Suit Against Council Dropped Due to Cost

Faced with mounting legal fees, a man who sued Moorpark’s City Council members last year after they rejected his plans to build a gas station on Condor Avenue has dropped his suit.

Ali Boukhari had accused council members of deciding his project’s fate in private, rather than in public meetings as required by state law. But Boukhari dropped the suit April 11 after becoming convinced that pursuing the case further would take too long and cost too much.

“The cost of continued litigation is just too great,” Boukhari said in a written statement Thursday. “With the City Council willing to spend thousands of dollars to defend itself at taxpayer expense, a small business simply cannot afford the price of justice.”

Robert A. Faber, a business partner of Boukhari’s wife, said the lawsuit had cost about $63,000 so far. Before taking the matter to court, the couple already had spent about $38,000 on architectural drawings and city fees, Faber said.

Councilman Bernardo Perez said Thursday that the council had not broken the state’s open-meetings law when it voted on Boukhari’s project.

In the spring of 1995, Boukhari’s proposed Mobil gas station and mini-mart, proposed for an industrial park just south of the Ronald Reagan Freeway, seemed a sure thing. Moorpark’s Planning Commission approved the project in April.

But some of the industrial park’s tenants appealed the decision, claiming the station would create traffic problems and lead to vandalism by bringing people into the park at night.

In July, the City Council split over the appeal, with one member absent. When the council voted again in August, Councilman Bernardo Perez and then-Mayor Paul Lawrason changed their minds, joining the other three council members in rejecting plans for the station. Council members said at the time that their decision was based mostly on concerns about traffic.

Perez said Thursday that potential traffic problems were one of the factors in his decision on the project, but he declined to say what the other factors were.

Part of Boukhari’s suit claimed that concerns about traffic were baseless and said the council members had abused their power of discretion by voting against the project.

Although Boukhari has dropped the suit, his attorney, Jeffrey W. Kramer, said he sent a letter Wednesday to the Ventura County district attorney’s office requesting that it investigate the alleged violation of the state’s open-meetings law.