Simi Valley Calls for Consultant to Help Revitalize Tapo Street

What to do with the blighted Tapo Street business corridor?

Fresh landscaping? New facades? A farmers’ market and car shows?

Whatever the method, Simi Valley City Council decided Monday night to call in a professional.

The council voted 5 to 0 to search for a design consultant who can help Tapo Street remove the blight, fill the vacant stores and lure back the shoppers.

Last autumn, city staff began huddling with Tapo Street merchants to come up with ideas for a master plan for pumping life back into the business corridor.

They ranged from the fanciful--installing decorative lighting--to the forceful, such as building an offramp connecting the Simi Valley Freeway directly with Tapo Street.

On Monday night, council members applauded the speed with which the Tapo Street business community is pursuing its future.

“This is really the time to do something and to keep this thing moving, not to let it bog down,” Councilman Bill Davis said.

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Mayor Greg Stratton agreed. “I’m pleased to see this is moving forward this fast,” he said.

The council also chose Councilwoman Barbara Williamson to work with city staff on the interview panel that will select the design consultant.

Tapo Street has seen better times.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake shook the bustling Pic ‘N’ Save store and the Sears Outlet furniture showroom so badly they had to be shut down.

The Pic ‘N’ Save has since been demolished, but its lot lies vacant, and surrounding businesses have suffered. One, Nappy’s Restaurant, has closed after 25 years because of the drop in lunchtime crowds caused by the earthquake damage at neighboring buildings.

The Sears Outlet building still stands waiting for a tenant, despite an Oct. 23 arson fire that gutted it.

Owner Lawrence Morse is hoping to repair the building--little more now than a cinder-block shell open to the sky--and find a tenant, said Assistant City Manager Don Penman.

“He believes it could be rebuilt, that it would be cheaper to rebuild it than to start over because it would not have to be brought up to code,” Penman said. “As a city we don’t agree with that.”

Morse has chosen to defy a city order to abate the nuisance conditions at the building, so a trial is scheduled June 6, when the city will seek a court order to force the building’s immediate demolition or repair.

Even before the earthquake’s physical devastation, sales and traffic along Tapo Street had been following a downward trend.

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Sales generated by the largest businesses along Tapo Street have dropped nearly 38% since 1989, not including the loss of sales from the damaged Pic ‘N’ Save and Sears Outlet stores.

And traffic volume has dropped by 18% between 1990 and 1995, from 17,700 average daily trips to 14,500 average daily trips, according to a city report.

A city traffic project in 1992 dealt the harshest blow to the kind of curbside commerce that keeps many small businesses afloat: The city punched dead-end Tapo Canyon Road through to Los Angeles Avenue.

This connected the freeway-fed Tapo Canyon Road with one of the city’s biggest east-west arteries, Los Angeles Avenue. That turned Tapo Canyon Road into a major north-south artery, sucking business off Tapo Street, which runs parallel to it just one block to the east.