Church Hopes Plan for Cemetery Ends Homeowner Feud

West Valley Christian Church hopes a new plan for land the congregation owns in West Hills will make its long quarrel with a homeowners group there a dead issue.

For years, the West Hills Neighborhood Assn. has battled to keep the congregation from building a church on a five-acre tract it bought for $2.2 million in 1985.

So now the church has a new proposed use for the site--a cemetery.

Well, that does “address a lot of our issues, like traffic, grading, activity at night (and) bell-ringing,” said homeowners association board member Barbara Kay.

Church and homeowners association leaders alike are tentatively optimistic that replacing live worshipers with the remains of the departed will end their lengthy quarrel, but it remains to be seen whether the association’s membership will agree.

The feud dates back to 1992, when the congregation proposed building a church and school on the triangular parcel of hillside land bounded by Roscoe Boulevard and Woodlake Avenue.

Residents, who complained the school would create traffic nightmares and require grading the hill, flocked to city zoning board meetings to block the project. One meeting ran a record seven hours.

In 1993, the City Council approved construction of a combination church-nursery school, smaller than the original proposal.

But residents worried the nursery school could be expanded into a larger facility, and the association sued the city, demanding that an environmental impact report be required for the project.

“That’s not the way to go,” Mel Malkoff, a consultant to the church, said in reference to the legal brouhaha. “We would like to work with (the residents) arm in arm.”

And so, meeting with the Neighborhood Assn. board in August, the church presented plans for a cemetery. The church and school will be built on another site, Malkoff said.

The first of what may be several meetings to gauge neighborhood response was held Thursday night.

Some residents seemed startled by the grave proposal, Kay said.

“It really is up to the membership,” Kay said. The association is not formally endorsing the plan until after it canvasses its members, she said.

The church, she said, has promised to pull the project if the residents oppose it.