Newspaper Snafu May Delay Whiteface Housing Development : Simi Valley: Ad notifying residents of a hearing on the project fails to appear on time.

The long-planned Whiteface housing development in Simi Valley could be delayed at least six months because of a snafu over publication of a meeting notice in a local newspaper, city officials said Tuesday.

An ad was set to run in the paper on Sunday informing residents of an upcoming public hearing on the project, which calls for 269 custom-built homes in Dry and Tapo canyons in north Simi Valley. All that appeared was a map, with no text announcing the meeting, which was set for May 24.

The full ad ran Tuesday, but it was too late, said city planner Wolf Ascher. “Legally we have to have the announcements 10 days ahead of the meeting,” he said. “We missed that. And it doesn’t look like there is any way to fix that.”

Tight scheduling means there is not enough time to reset the required public hearings before the June 30 deadline for housing allocations, Ascher said. The next round of applications will not be accepted for at least another six months, he said.

Lloyd Poindexter of VTN West, which is managing the Whiteface project for developers Marafugi/Big Sky Limited Partnership, said it would take several days to determine the long-term impact of the delay.

The now-postponed public hearings are among the final hurdles in a three-year review of the project. Poindexter said he is frustrated with the holdup, which comes on the heels of an unexpected yearlong delay for a special environmental analysis of the site.

“I would call it a major setback,” he said. “We just went though this one-year process and now we’ve got another six months on top of that. Each delay just makes it worse.” The proposed developments for Dry and Tapo canyons are the smaller portions of what began several years ago as a massive project for three canyons.

The third and largest piece of the project, which calls for 1,100 homes for senior citizens in Sand Canyon, has been put on hold indefinitely because of financing problems.

Timothy J. Gallagher, editor of the Ventura County Star, which publishes the Simi Valley Star as one of its editions, acknowledged that the paper was at fault for not printing the full ad on schedule.

“We were in error,” he said. “These are some of the errors you make when you’re printing so many papers each day. I’m real sorry for the folks who worked on this.”

Gallagher said the paper is assessing its procedures to ensure that the problem does not happen again.

Meanwhile, Mayor Greg Stratton has asked that the city review its policy of placing meeting announcements exclusively in the Simi Valley Star, which was previously named the Simi Valley Enterprise.

“We may want to do something to give people the option of picking which paper they’d like,” he said. “In general, as the local community newspaper [the Enterprise] understood the importance of getting these things right. Once you put it out to a larger organization, mistakes happen.”