It Takes a Community . . .

San Fernando Valley residents are likely to have a been-there, done-that attitude toward the city planning effort underway for Ventura Boulevard. After all, city planners have been hauling around blueprints and talking up the Valley’s “main street” since 1991. Why another plan?

The plan being aired this week at public hearings in Encino and Studio City is not, in fact, new. It’s the same Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan adopted by the City Council in 1991 to direct growth along the 17-mile strip. The hearings have been called to correct oversights and to reflect changes since the last time the plan was amended three years ago.

OK, so why should residents bother to come out yet again? What’s to show from their earlier contributions to this almost-decade-old effort?

Robert Sutton, deputy director of the Department of City Planning, admits that planning is often slow to show results. He points out that the plan for Mulholland Drive took 19 years to become reality (a record Ventura Boulevard would as soon not top).

A flagging economy stalled the Ventura Boulevard plan almost as soon as it was adopted. Business owners and developers protested the fees levied on them to pay for improvements, fees that, it turned out, were based on mistaken figures anyway. That took almost five years to straighten out.

The timing was good, though, because the amended plan was in place by 1996 when the economy started heating up again, making possible the kind of development the plan was designed to guide. The upturn continues today.

Some of the changes encouraged by the plan, though small, can be seen, such as recent tree plantings along the Sherman Oaks portion of the boulevard. Other effects may be less visible, Sutton points out, because the plan stopped something from going in rather than put something in place. Proposed amendments to the plan, for example, would ban new billboards and encourage pedestrian-oriented areas by discouraging the building of new drive-thru and other car-dependent businesses.

As for those residents who like their stretch of the Valley’s main street just fine the way it is--pedestrian-oriented Studio City comes to mind--they may want a say in keeping it that way. And those who don’t much care what happens outside their neighborhoods may want to keep in mind that the development of pedestrian-friendly pockets elsewhere on the boulevard could keep their slice of paradise a little less congested (and give them someplace else to go on Friday and Saturday nights).

The Ventura Boulevard plan, for all its maddeningly slow pace, deserves the community’s support, just as this far-flung community deserves to have a central spine that gives it a sense of place and connection. But it will take the insistence of the community to make the plan work. That’s why the public hearings matter, both to elicit feedback to the amendments themselves and to reacquaint residents with the overall plan.

Valley residents who want to comment on the proposed amendments to the Ventura Boulevard plan or just learn more about the plan can attend a public discussion from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. and a public hearing from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Encino Community Center, 4935 Balboa Blvd., or Thursday at CBS Studio Center, 4024 Radford Ave., Studio City.