CALABASAS : Council May Add 4 to Project Task Force

The Calabasas City Council is considering naming four additional members to a seven-member task force established to help developer John Kilroy draw a master plan for his planned large-scale office and retail center.

Four community organizations, including the Calabasas Chamber of Commerce, want to be included in the master plan process, city officials said. The council is expected to vote sometime in March on whether to honor the groups’ requests.

The four organizations say they have a right to be included.

“The chamber represents the business community, and the business community would like some input,” said Carol Amenta, executive director of the Calabasas Chamber of Commerce.

The other organizations are an Old Town merchants’ group, the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation and a coalition of five homeowners’ groups in the area of Calabasas Road and Parkway Calabasas, where the project is to be built, city officials said.

The council, which approved the project in December, did so as part of a compromise proposal in which Kilroy must cut the size of the project. He must also work with the community to draw a master plan for all but the 200,000-square-foot retail portion of the 1.5-million-square-foot project.

The existing task force appointed by the council includes Michael Brockman and Jack Hakim, both community activists; Allan Cooper, a former planning commissioner, and Ellen Pangarliotas, the city’s parks and recreation commissioner.

Also named were Barbara Reinike, a member of the Old Town Coalition; Deanna Shapiro, a realtor; City Councilman Bob Hill, and James Leewong, a lawyer with a background in planning issues.

Some question whether the naming of a task force will ease hard feelings that have developed between those who want the project built and those who say it is too big for the city. Leewong wondered how much influence the task force will have with Kilroy, who has promised to work with the task force.

“The question is: How much authority are we going to have?” Leewong said.

He said Kilroy, under the terms of the original entitlement from the county, still has the right to build a five-story, 12-unit complex that no one in the city wants.

Kilroy, a fee developer for Ahmanson Land Co., originally won approval from the county for a 1.5-million-square-foot project. The developer asked to increase the retail portion of the project by 200,000 square feet last year, but needed the council’s approval.

The council placed conditions on the project that included cutting down the project by 200,000 square feet overall and another 100,000 square feet if the master plan for the project is not completed after one year.

City Councilman Marvin Lopata, who helped draft the compromise proposal approved by the council, said the master plan was not designed specifically to end the controversy.

“It may help to ease the controversy, but that was not why we did it,” he said. “We did it to put local input into that project.”