Porter Ranch ‘Highway’ Protested

The map handed out Tuesday by a residents’ group opposed to the huge Porter Ranch development proposal showed a dotted line slashing through the Santa Susana Mountains between Santa Clarita and the west San Fernando Valley, bearing the caption:

“Is this where Bernson’s ‘secret highway’ will be?”

But whether Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson or anyone else has plans for an actual road was far less clear than the thick black dotted line.

Bernson, other sources cited by the protesters and county highway officials said either that they knew of no such plan or that it was raised as a vague possibility and dismissed a decade ago.

The residents group, known as PRIDE, raised the issue during a news conference held in Chatsworth to reiterate its opposition to a proposal for nearly 6 million square feet of commercial space in Porter Ranch, a hilly area north of the Simi Valley Freeway above Chatsworth. The highway--as shown by PRIDE’s map--would cut through the 1,300-acre development.

Paul Chipello, PRIDE’s executive director, said his group has “heard from a couple of reliable sources” that “there are some plans to get a major highway through.”

PRIDE already is asking that a supplemental environmental study of the Porter Ranch proposal, which is pending before the City Council, consider the benefits of a less intensive project and address the “secret highway.”

Bernson spokeswoman Margaree Klein said the councilman “knows of nothing in his office or anybody else’s office” regarding such a highway. She added: “That is so ludicrous he can’t even comment on it.”

Chipello would not identify his sources, other than to say one had seen the highway on a map in Bernson’s office and another had heard of it from the Rev. Jess Moody, pastor of a Van Nuys Baptist church that is moving to Porter Ranch.

Moody said in an interview that he indeed had heard of such a highway, although he wasn’t sure when. He thought it might have been last year in a speech by former Councilman Robert Wilkinson.

Wilkinson, who is project coordinator for Porter Ranch developer Nathan Shapell, said he remembered the speech but that no such road was mentioned.

Wilkinson also remembered that shortly after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake damaged a Golden State Freeway interchange just north of the San Fernando Valley, there was indeed a suggestion by state planners that such a highway was needed.

“It was brought up that maybe someday, and they used the word maybe, there ought to be another highway on the west side of Oat Mountain” to provide an alternative route to the Golden State Freeway after another quake, Wilkinson said.