Residents Fight to Preserve Their Little Slice of Rural Paradise : Newbury Park: The sleepy neighborhood is waking up as development threatens to encroach on residents' rural surroundings.

By STEPHANIE SIMON

May 30, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

With a dismayed cluck and an exasperated sigh, Jean Maxfield hurries to set the record straight: The half-finished estates she is marketing are definitely, absolutely, undeniably in Thousand Oaks.

And anyone who says they are in Newbury Park is just plain wrong.

In reality, the $400,000 homes off Ventu Park Road do lie within the city of Thousand Oaks--but also within the neighborhood of Newbury Park.

Yet Maxfield will have none of it. Her sales representatives go so far as to route prospective buyers in a circuitous loop past the Oaks Mall instead of sending them past a sign welcoming visitors to Newbury Park.

“It’s more prestigious to be in the city of Thousand Oaks,” Maxfield explains. “We do not want to be included in Newbury Park.”

This kind of attitude typifies the way Thousand Oaks residents have traditionally looked at the enclave of 26,500 in the city’s southwestern corner. Newbury Park has been described as a stepchild, a poor relation, a backwater--”the intellectual Appalachia of the Conejo Valley,” as one resident put it.

For decades, Newbury Park’s citizens were content with this reputation, glad when hoity-toity neighbors left them in peace with their spectacular mountain views and refreshing ocean breezes.

But about a year ago, everything changed. The sleepy community that local kids derided as “Snoozebury” woke up.

The alarm clock: encroaching development.

Dispelling Myths

“The qualities that drew people to Thousand Oaks are magnified in Newbury Park,” Councilwoman Jaime Zukowski says.

Surrounded by oak-studded mountains and flower-dotted fields, Newbury Park boasts one of the most rural environments in the Conejo Valley. Even the industrial park north of the Ventura Freeway overlooks breathtaking pastoral vistas.

Gentle winds from the Pacific Ocean swirl through the neighborhood, lowering the average temperature to a crisp 10 degrees below central Thousand Oaks.

“Newbury Park is geared toward the south and the ocean,” local realtor Paul DuRoss explained. “When they have maps with north at the top, people from Newbury Park can’t read them.”

Although Newbury Park sprawls across three freeway exits and contains fully one-quarter of Thousand Oaks’ population, residents consider it a close-knit neighborhood.

As a neighborhood, though, Newbury Park defies categorization.

One pocket contains a mobile-home park for seniors--row after row of tidy, tiny houses with barely a hint of grass separating the lots. Just a few miles away, spacious new homes--costing as much as $700,000--sit on expansive plots overlooking soft hills.

“I don’t know how people could consider this the poor part of town,” community leader Diane Doria said. “We have a little bit of everything here.”

Perhaps the oddest feature of Newbury Park is an unincorporated enclave, which stubbornly refuses to join the city of Thousand Oaks and remains under the purview of Ventura County.

Unhampered by Thousand Oaks’ stringent design standards, residents along unincorporated streets paint their homes lilac or blue, erect straggly fences that would not pass muster in the city, and park their cars on the street in defiance of neighborhood policy.

The largest chunk of unincorporated turf spans Wendy Drive from Borchard Road to Old Conejo Road.

Bearing old-fashioned names like Ethel, Melvin and Molly, the streets don’t match the well-ordered, planned look of Thousand Oaks. A jumble of electrical and phone wires overhead is another giveaway that this part of town is run by the county, since the city has long since buried most of its wires underground.

Although Newbury Park has a reputation for being less affluent than Thousand Oaks, the median household income is about the same, approximately $56,000 a year. Only 3.5% of Newbury Park residents live below the poverty line, compared with 4.2% in the city as a whole. The proportion of Latino, Asian and black residents in Newbury Park mirrors city-wide demographics.

Parents sometimes complain that Newbury Park High School, because it is smaller than Thousand Oaks and Westlake high schools, offers a poorer selection of classes.

Students have to travel across town for advanced placement chemistry and physics, German and Japanese--and can take these courses only if their schedules allow them to commute. Top French students also have trouble finding an appropriate class in Newbury Park, since the high school combines third- and fourth-year students in one room, said Phyllis Stender, who sits on the school’s advisory council.

Still, families continue to flock to Newbury Park, drawn by the low crime rate, clean air and bountiful parkland. Some 38% of Newbury Park residents are under 18, compared with 25% in Thousand Oaks overall.

“I wouldn’t trade living here for anything,” local activist Michelle Koetke said. “This is where I want to be.”

Paradise Plundered

But these days, as they look around them, Newbury Park residents see signs of “an unacceptable decline in our quality of life,” said Mike Dunn, who describes himself as a refugee from the San Fernando Valley.

Development, they say, is ruining their paradise.

The biggest project, Dos Vientos, will plunk 2,350 homes into the foothills of a treasured mountain range over the next 20 years. A second development will add 1,409 units. Several smaller--but equally controversial--projects have also gotten the go-ahead, including 94 homes approved just last week.

In addition, the City Council has agreed to speed up consideration of the Seventh-day Adventists’ plan to replace an equestrian facility with a shopping mall and multiplex cinema in the heart of Newbury Park.

Faced with this growing list of projects, Dunn--and many other residents--started to imagine nightmare scenarios. They envisioned their rural atmosphere tarnished by big-city traffic, pollution and noise.

Where they once heard coyote howls, they imagined they would now listen to jackhammers. Where they once gazed at prairie falcons, they would now see construction workers. Where they once shared a path with road runners, they would now step around foundation pits.

That future was unacceptable to them.

“This is the semi-rural heart and soul of the Conejo Valley, and when this is gone, that’s it,” said Dunn, a firefighter for the city of Los Angeles.

Thousand Oaks officials defend the projects they have approved. Newbury Park is not getting dumped on all of a sudden, they say. Construction there is inevitable, because most of Thousand Oaks’ developable land lies within the neighborhood.

“Yes, they are getting more development now, and they will in the future, but it’s their moment--the rest of the city is built out,” Councilman Frank Schillo said. But no matter how rational the construction may be, no matter how well-planned the development, scores of local activists have vowed to fight it. Galvanized by a common threat, they have formed grass-roots groups to demand attention from city leaders.

By all accounts, it’s working.

People Get Political

Politicians are scrambling to address Newbury Park’s restive citizens, whom they once dismissed as “those people in the corner,” resident Sam Vernallis said.

“We’re forcing them to recognize us,” agreed Therese Hughes, who moved to the area nine years ago after falling in love with the majestic ridge lines and friendly, small-town atmosphere.

Activists trace their newfound influence to the last City Council election, when political novice Zukowski ousted Mayor Bob Lewis. Although Lewis lives in Newbury Park and Zukowski does not, anti-growth agitators felt more kinship with Zukowski, who opposes most development.

Zukowski carried Newbury Park and won by a wide margin.

Hailing Zukowski’s election as a neighborhood triumph, the strong anti-development faction has been scouring the city for like-minded candidates to run in 1994. With Mayor Judy Lazar up for reelection and Councilman Alex Fiore planning to retire, they feel poised to seize power.

And they think the three-member council majority that generally favors development is running scared.

Councilwoman Elois Zeanah, who sponsored Zukowski, agreed with that assessment. “Newbury Park is a sleeping giant which flexed its political muscle in the last election . . . and is capable of causing a political quake,” she said.

Schillo--a member of the three-person majority--points out that he, too, won a substantial portion of votes in Newbury Park in the last election. “I have been focusing on Newbury Park for a long time,” he said.

But residents insist they have gained new power--and they don’t intend to squander it.

“People in office forget about us at their peril,” said Koetke, a possible council candidate and the leader of an anti-growth group called Residents to Conserve Newbury Park.

Fred Doria, a 20-year veteran of Newbury Park, echoed Koetke’s warning with a gruff threat.

“Now that we’ve got a little clout, I’m all for some leg-breaking,” he said. “We need to slap the council members on the head and say, ‘These kind of mistakes (approving big projects) are not going to happen any more, because if they do, you’re out.’ It’s time for them to kiss up to us.”

Since the election, Newbury Park activists have claimed several major victories over what Koetke calls the “paternalistic attitude” of the Thousand Oaks powers-that-be.

As exhibit No. 1, they point to the Cohan property, a grassy 47-acre parcel at the southwest corner of Reino Road and Kimber Drive.

In a stunning triumph for neighbors, a Ventura County Superior Court judge on Friday upheld the City Council’s rejection of developer Nedjatollah Cohan’s plans to build a shopping mall and 170 homes on his property.

Cohan had sued the council for improperly appealing an earlier Planning Commission ruling approving the project. In an attempt to avoid litigation, the City Council offered a compromise proposal, drafted by a third-party consultant.

But at a rowdy town meeting in April, Newbury Park residents turned down the compromise and urged the City Council to stand by its decision, even if that meant going to court.

The council bowed to those demands--and the gamble paid off. “We went to bat for them on the Cohan property,” Schillo said.

Other triumphs, too, have entered the local lore. They include:

Mayor Lazar’s recent drive to purchase Broome Ranch and preserve the 640-acre tract as public parkland. Newbury Park residents, citing their clout at the ballot box, take credit for focusing Lazar’s attention on the land. The formal impetus, however, was an upcoming auction of Broome Ranch to the highest bidder.

The successful challenge to an environmental impact report for the first stage of the Dos Vientos project. The Sierra Club, working with local environmentalists, convinced the council that the original report was inadequate. The public hearing on the development has been postponed to late summer.

The city-backed effort to find new equestrian facilities. Newbury Park residents had shouted loudly about plans to close horse stables on the Adventist property and Dos Vientos tract.

Heartened by these perceived successes, the anti-development forces vow to keep raising a ruckus.

Meanwhile, a rival grass-roots group called the Newbury Park Civic Organization employs a different strategy. More moderate in its attitude toward development, the organization aims to explain projects instead of fighting them.

The group’s leader, Diane Doria, counts herself among those who think the city has behaved responsibly in considering development in her neighborhood.

“There will always be some die-hards who think there’s a big conspiracy in City Hall to dump on Newbury Park,” she said. “But it’s just a simple fact that this is where the developable land is.”

Community Bonds

Despite the rivalry among grass-roots groups, residents say the past year’s activism has brought the community closer together.

“When you go to the store these days, you see people you’ve seen at various meetings, and you feel a kind of kinship,” said Steve Grossman, who moved to Newbury Park from central Thousand Oaks three years ago. “I think that will last.”

That sense of cohesion within Newbury Park has prompted a few residents to look into detaching from Thousand Oaks.

“We would do just fine as a separate city,” Dunn said, noting that Newbury Park could reap tax revenue from its large industrial center, which now houses biotechnology giant Amgen and will soon welcome Blue Cross and Baxter Labs.

As a less drastic step, some residents are pushing for an overhaul of city government. They call for an elected mayor and a City Council drawn from districts, instead of at-large. No one sitting on the current council comes from Newbury Park.

While debate flares sporadically, the secession movement has attracted few supporters. And the drive to divide the city into districts has been relegated to the back burner.

In the meantime, activists have vowed to keep pushing to preserve their neighborhood. “We’ve got the numbers and we’ve got the credibility,” Koetke said. “We’re not powerbrokers, but we’re the people.”

For some, though, the change in the neighborhood’s stature is a bit disconcerting.

“I liked it better,” Fred Doria said, “when Newbury Park was the best-kept secret of California.”

Newbury Park at a Glance

Population: 26,564

Racial breakdown:

White: 82%

Latino: 11%

Asian: 5%

Black: 1%

Other: 1%

Education (residents 25 and older):

High school degrees: 88.3%