New Study Urged for Soggy Neighborhood

Folks in the soggiest neighborhood in Simi Valley want the city to find out why water oozes from their lawns, algae grows in their streets and insects breed in their gutters.

Neighborhood Council 2 agreed Tuesday night to press the City Council for an engineering study of their west end neighborhood that could offer a solution to the steady rise of underground water.

“There’s several questions as to why this problem is happening, and a study might--might--point out solutions,” Judith Noyes, acting chairwoman of the Neighborhood Council, said Wednesday.

For the past six or seven years, springtime rains have been raising water levels under the residential blocks lining Sutter Avenue and Fitzgerald Road.

Until midsummer--even in the driest weather--water oozes constantly from the earth, coating curbs with slime, staining pavements with minerals and killing trees and lawns with root rot.

A 1985 report commissioned by Simi Valley theorized that a neighboring tract was suffering similar problems partly because farmers were no longer irrigating crops from underground water supplies and the level had risen steadily to overflowing.

This year, homeowners got mad enough to band together as a neighborhood and demand a broader study that could offer solutions to the relentless seeping. The proposed study would cover neighborhoods bounded on the west and east by 1st Street and Erringer Road and on the south and north by Fitzgerald Road and the Arroyo Simi.

“I’m very happy with this,” homeowner Paul Crossman said of his Neighborhood Council’s 9-0 vote to ask for the study. “They did exactly what we would like them to do, and they’re very responsive to our concerns.”