Build a Safe Road Now

On the treacherous two-way street of lawsuit and countersuit over the Borchard Road extension in Newbury Park, two facts are evident:

* If the road is built and opened with the 12% grade approved by the city of Thousand Oaks, sooner or later there will be an accident and someone will die.

* When that happens, everyone will fervently wish that city, developer--and, if need be, court--had acted now to do the right thing and make the road less steep.

Rather than wait for tragedy, the mistake must be corrected now. City and developer should negotiate who pays.

Thousand Oaks construction standards limit road steepness to a grade of 5%. The E-ticket ride of the Ventura Freeway across the Conejo Grade, which last year tallied 130 accidents, is a somewhat steeper 7%. Yet two years ago the City Council approved a half-mile extension of Borchard Road that would in places climb at 12%.

That route reduced visual scarring of the hillsides and also saved the developer the expense of moving 3.5 million cubic yards of dirt, estimated at $1 million to $4 million.

But after the route was graded and its steepness became obvious, about 75 area residents asked the council to stop the work and reexamine the issue from scratch, looking at traffic, the grade, environmental effects and costs. The council unanimously agreed.

Three weeks later, developer Operating Engineers Pension Trust demanded in court that the city lift the work ban and let it resume building. Last week another of the developers involved in Dos Vientos Ranch filed its own legal challenge of the stop-work order, in an attempt to get the project moving again. The same day, a homeowners association with a high-profile attorney joined the city in defending redesign of the road.

Balancing the conflicting priorities of safety, economics and hillside appearance is complicated by the politics of growth. Borchard Road is one of two arteries that will lead to the 2,350-unit Dos Vientos housing development, which remains controversial more than two decades after an earlier City Council approved it.

At least some of the opposition to the extension of Borchard Road is due to spirited opposition to Dos Vientos. In the heat of a City Council campaign that casts developers as the bad guys, the road makes an easy rallying point for no-growth candidates eager to paint incumbents as too willing to give in to developers.

Yet the safety issues are real. A hike along its intended route shows it to be a potential speedway in dry weather and a water slide when it rains. Even Councilman Andy Fox, who voted to approve the current plan, concedes that the decision was a mistake.

The developers are right that it is unfair to hold up their work indefinitely while the city figures out how to undo the error. But simply giving them the green light to proceed as planned is not the answer.

The time to set things right is now--not after some mishap sends an unwary motorist or school bus over the edge. We encourage the City Council and developers to build Borchard Road safely the first time. If it takes a judge to fairly divide the bill, so be it.