City Tackles Adventist Development

It began inauspiciously enough with the quiet voice of the city clerk opening a 7 p.m. public hearing.

But as the hearing on the proposed Seventh-day Adventist project in Newbury Park dragged on late into Tuesday night, it became clear that the Thousand Oaks City Council was wrestling with the year’s thorniest issue and would need at least another night to get through it.

After 10 p.m., the council agreed to continue the issue at 6 p.m. tonight, promising to hear the more 50 residents who have already asked to speak on the project.

Set down in the middle of council chambers--as if to illustrate the momentous decision before the council--were two six-by-eight-foot models of the Seventh-day Adventist project depicting vast parking lots, winding new roads and tidy rows of houses filling the rolling hills near the Conejo Grade.

Planned for a 458-acre property off Wendy Drive that has been owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church since 1947, the project includes a 750,000-square-foot commercial center with a multiplex cinema and a Target discount department store.

The church would also build an 18-acre campus for about 350 elementary, middle and high school students; senior citizen housing and residential units. Aiming to recapture the rural setting of its original 60-acre campus, the church wants to tuck its proposed campus behind a ridgeline, tantamount to sacrilege in a city that prides itself on its strict environmental policy.

Approval of the project would require many amendments to the city’s General Plan, created in 1970. The church’s construction would carve into hillsides, encroach on slopes of more than 25% and require filling in canyons. Endangered plant species would be swept away by bulldozers.

The council dug into the issue with zest, taking turns grilling city staff members with questions ranging from the environmental impact of extensive grading to build the school and residential site to the economic impacts of adding a new commercial hub to the western end of the city.

To build the school, senior housing and residential portion of the project would require grading 50 acres behind a ridgeline. “No doubt about it,” Mayor Andy Fox said, “this project has significant grading. Are you going to be able to tell, to see where the grading happened?”

“I think you’ll certainly see a change in the landform,” replied planner Greg Smith, who worked on the city’s environmental review, which recommended denial of the church’s project.

The city’s economic advisor on the project, Allan Kotin, told the council that existing businesses would suffer revenue losses if the commercial center is built. He estimates that Target and the other stores proposed for the site would take 54% of their gross sales from other area businesses.

But Kotin warned that even without the Seventh-day Adventist project, small businesses within the city would very likely lose revenue. “We’re migrating away from individual stores and strip [mall] stores,” he said. “This is a pattern that is happening. It will continue whether or not this project is built.”

Council members had spent days preparing for the event, mulling over 35 hours of taped Planning Commission hearings and boxes full of documents on the project.

Halfway through the hearing, Fox apologized to the audience of about 150 residents for groping through papers while asking questions of city staff members. It was not that the council was not prepared, he said, it was that they had so much information to go through.

As if to prove the point, City Manager Grant Brimhall raised a cardboard box filled to the brim with papers and displayed it to the audience.