Ventura City Hall Hears Plea For a Sound Barrier

Ventura resident Greg Seiler would like to invite friends over for a chat in his back yard.

But with all the noise from the cars and trucks rattling along California 126, which runs right behind his house on Lafayette Street, he says he can barely hear his own words, much less anyone else’s.

Friday morning, Seiler and half a dozen of his neighbors trekked to City Hall to seek help in their 20-year struggle to get Caltrans to erect a sound wall behind their homes.

“Our windows shake all night long,” Seiler told sympathetic Ventura City Council members on the traffic and transportation committee.

But council members said they have little power over state bureaucrats. “You need to keep the pressure on the state and make sure it happens,” Councilman Jim Monahan said.

Councilwoman Rosa Lee Measures advised the frustrated homeowners to nag state Assembly and Senate members. “Election year is the best time to go after those politicians,” she said. “You know how we are.”

Bill Minter, a Caltrans sound wall engineer, said that whatever Lafayette Street residents do, they will probably not see their sound wall until the year 2000 at the earliest.

The sound wall, which would cost $1.3 million, has not been included in the statewide Caltrans budget that targets projects up to 1999. If the agency were to build the Lafayette Street sound wall in 2000, he said, that would be only if the city or the county were to donate up to one-third of the cost of the project.

“But really, who’s to say six years from now what the situation will be?” he said.