AGOURA HILLS : Office for Workers’ Comp Claims Closes

The state has closed its workers’ compensation claims office in Agoura Hills, citing lack of business and referring clients to offices in Ventura and Van Nuys.

Richard Stephens, a spokesman for the state Division of Workers’ Compensation in San Francisco, said his agency had been considering the idea for more than a year as part of an overall effort to cut costs.

The Agoura Hills office was shut down last month.

Marlon Bateman, a Westlake Village attorney who handles workers’ compensation cases, blasted the decision, saying the closure will create a hardship for Conejo Valley residents.

“It’s absolutely ludicrous for these people in this area to have to go to either Ventura or Van Nuys,” Bateman said Friday.

Bateman said the Wilson Administration “pulled a fast one on the people in this area.” He questioned the state’s plan to build a new office in Riverside, which officials say is necessary to help relieve a busy San Bernardino office just 10 miles away.

“They owed a political debt to one of the state senators or assemblymen in the Riverside area,” Bateman said.

Stephens defended the plan, saying the growth of business in the Inland Empire has increased the workload for his agency in that area.

By contrast, he said, the Agoura Hills office, which opened several years ago to take pressure off the agency’s busy Van Nuys location, has never received enough traffic to warrant spending the money to keep it open.

Stephens said his agency conducted a survey of attorneys in the Conejo Valley area to see how the closure would affect them.

“We didn’t get a lot of negative comment from them, quite frankly,” he said.

The office had three judges, three auditors and eight support staffers, Stephens said. All those people, he said, have been transferred to Van Nuys or Ventura.