Conejo Park District should serve whole community

In response to Joy Meade’s letter regarding the Conejo Recreation and Park District’s proposed Lang Ranch Community Park, I say do not use the tragedy of others to promote your own personal agenda.

The landslide in La Conchita is still very fresh in everyone’s minds, and we pray for those who mourn and lost so much. However, to liken it to the hillside in Thousand Oaks is blatant scare tactics. Ms. Meade has done her homework. However, she is only stating the facts that support her agenda. When the extension of Westlake Boulevard was being built, workers did arrive "one morning to find all the heavy equipment buried under a landslide."

However, this landslide was not a natural disaster as Ms. Meade leads the reader to believe. It was a man-made disaster caused by the overzealous construction of the road. In other words, instead of slowly cutting into the hillside and engineering the road a section at a time, they quickly plowed the whole thing from top to bottom. A rainstorm came and the bare, stripped hillside slid. After it dried out, they finished the road and built hundreds of homes there. I have not heard of any new homes being built in the La Conchita area.

If the Lang Ranch Community Park area is so active and dangerous as Ms. Meade tells us, then why are so many homes built upon the crest of the hill at Westlake Boulevard? Ms. Meade states from her research, "Internet sites with information on landslides note that people can cause landslides by overloading slopes and hillcrests or through the use of improper irrigation." So, is this hill overloaded with homes on its slopes and hillcrests? I do not think that the city officials of Thousand Oaks would have allowed such "a recipe for disaster" to be built.

Community members, I urge you to see her statements for what they really are—scare tactics. Some homeowners in the North Pointe and Signature areas do not want this park built because of lights, traffic and noise. However, they all signed papers when they bought their million-dollar homes acknowledging that the community park would be built near them. The master plan for the park has already been made. An environmental study of the area is underway. The CRPD is very straightforward in their development of this area and has invited the community to numerous meetings about it. Let’s support the CRPD and encourage their agenda, which serves the whole community and not just a few NIMBY homeowners.

Stephanie Ferrin

Thousand Oaks