Bleak Look at Ahmanson

The small number of people protesting the billion-dollar Ahmanson Ranch project underscores the need to educate West Valley residents as to just where this time-bomb is.

Take the Ventura Freeway west from Valley Circle Boulevard to Las Virgenes Road. Look to the empty rolling hills to the north. This is where greedy developers want to cram more than 3,000 homes, a hotel, two golf courses and 400,000 square feet of commercial space.

The only thing you hear from Ventura County Supervisor Maria VanderKolk is the 10,000 acres to be donated or sold as parkland. She never mentions that the 35,000 daily car trips this project will generate won’t affect Ventura County at all. Her residents get the parkland. We get seven days of traffic hell each week.

The project proposes to connect Victory Boulevard to Thousand Oaks Boulevard and Las Virgenes Road. Someone could travel from Malibu to Burbank and only have to make one turn.

With all this, we shouldn’t mind the three events planned at the PGA-owned golf course. These are seven days long and on weekends they will only dump 7,000 to 10,00 vehicle trips on surrounding streets. They won’t affect the millionaires living on the Ahmanson Ranch. They’ll be living behind private gates, on private roads, on their six acre (minimum) estates.

MARK EPSTEIN

West Hills