Planners Offer 5-Year Deal for Struggling Wood Ranch Housing Project : Simi Valley: The council will be asked to give the developer time to repay a $250,000 debt while building additional homes.

Hoping to rescue the ailing Wood Ranch housing development from default, the Simi Valley Planning Commission has recommended that the City Council approve a compromise hammered out by city staff and the developer.

Under the agreement, the city would grant developer Olympia/Roberts up to five years to repay a $250,000 debt. The agreement also would allow Olympia/Roberts, which is anticipating an economic turnaround that will improve the real estate market, to build in the next 14 years an additional 1,500 homes already approved by the city.

In exchange, the developer will give the city a 65-acre portion of the Wood Ranch property and pay the city $6,000 each for most of the units it builds.

Wood Ranch, located on 3,000 acres southeast of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, now consists of about 2,400 houses, condominiums and apartments, a partly finished community park, a small shopping center and a fire station.

Housing prices in the sprawling tracts of clustered communities range from $130,000 for two-bedroom condominiums to $600,000 for four-and five-bedroom houses.

In other terms of the agreement, Olympia/Roberts would give the Simi Valley School District a parcel of land zoned for 680 housing units, instead of building a $6-million elementary school as it had promised in the original 1982 development agreement.

The developer will also relinquish its 18-hole tournament golf course to Wells Fargo Bank, in lieu of repayment of a $15-million loan. An auction sale of the golf club has been postponed repeatedly over the last year, most recently to Dec. 1.

Both city officials and a spokesman for the developer praised the agreement, the result of nearly eight months of negotiations.

“We’re very pleased by the action that was taken by the Planning Commission,” said Olympia/Roberts attorney Frank L. Rugani. “It represents the first step toward resolving a number of obligations the partnership owes the city and the school district.”

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Planning Commissioner Dean Kunicki agreed: “I think it best serves the community to go ahead with this, and we’re relieved to finally get this off our agenda and get on to other things.”

The matter will next be considered by the City Council and the Simi Valley Unified School District. If approved this month, the agreement would go into effect in late December.

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If the compromise stalls, however, Olympia/Roberts in January will face a $100,000 payment due under terms of the original agreement. The plan defers the payment, folding part of it into the land contributions.

“It’s like trying to sell your house before they repossess it,” said Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton, who lives in Wood Ranch and helped negotiate the agreement. “I don’t think they want to make that payment and I don’t think we want to be in the position of asking for it.”

Simi Valley officials first sought to terminate their original agreement with Olympia/Roberts in April after the developer failed to pay back the city for more than $250,000 in road improvements. That action spurred efforts to reach a new agreement.

The developer initially ran into trouble after its parent company, Olympia & York Developments Ltd., the world’s largest real estate company, filed for court protection under Canadian bankruptcy laws in May of 1992.

NEXT STEP

The Simi Valley City Council will hold a public hearing on the Wood Ranch proposal at its meeting Nov. 15 at 6:30 p.m. at City Hall, 2929 Tapo Canyon Road. Board members of the Simi Valley Unified School District will take up the issue at their Nov. 23 meeting, which begins at 7 p.m. at City Hall.