Le Club Owners Want Out of Footbridge Deal

Less than a month after hundreds of residents demanded that the city immediately build a footbridge across the Arroyo Simi, where an 11-year-old boy drowned, the owners of a nearby apartment complex--who had pledged to pay half the bridge’s cost--have gone to court, saying that Moorpark’s delays had freed them of their obligation.

The owners of the Moorpark Le Club apartments filed papers last week in Ventura County Superior Court, asking a judge to free them from having to provide a $300,000 bond, which guarantees their portion of the bridge’s construction.

“This has no relationship to the drowning except for bad timing,” said Mitch Kahn, a lawyer who represents the property owner, G. H. Palmer Associates.

Moorpark sixth-grader Joel Burchfield was swept into the rain-swollen arroyo Feb. 1 while taking a shortcut home from school. After the boy’s death, more than 1,300 high school and middle school students signed a petition urging the City Council to build the bridge, which had been planned since the mid-1980s.

And city officials told the students and other concerned residents that they would try to complete the $600,000 pedestrian bridge this year.

The effort to build the bridge has been plagued by delays. The most recent setback came when officials of the county Flood Control Department, working out plans to widen the arroyo, refused to give up an easement needed for bridge construction. The city will also have to reach agreement to use property owned by Southern California Edison.

But Moorpark officials said Tuesday that the recent court action would not threaten the progress of the bridge construction, which they expect will begin this spring.

“I would have to revisit the terms of the agreement, but I think it compels [the apartment complex owners] to fulfill their obligation to pay half,” Councilman Bernardo Perez said. “I don’t think this will play into any further delays.”

The Arroyo Simi runs along the south side of the apartment complex. Although the bridge was originally planned to cross the arroyo near the end of Moorpark Avenue, the bridge is now being planned as part of a small neighborhood park that will be developed at the end of Liberty Bell Road near the Villa Campesina neighborhood, which is about half a mile from the apartment complex.

Plans to build the footbridge date back to 1985, when city officials stipulated that the owners of the Le Club apartments--as a condition of the apartments’ construction--would have to pay half the cost for a pedestrian bridge.

Later, as Palmer Associates completed the first phase of construction, it was required to post a surety bond for $300,000 to assure that the bridge would be built, Kahn said.

In 1992, when the apartment owners refinanced the building with city help, they paid the city a lump sum of $158,500 while continuing to maintain the bond, he said.

But, according to court papers, as part of that refinancing, the city was required to “. . . exonerate the entire surety bond . . . no later than Dec. 31, 1995, more than 10 years and three months following the original conditional approvals of the entitlement to construct the Le Club apartment complex.”

On Jan. 15, Palmer Associates sent a letter to the city asking that it be freed from having to make further payments.

“The city said they were having trouble with Southern California Edison and needed more time,” Kahn said. “My client has been paying premiums on a bond since 1987 and has had nothing in return.”

City officials said Tuesday that they were less than a week away from a final agreement to begin construction of the bridge.