Council OKs Adventist Development

An air of resignation settled across the slow-growth community Thursday as activists, officials and residents contemplated a future for Newbury Park that now includes a commercial center almost as big as The Oaks mall.

By 3-2 votes, the City Council approved nearly every aspect of the $150-million Seventh-day Adventist project late Wednesday.

“It’s not a surprise,” said a subdued Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski, who along with Elois Zeanah voted against the project because it required changing the city’s blueprint for development.

“The era of the robber barons has come to Thousand Oaks,” said Sierra Club representative Cassandra Auerbach, who fought long and hard against the project.

But the development has won plenty of praise from friends of the church, from Newbury Park residents tired of having to leave their neighborhood to get groceries and from council members who say it will have a positive impact on the local economy.

“This is going to bring in $163 million in sales to the city,” Councilwoman Judy Lazar said. “That is a lot of money. And every dollar gets spent more than once in the community.”

To be built over the next few years, the project includes two separate sections: a north campus built behind a ridgeline and a south campus near the Ventura Freeway at Wendy Drive.

The south campus, spread over 88 acres, includes a 722,500-square-foot commercial center, with an additional 33,000 square feet of industrial use. Plans also call for the discount chain store Target to anchor a center encompassing restaurants, smaller shops, a fire station, transportation hub and possibly a multiplex cinema.

The north campus plan includes a school for 350 students--kindergarten through 12th grade--and 250 units of housing for senior citizens.

The church has yet to endorse several hundred city conditions, which a weary council failed to act on Wednesday and will have to return to in a few weeks. Some of those conditions are strongly objected to by the church. Those conditions include a park district request that parkland be set aside within the project and a demand that the north campus be fenced to separate it from open space. The council also refused to freeze development fees. In general, however, the group was happy with the outcome.

“I thought the council’s action was thoughtful,” said Chuck Cohen, the land-use attorney who represented the church. “We’re quite pleased by what occurred.”

The one major change imposed by the City Council on the church Wednesday was the deletion of 45 homes for teachers and school staff members on the north campus. Lazar suggested the change to eliminate some of the most destructive grading planned. The city will gain about 50 more acres of open space as a result, bringing its total land acquisition from the church to about 300 acres.

But the Sierra Club’s Auerbach was unimpressed with the concession.

“It’s a joke,” Auerbach said. “It’s like a pretense that they did something environmentally responsible so that the rest of the outrage can continue as planned.”

The Sierra Club has not decided whether it will take legal action against the city for changing the General Plan, which governs development in the city, she said. “It is nothing that we can talk about at this time,” Auerbach said. “We’re reviewing all the options.”

To approve the church’s plans, the City Council had to make several amendments to its General Plan, created in 1970 and revised a number of times since. Zoning for the 458-acre parcel had to be changed to allow building in a steep canyon behind the ridgeline and to increase the property zoned for commercial use.

Land that was formerly termed undevelopable behind the ridgeline will now be graded and turned into a densely packed community.

Zukowski and Zeanah said they had long been resigned to the project being approved. Zeanah had sent out a letter to constituents last month asking them to turn out in force against the project, which she said would be approved for political, rather than practical, reasons.

But little opposition was evident Wednesday night.

Speakers ran 3 to 1 in favor of the project. Although some had close ties to the proposal, they spoke as residents. Tom Grasmehr gave a particularly passionate defense of the project without mentioning that he is married to a woman who works for attorney Chuck Cohen.

“My perception is that the Seventh-day Adventist project is being unduly harassed,” Grasmehr told the council. “This project was nearly talked to death by a minority of the Planning Commission. It reminds me of a federal filibuster.”

The Planning Commission spent seven sessions--more than 35 hours--reviewing the project from September until the end of November.

Zukowski said many Newbury Park residents still are not aware of how the church’s development will change their community.

“It’s one of those things that until it is built, it’s not in anyone’s backyard,” she said.