VAN NUYS : New Sepulveda Blvd. Crackdown Is Urged

The city should extend its recent crackdown on Sepulveda Boulevard businesses to include all 24-hour restaurants, liquor stores and other businesses that are magnets for crime, community leaders said this week.

The call by Don Schultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn., and neighborhood watch activist Romana Catton to target the businesses marks the first time residents have called on city leaders to focus on all-night establishments. “With any 24-hour operations that cannot convincingly discourage loitering and congregating during late hours and early morning hours, police and city departments should review and discontinue those 24-hour operations,” Schultz said.

“I’m not anti-business,” Catton added. “It’s nice to have a 24-hour gas station available. But in an area with so much crime, you don’t need anything open like a doughnut shop or a burger shop or a Laundromat. These are just a place for prostitutes and drug dealers to loiter and do their business.”

Both Catton and Schultz have testified at public hearings or written letters to the city to complain about businesses that lure crime to their neighborhoods.

Schultz and Catton want the city Zoning Department or City Council to identify and investigate all 24-hour operations along Sepulveda Boulevard as possible magnets for crime. Those that are determined to have a high crime rate should have their hours reduced and possibly be required to hire security, they said.

As a precedent, Schultz cited the city Zoning Department’s crackdown last week on five Sepulveda Boulevard motels. As part of an investigation initiated by City Councilman Marvin Braude to eliminate prostitution that surrounds these locations, the owners of all five were told to hire security or risk closure.

Catton and Schultz also cited a recent investigation into Orville’s Originals doughnut shop on Sepulveda Boulevard, a 24-hour operation considered a public nuisance by police.

But both community leaders exercised caution while calling for such a probe of the 24-hour shops.

“If you only go after places that serve alcohol, you are discriminating,” Schultz said. At the same time, he added, “I don’t think this applies to the Kinko’s Copies on Sepulveda.”