Commissioners Seek to Reshape Newbury Park Housing Project

If time has not yet brought a mini-city of new homes to the smooth, tan hills of Dos Vientos Ranch, it also hasn’t ended the project’s problems.

A lawsuit filed against the city of Thousand Oaks for its handling of the project--which would bring 2,350 new houses to the city’s far western edge--is winding its way through an appellate court. One of the project’s two developers, Courtly Homes, is still in arbitration with city officials over more than $800,000 in unpaid fees.

And a group of residents, angry that arbitration has taken more than two years to resolve, has filed a public records request with City Manager Grant Brimhall to release documents explaining the delay.

Despite these problems, the project moves slowly forward. The next round of tract maps and permit requests--for 584 houses--will go to the Thousand Oaks Planning Commission on July 1. A proposal to increase the amount of wetlands in another segment of the development is scheduled to come before the commission later in the month.

Although city leaders years ago locked themselves and their successors into an agreement with the project’s developers allowing the 2,350 homes to be built, the hearing will reopen some of the plans already approved by the city. Planning commissioners disagree on how much they can change the project, but Commissioner Linda Parks said she sees the upcoming hearing as a chance to reshape a development that will, in turn, reshape Newbury Park.

“It allows us to make it a more acceptable project to the community and make it better,” Parks said. “And I think there’s room for improvement.”

The requests coming before the commission in July are, themselves, attempts to improve a project that has been in various stages of development for more than a decade. In 1988, the City Council approved plans for the development, including parks, an elementary school site, several storm water detention basins and about 1,200 acres of open space. Tract plans for 220 homes along Potrero Road were approved in 1994, and grading on the site has begun.

Now the other developer, Operating Engineers Funds, wants to adjust plans for a wide swath of housing, pulling some homes back from the development’s western boundary. The company also wants to delay the extension of Borchard Road into the project and build the extension with two lanes instead of the four originally proposed.

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Thousand Oaks Senior Planner Greg Smith said the changes will increase the size of a wildlife corridor running along the property’s western side, giving more space to the bobcats, deer and coyotes that now roam the property. The developers are proposing the change, Smith said, even though it will reduce the size of some of their larger lots.

“They gave up an awful lot, and they did that willingly,” he said. “The city could not have required them to do that with the development agreement.”

Some of the changes, however, have already drawn questions from the commissioners. Parks and commission Chairman Forrest Frields both wondered whether the redesigned, narrower Borchard Road can handle the number of commuters pouring north toward the Ventura Freeway from the new homes. According to a traffic study for the project, most commuters would first swing south onto Lynn Road before heading to the freeway.

“That won’t fly, in my opinion,” Frields said.

Even if commissioners have doubts about elements of the project, the amount of leeway they have to change it is unclear. Unlike most development projects coming before the panel, Dos Vientos already has a development agreement with the city that allows a predetermined number of homes.

That agreement prompted a 1994 lawsuit against the city by the Sierra Club, charging that city officials had overlooked state environmental regulations. Although a Ventura County Superior Court judge rejected the club’s arguments in 1995, the case is on appeal.

Deputy City Atty. Jim Friedl said the agreement limits the commissioners to determining how well the changes proposed by Operating Engineers comply with the approvals already granted.

“Really, what you’re looking at, at this point, is where to put the lines on the map,” he said.

Parks disputed that interpretation, saying that by requesting changes to the original plans, the company had opened the door to discussing the entire proposal.

“When you open up the specific plan, you open up all of it,” she said. “So I don’t know how tied our hands are.”

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Although he agreed that commissioners could review all aspects of Operating Engineers’ original plan, Frields said the company could easily avoid making any changes it didn’t like. Company officials could simply drop their proposed plan amendments and work with the plan already approved, he said.

“All they have to do is say, ‘We don’t want to do that, we withdraw the amendment,’ and that’s the end of it,” Frields said.

Dos Vientos’ opponents hope they have already found a way to change Courtly Homes’ portion of the project. In 1993, the City Council voted unanimously to find the company in default on more than $800,000 of development fees owed to the city.

Michelle Koetke, chairwoman of Residents to Preserve Newbury Park, said that by defaulting on the fees, Courtly Homes broke its contract with city officials. The city should therefore be able to downsize a project that her group considers too massive for the area, she said.

The city, however, is still in arbitration with Courtly Homes over the default and is keeping details confidential. So on Friday, Koetke filed a California Public Records Act request with the city manager’s office, requesting city memos, faxes and letters concerning the dispute.

City Councilwoman Elois Zeanah also has requested that documents concerning the long-running arbitration be made public. She plans to discuss her request at Tuesday’s council meeting.

“What we’re doing is undermining this current council’s credibility if we do not release these notes,” Zeanah said. “If we don’t, the public will suspect there’s a secret deal here.”

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City Atty. Mark Sellers said details of the arbitration proceedings must remain confidential until the dispute is resolved.

“Any disclosure of this information will jeopardize the arbitration,” he said.

After more than two years, the arbitration process is still in the discovery phase, he said, and has not yet progressed to hearings. “Everything connected with Dos Vientos Ranch takes an extremely long period of time,” he said.