a great competitive disadvantage to those few individuals. I can’t, in good conscience, support that.”

But the proposal’s backers said the reason so few parcels would be affected by the plan was the dwindling amount of wetlands in the city.

“The loss of significant wetlands in California has been noticed on a national level,” said Roseann Mikos of the Ventura County Environmental Coalition. “You’re the ones that have an opportunity to do something about this now, before it’s too late.”

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Zukowski said she believed that the ordinance urgently needed to be passed.

“We’re at a critical time in our development,” she said. “I’m sure there is a great desire to delay this, to put it off to another election season, but it’s time--past time--to do this.”

Many of the developers who spoke said they agreed with the concept of wetlands protection. But they said the proposal would have been so restrictive, it would constitute a government seizure of their land.

Albert Cohen, one of the potentially affected property owners, said he believed that Zeanah had engineered the ordinance to prevent him from using his property.

“Ms. Zeanah, this is your ordinance. If you adopt it, we’ll sue you,” he said. “And I guarantee you, we’ll win.”

But Zeanah said her intentions were to protect the wetlands, not attack any specific development.

She and others at the meeting said the needs of developers should not be the council’s primary interest.

One landowner who took exception to that asked for calm and reason from both the council and the audience.

“I would urge some moderation,” said Tibor Zada, who owns a parcel of land north of Hillcrest Drive that he said would be rendered useless by the ordinance. “Just as you accuse the developers of selfishness, there is such a thing as public selfishness as well. You are dealing with people’s property, and you cannot simply take it away.”

Zada’s wife, Suzanne, compared the couple’s situation to the myth of Sisyphus, in which a man is condemned to push a boulder up a hill and, when he reaches the top, the rock rolls down and he has to begin again.

“We lost part of our property to a city road, and then to a large greenbelt; now they want to take the rest with this ordinance,” she said. “I feel like Sisyphus. Please don’t let another rock roll down on me.”

Lazar said the three council members who voted down the ordinance decided that it contained too many inconsistencies.

“Everyone here wants to protect the environment,” Lazar said. “This just wasn’t the right way to go about it.”