Road Now a Battle Line Between City and County : Streets: Thousand Oaks wants funds spent on Norwegian Grade.

Cruising down Moorpark Road, the average driver would be hard-pressed to find anything remarkable about the curving, two-lane stretch as it crosses Santa Rosa Road.

But in reality, Santa Rosa marks the boundary between Thousand Oaks and unincorporated Ventura County. And in recent months, it has become a battle line.

To the south: Thousand Oaks. City leaders have asked that a $400,000 pot of funds be spent on their side to improve the notoriously steep, winding route known as the Norwegian Grade. The grade includes Moorpark Road from Santa Rosa Road south to Olsen Road.

To the north: the county. The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will consider using the same cache of funds to repave and widen their span of Moorpark Road, from Santa Rosa Road north to Tierra Rejada Road. Traffic there is twice as heavy as it is on the Norwegian Grade, and the accident rate is higher than that of many other county roads.

At issue is revenue collected from homeowners in the Santa Rosa Valley to widen and maintain roads in the area. The county first levied the $500-per-lot assessment 13 years ago, in response to concerns raised by the city of Thousand Oaks that traffic generated by new housing would overtax the Norwegian Grade.

After all, they said, cars had long ago replaced horse-drawn carriages but little had been done to improve the road since it was knocked out of the side of a craggy hill at the turn of the century.

“Diversion of these trust funds is unfair to motorists and bicyclists of the city and the Santa Rosa Valley,” Mayor Jaime Zukowski wrote in a letter unanimously approved by the Thousand Oaks City Council last month and sent to the Board of Supervisors.

In the past decade, however, traffic has gone up more than three times as fast on the county’s stretch of road, than it has on the grade.

In 1981, when the assessment district was formed, an average of nearly 2,700 cars and trucks sped down the Norwegian Grade each day. Now about 3,300 vehicles use that route.

Over the same time period, traffic on Moorpark between Santa Rosa and Tierra Rejada has increased from 3,300 cars a day to 7,700.

“It’s not a matter of pitting one against the other,” said Butch Britt, the county’s deputy director of public works. “It’s a matter of the board deciding what would be an expedient and prudent use of funds.”

The county project has met state and federal guidelines and would likely be matched by a nearly $3-million federal grant.

The project would include widening the road, straightening two 90-degree curves, adding paved shoulders and installing a traffic signal at the intersection of Santa Rosa and Moorpark roads.

As far as planning goes, the Thousand Oaks project lags far behind.

The city has just completed a feasibility study of a range of improvements that could be made on the Norwegian Grade, ranging in cost from $1.8 million to $28 million. The city may not be ready to proceed with an actual project for five to 10 years, said Supervisor Frank Schillo, a former Thousand Oaks councilman whose district includes the city.

Schillo said he has hammered out a compromise with Supervisor Judy Mikels, whose district includes the unincorporated section of Moorpark Road. Under the compromise, the $400,000 would go to the county project, but the county would pledge to help Thousand Oaks find funding for the grade when the time comes.

“We agreed to work on this together,” Schillo said, “I think it is acceptable.”

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Road Improvement

The county will consider spending $400,000 to improve Moorpark Road north of Santa Rosa Road, in the unincorporated county. Some Thousand Oaks leaders think the money should be spent south of the Santa Rosa inside the city limits, on a stretch of Moorpark Road called the Norwegian Grade.