Big Hardware Comes Out in Agoura Hills Council Race
For many in Agoura Hills, Home Depot are fighting words.
Whether one is for building a Home Depot in this small Conejo Valley community, or against, has become the litmus test for judging the candidates running for its three-person City Council.
“It’s definitely the hottest issue in town,” said Ken Horton, one of five who hope to unseat the incumbents, all of whom are running again.
For all the fuss, no formal application to build a Home Depot has actually been made, said developer Dan Selleck of Westlake Village’s Selleck Development Group. But seven months ago, Selleck submitted a preliminary application for a 250,000-square-foot project on Agoura Road near Kanan Road.
The development would be called Ladyface Village, after the city’s most prominent point, Ladyface Mountain. According to Selleck, it would include a 115,000-square-foot anchor store alongside a 24,000-square-foot garden center.
“So far, I haven’t officially announced it’s Home Depot,” Selleck said.
But as everyone in town who is out of diapers seems to know, the home-improvement giant is the likely anchor tenant. “That’s the tenant I’m the closest to making a deal with,” the developer acknowledged.
A Perceived Threat to Rural Lifestyle
The battle over the big-box store has raged for months in the pages of the local weekly newspaper, The Acorn. For many in the politically slow-growth community, Home Depot is a kind of corporate Great Satan that might alter the city’s ambience.
Supporters, whose voices tend to be muted, argue that the presence of a Home Depot or similar store would bring in welcome tax dollars.
As an opponent, Horton fears the store would change the city’s semirural nature: “Our open spaces are important to us, and our small-town feel is important to us, and when something threatens that, it makes us upset,” Horton said.
Horton, who describes himself on his Web site as strongly opposed to Home Depot, cites the company’s “very aggressive growth plan and a disturbing business philosophy.” Adding to his fears are a number of suits brought against Home Depot by women employees who claim the company discriminates on the basis of gender. In 1997, the firm agreed to pay $87.5 million to settle one such bias suit. Others are pending.
“I just happen to be a gentleman of color and so I’ve been exposed to that in my life,” he said.
Candidate and Agoura Hills Mayor Ed Corridori said he believes the flap is very premature.
“They have not signed on the dotted line about coming here,” he said of Home Depot.
Once an official proposal is before the City Council, he said, “then I think we should treat it the way we treat every other development proposal.”
Corridori has yet to come down one way or the other. On his Web site, he says he does not want to prejudge the project, despite pressure from “a handful of local businessmen, competitors in the home-improvement market, [who] have organized to oppose Home Depot.”
Alex Soteras, president of the Agoura/Oak Park/Las Virgenes Chamber of Commerce, said his group, which has more than 600 members, has no official position but is very concerned that the store’s presence would hurt local firms, some in business for as long as 30 years and part of the fabric of the community.
Such vulnerable businesses include the Do-It Center, Agoura Equipment Rentals, Roadside Lumber and others that offer home-improvement goods and services. With others who object to the project, owners of these stores have hired Al Abrams, a Tarzana-based political consultant and public relations specialist, to organize and coordinate opposition.
“These big-box stores basically devastate and kill the characters of these small towns,” said Abrams, spokesman for the group Citizens for Responsible Growth.
As community battles often are, this one is being fought with mailings, petitions and meetings. Anti-Home Depot forces contend the store would bring 20,000 more car trips a day to city streets. Corridori and others who want more information say such numbers are being plucked out of thin air.
Today, Abrams said, his group will present petitions at City Hall calling for an initiative on a future ballot that would limit retail stores in the city to 60,000 square feet.
A resident of Agoura Hills for almost 12 years, developer Selleck was asked to sign one of the petitions outside a local supermarket. He declined. The person with the petition was misinformed about the project, Selleck said.
“Nobody has seen what I’ve proposed yet,” he said, adding that he hopes to have a proposal before the city in 30 to 45 days. He said the project would cost more than $40 million.
Selleck Says Store Will Be ‘Unique’
As a resident, he said he is as concerned about the quality of life in the city as anyone. Selleck pointed out that the site has already been designated for redevelopment and retail use. And studies by his firm project only 4,800 additional car trips a day as a result of the development.
The city’s guidelines call for commercial buildings of human scale that are architecturally compatible with the rest of the community. Selleck said the Home Depot that he will propose “is going to be unique.”
It will be more rural in feel than the standard store and incorporate more natural materials, he said. Asked if the Arts and Crafts style of the community’s new City Hall and library would influence the design, Selleck said: “Craftsman style is something that’s being looked at to incorporate into the building.
“We’re saving a lot of the trees,” including one huge oak that will be a focal point of the mall, he said. As to the potential tax windfall that has project supporters looking enviously at how Costco enriches neighboring Westlake Village, he said: “We think we’ll generate approximately $750,000 to $1 million a year [in tax revenue for the city].”
As far as Mayor Corridori is concerned, enough already about Home Depot.
“We spend all this time on it, and this is a fraction of what our city is all about,” he said. “Everyone’s focused on this one thing. There are so many other things that are important.”
