Businesses Cry Foul on Assessment Plan

An $8-million freeway interchange project designed to bring Agoura Hills business owners closer to the city’s homeowners is having the opposite effect.

Angry merchants and commercial developers are complaining that residents are hitching a free ride on the proposed construction project because of their exclusion from a special city assessment district that will pay for the improvements.

At issue are the widening of the Reyes Adobe Road overcrossing on the Ventura Freeway and construction of a complicated on- and off-ramp system connecting the bridge and the freeway.

The new interchange would replace a two-lane bridge and simple ramp system designed about 30 years ago when four ranches dominated the area.

These days, more than 2,200 homes and businesses near the bridge produce 13,000 vehicle crossings daily, creating rush-hour delays of up to five minutes for motorists turning from the off-ramps onto the bridge.

Gridlock Warning

Traffic engineers have warned that virtual gridlock could occur on the narrow bridge during the next five years as industrial and commercial development around the interchange increases traffic to 20,000 vehicles a day.

City officials hatched the assessment-district idea last year when the state Department of Transportation warned that it had no money immediately available for the Reyes Adobe Road project.

Under a plan expected to be submitted next week to the Agoura Hills City Council, officials would seek assessments from 60 commercial-property owners to finance the work. Individual fees would depend upon each owner’s anticipated benefit and would range from $600 to $500,000.

“I’m really bothered you’re only going after commercial owners to pay for it,” storage yard operator Kel Aiken told council members Tuesday night. “It’s very unfair.”

Patricia L. Kanan said her family-owned shopping center and commercially zoned vacant land would fetch a $500,000 assessment. Kanan told council members that she is “very uncomfortable you’re not talking to the residential people about this. As you can imagine, we’ll oppose it.”

Shoe store operator Michael Orlikoif said homeowners will benefit from the new bridge more than his shop will. “If you want dessert with a meal, you have to buy it,” he said of the residents.

Barbara DeVico, a representative of Litton Data Command Systems, also urged the city to “go after” the homeowners.

Builders Pay $500 Fee

But Councilman Ernest Dynda said residents contribute to city road improvements through gasoline taxes. Home builders also have paid $500 fees per unit into a special city transportation improvement fund created in 1983.

Commercial and industrial property “does not pay one nickel” toward transportation, Dynda said. “We’re asking the development community to pay their fair share for the road improvements they need.”

City Engineer Henry Van Dyke Jr. said there also are practical considerations to the district’s boundaries. “When all is said and done, if residents were included, the assessment district would go nowhere,” he said.

Mayor Vicky Leary told the property owners that the city could skip the bridge work if it called a halt to further commercial development along the Ventura Freeway corridor.

Owners of 60% of the targeted property must agree to join the district before it can be formed. But the city already has 30% of the property committed because of special conditions it has attached to newly approved development permits in the vicinity of the bridge, City Manager Michael Huse said.