Moorpark OKs Ordinance Intended to Protect Scenic Ridgelines : Development: The law restricts construction. Stricter versions were fought off by builders over the years.

Capping seven years of debate, the Moorpark City Council unanimously approved an ordinance Wednesday meant to save the scenic ridgelines surrounding the city.

The so-called Hillside Ordinance will restrict construction on steep city slopes and prohibit building on some ridgelines on the north side of town.

The ordinance is much less restrictive than similar laws in Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley, Mayor Paul Lawrason said.

“This one’s taken awhile, but now it’s on the books” Lawrason said.

Over the years, developers successfully fought off stricter versions of the ordinance with claims that it was merely a backhanded attempt at growth control.

After many years of rancorous debate, both sides seemed to have come up with a compromise that preserves the important ridgelines in the city while also allowing landowners to develop their property, Lawrason said.

He added that flexibility in the rules regulating construction on area hillsides is the most attractive feature of the new law.

Other council members agreed. They said they wanted to prevent experiences such as that of a Thousand Oaks couple who were recently stopped from building a home on the hilltop property they owned for 30 years because of that city’s strict hillside protection ordinance.

Moorpark’s law has certain exemptions that would prevent that kind of incident, Lawrason said.

The rules would allow the council to exempt projects that already have an approved specific plan, or a development agreement.

Lawrason said those exemptions give the council the flexibility to look at a project on a number of levels, including the number of residences planned and how close together they will be built, the amount of low-income housing in the project, and how much open space the developer is willing to set aside for public use.

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Developers generally supported the new measure and praised the city for listening to their concerns and making the ordinance flexible.

Because much of the undeveloped land in the city is on steep and rugged slopes, a stricter ordinance could have curbed all future projects, said Gary Austin, vice president of the Messenger Investment Corp., which is proposing to build 3,221 residences on the rugged hillsides northeast of town.

“We were concerned that the ordinance would be too rigid, but I think we’ll have the flexibility here to work with the city on this one,” he said.

The ordinance also is meant to prevent erosion of the hillsides by limiting the number of housing units built on slopes with gradients between 20% and 50%. A perfectly vertical cliff has a gradient of 100%.

Under rare circumstances, construction will be allowed on slopes greater than 50%. But in those cases, developers would have to show that housing could be built safely without undermining the stability of the hillside.

Because the Hillside Ordinance was debated for so long, most of the projects now in the planning stages in the city have already incorporated the building guidelines into the ordinance.