Video Depot Owner Fights Blockbuster Plan

The owner of a small Westlake video store watched last year as a popular neighboring business, Erika’s Bake Shop, closed to make way for a new Blockbuster Video store.

Now he is determined that his shop not suffer a similar fate.

Ernest Martel, owner of Video Depot, has appealed a Thousand Oaks Planning Department decision allowing Blockbuster to modify the storefronts it will soon occupy. He said he has gathered more than 500 signatures on a petition opposing the modifications. And he has filmed traffic congestion at the driveway that Blockbuster patrons would use, congestion that he said the store will make worse.

The Planning Commission will consider his appeal--and review his petition and videotape--Monday.

The giant video store already provoked the community’s ire when residents learned last year that its arrival would mean that the popular Erika’s would have to move. Despite a petition drive to save it, the bakery shut its doors in July.

Martel acknowledges that he can’t prevent Blockbuster from coming to the center. But he hopes to force the national chain either to change the store layout or pick another location within the plaza.

Current plans call for a store near the Vons supermarket and Video Depot, with front doors facing Vons. The four stores that Blockbuster will replace had storefronts facing away from Vons, toward Agoura Road. Martel sees the location and layout as deliberate attempts to steal his customers and drive him out of business.

“I feel they’re trying to close me down, because by opening their doors toward Vons, they’re going after my customer base,” he said.

Officials at La Cagnina & Associates, which manages the plaza, declined to say Thursday whether such a move or reorganization of the Blockbuster layout were possible. Blockbuster officials could not be reached for comment.

Some of Martel’s supporters have written the city Planning Department complaining that a Blockbuster store would harm smaller local businesses and asking the department to reject the entire project. The Planning Commission voted in 1994 to allow renovations at the shopping strip, which includes the Blockbuster.

“We take away the capacity for entrepreneurship to flourish in this town when we bring in these huge chains,” said Karen Dean Fritts, a resident of the Westlake neighborhood of Thousand Oaks who wrote to the Planning Department in protest.

“I think one of the things we’re losing in America in the small towns is the concept of the small businessman and woman being able to make money, make a living,” she said.

But Forrest Frields, chairman of the Planning Commission, said the panel cannot discriminate against larger stores.

“I understand that there’s resistance by the neighbors,” he said. “I understand that they’re upset about it, but that’s not something the city can do.”

The panel may, however, require that before Blockbuster opens, proposed changes be made to the parking lot to improve the flow of traffic through the nearby driveway, Frields said.

The minor modification that Martel appealed would allow Blockbuster to build a trellis along the eastern side of the building and reconfigure the storefronts of the four businesses the store would replace, including the old storefront for Erika’s Bake Shop.

The bakery’s former owner, Dieterich Heinzelmann, said Thursday that he hopes Martel succeeds. Heinzelmann has been working in Oxnard’s Yankee Doodle Bakery since his shop closed last summer.

He is still looking into the possibility of reopening Erika’s. He had to close the store, he said, when his lease expired, because he didn’t have enough money to move to another location in the plaza.

He said he hopes to attend Monday’s Planning Commission meeting to support Martel. “He’s fighting for his business,” Heinzelmann said. “I would do anything to help him.”