Agourans Gird for New Fight With Builder

Twenty months after beating back a plan to build houses and factories on a cattle ranch next to their homes, Agoura residents are braced for a new battle over development of the land.

This time, however, an Encino developer has scaled down his proposal in hopes of winning Los Angeles County’s permission to build a $300-million, 15-year project.

Homeowners are countering with a new slow-growth strategy that is drawing allies from the neighboring City of Agoura Hills and the area’s Las Virgenes Unified School District. Project foes are also arguing that part of the development site lies within a potential danger zone from a local county dump where toxic wastes have been deposited.

Planners Meet Today

The dispute will land in the laps of county planning commissioners today, when officials consider a zone change for a hilly, 268-acre parcel 10 miles west of the San Fernando Valley.

Builder Jerry Oren has applied to build 1,012 condominiums and houses, a small shopping center and almost a million square feet of light industrial and warehouse space in a project called Rancho Palo Comado. His land is north of the Ventura Freeway between the Liberty Canyon and Chesebro Road exits and next to the Agoura Hills city limits.

Oren is stressing that the residential density he is now seeking is about half that of the 2,010 homes he unsuccessfully sought in mid-1983 from the commission. At that time, Oren was instructed to come up with a more “environmentally sensitive” project.

The density reduction is due, in part, to Oren’s $7.5-million sale four months ago of a 337-acre part of the ranch to the National Park Service. Oren purchased 811 acres of ranchland at the location for $4 million in 1978.

Agoura homeowners argue that Oren has already recouped a handsome profit on his ranch investment without flattening its hills, filling in its valleys and loading it down with development.

“Now he’s trying to squeeze the lemon dry and drown us in the juice,” said Robert Harris, who for eight years has owned a small horse ranch in a 300-home, semi-rural neighborhood called Old Agoura, west of Oren’s property.

“He’s basically destroying the eastern edge of our natural valley. He’s creating an urban-type environment in a rural residential area.”

Harris, head of a television production company, is president of the Old Agoura Property Owners Assn. He said Oren’s condominiums and industrial buildings would line hills and ridges above Old Agoura. The project calls for the grading of about 4 million cubic yards of earth.

Traffic Feared

Kenneth Golden, head of a homeowners’ group in a single-family subdivision called Saratoga Hills, east of Oren’s site, said residents of his 245-home tract fear that about half of the projected 18,430 daily car trips in and out of Oren’s project would pass through the middle of their neighborhood.

Golden, owner of an investment counseling firm and a four-year Agoura resident, said his neighbors would not oppose Oren if he were willing to build only 240 homes--the number allowed under current county zoning.

“We’re not against development,” Golden said. “If he wants to build the number of ranch-style homes that zoning allows, I’ll get out there and help him turn the first shovel of dirt.”

But Oren charged that the protesters have a “drawbridge mentality” against all further development in Agoura.

“Where do they have the right to think it’s their country and nobody else’s?” he asked. “They want to have 100 miles of non-buildable area around them the minute they move into their houses. They want to open their windows and see trees on my property. Why not take down their houses and build a park on their land for my people to look at?”

‘Very Limited’ Grading

According to Oren, “very limited” grading would take place on his hillsides. “Our development will be much safer and nicer and more environmentally sensitive than what was built in Saratoga Hills,” he promised.

Despite such claims, other residents of scattered subdivisions near Oren’s property indicated they fear downstream flooding from his project and its effect on local services such as streets and schools.

Fran Pavley, an Agoura Hills City Council member who lives in the Liberty Canyon tract, a few hundred yards south of Oren’s site, said more than 100 Liberty Canyon residents have written letters protesting the project. Others in the community have charted a bus to take them to today’s 9 a.m. Los Angeles hearing to protest in person.

“People are concerned about the impact this is going to have out here,” Pavley said. “Both the city and the county have designated the freeway stretch out there as a scenic corridor. The grading and construction he’s planning will definitely change it for the worse.”

Threat From City

Other opposition to the development is coming from the 14-group Las Virgenes Homeowners Assn. and the City of Agoura Hills. City officials have threatened to block off city streets if Oren wins county permission to start his project and then tries to connect his development’s roads to them.

Agoura Hills City Manager Michael Huse said he will head a small delegation of city officials who will protest the project today. The City Council has sent a lengthy letter to county planners citing 41 alleged errors in an environmental assessment for the project that was prepared last year by consultants to Oren.

Las Virgenes Unified School District officials have also taken the unusual step of protesting the effect that the project would have on its schools’ “cumulative” enrollment. Although Oren has projected that only 292 school-age children would come from the project, school officials will ask that Oren be required to give them a cash assessment for each home as well as a level school site, Supt. Albert Marley said.

Ace in the Hole

According to Golden and others, however, the project foes’ ace in the hole could be the proximity of the county’s Calabasas Landfill to Oren’s property. New state law entitles health officials to establish a 2,000-foot “buffer zone” between residential areas and dumps where toxic wastes have been deposited. Those opposed to the project say such a zone would cover much of Oren’s proposed development.

An estimated 422,000 tons of chemical wastes were disposed of at the 416-acre landfill immediately east of Oren’s property from 1965 until mid-1980, according to the county. So far, however, no buffer zone has been designated for the dump; county solid waste management officials have said they expect no seepage from the dump.