Kadota Fig Proposal Sent Back for Work

Concerned that a plan to guide development in the city’s Kadota Fig neighborhood would not evenly distribute costs for improving an intersection, Simi Valley planning commissioners have sent the proposal back to city planners for more work.

The decision came this week after a three-hour discussion in which neighborhood residents and some commissioners expressed doubts about the plan.

As proposed, the plan would change the zoning on many parcels of land in the area south of the Simi Valley Freeway between Fig and Stearns streets.

Those changes would increase the number of houses or apartments that could someday be built in the area, leading some people to complain that the plan would destroy the rural nature of their neighborhood.

Horse trainer Vallory McGraw said Kadota Fig is one of the few neighborhoods left where people can keep horses.

The plan, she said, would squeeze out equestrians.

“I do not understand why developers and planning people want to cut animals out of our lives,” she said.

But resident Donald Tschirhart, who served on a committee that helped develop the plan, said such changes were already underway.

“In my opinion, the horse-keeping days on properties facing Cochran [Street] are over,” he said.

Commissioners discussed changing elements of the plan by reducing the density of development proposed in some areas of the neighborhood.

They sent the proposal back to the city’s planning staff, however, based on concerns that the plan would not evenly spread the costs of adding a turning lane to the intersection of Cochran Street and Tapo Canyon Road among developers.