Agoura Village delay will be costly
The Agoura Village Plan, an eclectic but tasteful new commercial and residential development that gives residents the true town center they've been promised for almost a decade, is inching closer toward realization..

But the wait must continue. As Stephanie Bertholdo reports in her page 1 story, a Superior Court judge ruled recently that the city must postpone the project pending further environmental review.

Except for the new freeway interchange that just opened- bringing Agoura Hills closer to the modern age- things are the same as they ever were in this sleepy, west Los Angeles County community. With three or four shopping centers and three- or four-hundred furniture stores, Agoura Hills has much to offer, but could do better.

The city is on the right track with Agoura Village. It's not another shopping center, not another strip mall, but a rural commercial complex in the shadow of the Santa Monica Mountains, where tasteful dining, entertainment and shopping venues merge with residential space.

The city's role is to formulate a broad plan, which it has done. Each developer must then come along and piece together the final puzzle, abiding by the city's high standards for development. The problem with Judge James Chalfant's ruling is that it asks the city to undertake expensive additional planning steps before the individual projects have even been proposed. The delay will impose an unnecessary burden on taxpayers, when it's the commercial developers who should be paying for the added environmental studies. (Delays ultimately will take the form of higher construction costs, higher rents and higher consumer prices.)

We agree the city should be jealous in its protection of the sensitive Santa Monica Mountain foothills, the area along Agoura and Cornell roads where Agoura Village would be built, but developers should bear the brunt of the additional planning costs, not the city and its overtaxed residents.