Swap Meet to Close After Losing Permit
The City Council unanimously decided not to renew the permit that has allowed Moorpark College to operate a swap meet on the site of the former Simi Drive-In, which closed last month. As a result, the Moorpark College Swap Meet, held the last three Sundays, will have a final sale this weekend.
The final swap meet will be Sunday on the north end of campus. The college’s 30-day permit expires May 29.
The announcement brought applause from several neighboring homeowners who attended the Wednesday night meeting to voice complaints about the early morning noise and additional traffic they said the swap meet created.
“I moved across the street from the college, not the Pomona Fairgrounds,” resident Bill Estrada said. “The college talks about being a good neighbor. To me, that’s not a good neighbor.”
After hearing the complaints from residents, council members said they were left with little choice but to shut the swap meet.
Councilman Clint Harper, a Moorpark College physics instructor, proposed several ideas to lessen the swap meet’s impact on the neighborhood, including holding the event on Saturdays and pushing the start time back two hours to 8 a.m.
In the end, however, the council felt that no compromise would effectively alleviate the noise, congestion and traffic created by the estimated 3,100 additional people attending the meet each Sunday.
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