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 Monday. A proposal to increase the amount of wetlands in another segment of the development is scheduled to come before the commission later in July.

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 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.

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 larger lots.

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.

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.