Truck Noise Angers Moorpark Residents

Frank Zamrock doesn’t need an alarm clock to rouse him out of bed. The retired businessman wakes up almost every day at 6 a.m. to the tune of trucks chugging past his 10-acre ranch on Happy Camp Road, toward a sand and gravel mine about half a mile away.

“This used to be a peaceful road,” said Zamrock, who bought the ranch in the unincorporated area just north of Moorpark 11 years ago. “Now it sounds like an army advancing first thing in the morning.”

For Zamrock and many other residents, moving from Los Angeles to the bedroom community of Moorpark and its surrounding areas meant safer and slower-paced neighborhoods, a chance to experience a bit of small-town life.

But with booming residential development and mining north of the city and toward Simi Valley, residents find themselves dealing with a growing number of whizzing gravel haulers, cement trucks and big-rigs. They say the heavy traffic is destroying the quality of life that attracted them to the town.

“We came here to get away from the smog and congestion in the San Fernando Valley,” Zamrock said.

Those feelings are echoed by residents throughout town. The traffic so peeved someone that he or she monkeyed with the word “Moorpark” on one of the city’s welcome signs.

The sign, on Walnut Canyon Road, now reads, “Beauty is a Community Effort--Welcome to Truckmoor.”

The city has taken a number of steps to keep trucks from violating traffic laws. Proposals that would reduce the volume of traffic, such as the creation of a bypass around the city, are frequently discussed, but to the residents, they appear to be pipe dreams.

Fed up, Zamrock and a number of residents in his ranching neighborhood filed a lawsuit earlier this year against Ventura County and Transit Mixed Co., which generates the most truck traffic of all the sand and gravel companies located just a few miles north of Moorpark.

The group, called Fairview Neighbors, is trying to reduce the number of truck trips allowed for the company on California 23. The route swings past the ranchers, down past the site of an elementary school set to open in fall 1998, past City Hall and then onto the highway, where it funnels into an even busier truck route, California 118, or New Los Angeles Avenue.

However, truckers and company officials say they resent being vilified. And they say the complaints they hear from Moorpark residents sometimes smack of hypocrisy.

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They argue that before Moorpark became incorporated in 1983, it was a primarily rural area where trucking was vital. To haul the sand and gravel that built the city, not to mention goods from the now-closed massive chicken farm, Egg City, and the avocados, citrus and apricots from surrounding farms, it took trucks.

Once Moorpark became a city, it quickly developed as a bedroom community, where a large percentage of residents still work in Los Angeles in the day and come home to Moorpark at night.

“So the city’s vision of itself has never really taken into account its historical creation and its economic framework,” said Glen Reiser, a land-use consultant and former legal counsel for Transit Mixed Co.

Much of the city was built on the mining operations that predate most of the neighboring homes. Transit Mixed took over Blue Star Quarry, which began operating in 1948. Wayne J. Sand & Gravel Co. also spread roots north of Moorpark in that same year.

“The community grew on the trucking operation. Now they say, ‘We want to be a bedroom community,’ ” Reiser said. “It’s common to hear that, but it’s hypocritical.”

There will probably be an even greater need for trucks to haul material if several construction projects get underway. The largest of them is the Hidden Creek housing project, which could add as many as 10,000 people to the city, which has a population of 28,000 residents.

Another development, the Carlsburg project, which has received City Council approval, would create 320 homes in the southeastern section of the city and set aside 73 acres for commercial use.

And mining operations will probably increase.

Transit Mixed has received approval from the Ventura County Board of Supervisors to expand its mines and create an asphalt plant.

To residents, it all adds up to one thing--there are going to be even more trucks on the road. And the Fairview Neighbors are prepared for a long legal fight.