‘The Relics’ Maintain a Decades-Old Vision for City

They are as responsible as anyone for the way Thousand Oaks looks and feels today.

They have survived decades of angry homeowners hellbent on preserving their backyard vistas and withstood the threats of powerful developers determined to squeeze the most out of their land.

But “The Relics,” as this city’s veteran planners jokingly call themselves, have toiled in obscurity, gaining little acclaim for the community they have spent decades piecing together.

“This is our lives’ work,” said Phil Gatch, 56, planning director for 27 years. “All of us have basically put our total concentrated effort on this. Now we’re the relics of the past.”

For two decades or more, Gatch and five top aides have charted the course of Thousand Oaks growth, working in three city halls for politicians of all stripes, always keeping in mind the city’s original vision of itself.

These veterans of countless fights and late-night City Council debates are Gatch and assistants Mike Sangster, Larry Marquart, Paul Metrovitsch and John and Maria Prescott.

Like frumpy academics, armed with citizen surveys and open space elements, they have acted as the city’s historical memory, providing a sense of consistency and context to the growth of Thousand Oaks.

“We’re really, as we view it, a treasure chest of historical backgrounds that helps to keep intact the planning of this city,” said Deputy Planning Director Sangster, who joined Gatch, an old college friend, in Thousand Oaks 26 years ago. “It’s more difficult, when you have longtime professionals, for the elected leaders to change direction. It’s like we’re the institutional conscience.”

Some local residents say the planning staff is the backbone of the City Hall operation.

“Those guys know what they’re doing. They’re what we call the good guys,” said Peggy Clifford, a resident of the Rolling Oaks neighborhood who has had her share of disputes with City Hall. “But when it gets to the politicians, that’s when things happen.”

Nonetheless, top planners and City Manager Grant Brimhall have been vilified in recent years by slow-growth advocates as virtual extensions of development interests, even meeting with builders to make projects more palatable before going to the City Council.

“Today developers and their lobbyists have greater clout with city administrators, city staff and council members than do citizens and homeowners’ associations,” Councilwoman Elois Zeanah said.

Brimhall said staff discussions with developers are only meant to iron out wrinkles and ensure that projects meet city standards. Planners laugh off such charges, since builders have slandered them for decades for mandating adherence to rigorous guidelines. They see themselves as enforcers--not developer cupcakes.

“You’ve probably heard we have a bad reputation with developers,” Gatch said. “We’d go and work them over--that’s what the council told us to do.”

Indeed, the City Council set the tone for planning department dealings with developers in the first years after the 1964 incorporation, when the city’s new master plan dramatically cut the value of some real estate by limiting what could be built on it.

“After meetings, we used to go back and look under our cars and see that there were no bombs there,” Gatch said.

Certainly, building industry representatives think Thousand Oaks planners have unfairly played by rules foreign to other cities.

“My favorite story about Thousand Oaks is that every year UCLA does a land-use seminar just to update people on new rules and issues, and at the mere mention of Thousand Oaks, attorneys start laughing,” said Eric Taylor, a land-use consultant on the controversial Dos Vientos Ranch project. “I’ve noticed that no one from Thousand Oaks ever attends. Sometimes they don’t tend to follow the rules.”

Former Mayor Chuck Cohen, an attorney who has represented major developers for 15 years, said the city is a tough place to do business--particularly compared with Los Angeles and Orange counties.

“Only the strongest applicants, those with the patience and mentality to survive that onslaught, can make it here,” Cohen said.

But Cohen does not consider Gatch and company to be unfair.

“For the most part, when you look at things, they try to be evenhanded,” he said. “There is a municipal memory with the planning people. They know what they did in the past.”

City planners have not always agreed with the City Council either. The approval of Shapell Industries’ Rancho Conejo development in 1988, which required massive grading and a change in the city’s General Plan, is a case in point, Sangster said.

“That was a major disagreement between the City Council and the planning department,” he said. “The council believed the development agreement, which resulted in millions [of dollars] for the city, was simply too good to pass up. Sometimes economic considerations may prevail over the environmental ones.”

“The Relics” believe they have accomplished their most basic goal for Thousand Oaks: They kept it from becoming a second San Fernando Valley.

“It’s kind of a trite thing to say,” Gatch said, “but coming from the Valley, Mike and I understood the significance of that.”

Gatch grew up in Woodland Hills when it had only about 50 homes.

By the time he met Sangster at Pierce College, however, unchecked urbanization had turned the Valley into a collection of strip malls and housing tracts, with few parks or pristine hillsides. Disgusted, Gatch and Sangster pursued careers in urban planning after graduating from Cal State Northridge. Gatch and three of the other “Relics” also attended USC.

After a three-year stint as a planner in West Covina, Gatch came to Thousand Oaks in 1968, soon to be joined by Sangster.

“There was this feeling that we were going to make a name for ourselves in planning,” Sangster said.

They did. And it didn’t take long.

Gatch took charge of the fledgling department a year later, when Director Barry Eaton was fired after siding with developers in arguments over growth. Within two years, the City Council provided planners a most powerful tool, the city’s General Plan and a set of guidelines to protect hillsides from development.

“Their reputation extended far and wide,” said Ventura County Planning Director Keith Turner, who was already familiar with Thousand Oaks planners when he came to the county in 1979. “They were often held up as a role model of what a planned community could be.”