Dos Vientos Ranch Developer OKs Deal With City on Late Fees

THOUSAND OAKS — A development company that defaulted on $800,000 in fees it owed the city for its massive Newbury Park project reached a settlement with the city Friday, ending months of closed-door negotiations that angered slow-growth advocates.

The agreement between Thousand Oaks and Courtly Homes Inc., the Los Angeles-based company that wants to develop about half of the 2,350-home Dos Vientos Ranch, requires the developer to pay nearly $1 million for principal and interest on the builders’ fees that were originally due in 1993.

“It’s done, and we are moving forward,” said Arlen Miller, Courtly Homes’ managing partner. “It is a good deal for the city and a good deal for us.”

Meeting a long-standing city need to provide flood relief in Newbury Park--and ending a separate legal saga surrounding another nearby development--Courtly Homes has also agreed to allow for a large flood control basin to be built on its property.

As part of a settlement last year that allows Nedjatollah Cohan and his family to build homes and a shopping center on an area previously designated for a flood basin, Thousand Oaks agreed to require other nearby developers to assume more of the responsibility for flood control. Therefore, city officials had to find a new place for the badly needed flood basin.

Sections of Newbury Park are extremely susceptible to flooding, and property owners currently pay unusually high home insurance fees because of the lack of a flood control network. With the Courtly Homes settlement, the Ventura County Flood Control District, the Cohan family and the builders of Dos Vientos Ranch will share the flood control costs.

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“We’ve got continued floods out there, and we have people who could get flooded out,” said City Atty. Mark Sellers. “It’s not just the Cohan issue. It’s much more than that.”

Thousand Oaks settled with the Cohans after a harshly worded state court ruling criticized the City Council for violating the family’s constitutional rights and submitting to “the roar of the crowd” when it rejected their development in 1994.

“This allows us to put the final piece of the puzzle together on the Cohan matter, which was an extremely damaging ruling against the city,” said Councilman Andy Fox. “This allows us to put that unfortunate incident behind us. More importantly, it allows us to take care of serious health and safety concerns.”

Council members who favor slow growth characterized Friday’s settlement much differently, however, calling it a sweetheart deal with an embattled developer.

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Councilwomen Elois Zeanah and Linda Parks, who voted against the settlement in a closed council session last month, argued that city leaders could have used the Courtly Homes default as grounds to reopen negotiations with the developer--and reduce the size of the Dos Vientos project.

Dos Vientos has generated considerable controversy since it was proposed more than a decade ago. Many Newbury Park residents and environmentalists believe that the virtual mini-city will destroy the gentle hillsides on the far western edge of town. Moreover, critics say, the development violates state and city environmental laws and should be downsized.

“We could have killed the development agreement,” Zeanah said “We could have reduced the project. Instead, [the council] gave this developer time to get out of their [financial] problems. This is a violation of the public trust.”

Sellers, citing a previously approved development agreement between the city and Courtly Homes, said such an action would have required a major legal fight and even then may have been impossible.

Fox said that even if Thousand Oaks had pursued that option, it could only have reduced the size of Dos Vientos by about 130 units--hardly enough to change the public’s misgivings about the project.

“The point is even if we had come out on top of that expensive legal proceeding, we would have only deleted 130 homes, which would not have made much of a difference to the residents of Newbury Park,” Fox said. “We would not have effected any real environmental change.”

Parks and Zeanah also said that linking the Cohan deal to the Courtly Homes settlement amounts to a breach of ethics because one of the mediators appointed to resolve the Cohan dispute works for Pacific Greystone Corp.

Greystone is one of the builders hired by Courtly Homes to construct the homes at Dos Vientos Ranch.

“I would say there was a conflict of interest,” Parks said. “I would think that that person could have been impacted financially.”

Miguel Bustillo is a Times staff writer; Miguel Helft is a Times correspondent.