Long term costs not calculated

Zev Yaroslavsky says he has "openly supported the Heschel school since it was proposed," but resents Jeff Thomas' implication that Heschel has enjoyed a "special relationship" with his office. Aside from the quiet relationships between Heschel's principal players, can Zev support a project and also cast an unbiased vote on it?

He says "the school was determined to be consistent with the North Area Plan" but the NAP only makes an exception for a "local serving facility" while Heschel is a regional one, serving the San Fernando and Simi valleys, Malibu, etc., with only a tiny minority of students coming from Agoura. Heschel is inconsistent with other aspects of the NAP as well.

Yaroslavsky says this project only differs from others in the degree of "ugliness it has generated" but other projects were probably less destructive and blatantly inappropriate and thus caused less contempt. If he had supported a theme park in Yosemite, he might have gotten a similar reaction.

He says Heschel has "offered to pay $3.5 million to mitigate traffic," but does not mention that much of it is to be paid over 25 years without interest and that Heschel will cost the city many times that much when it is not even in our city and does not even primarily serve Agoura's students, again because in reality it is a broadly regional facility.

Furthermore, traffic cannot be mitigated without radically changing access to Old Agoura which the city is charged with protecting and is a large part of why both city and residents are angry in the first place.

In truth, Heschel cannot mitigate negative impacts any more than Yaroslavsky can mitigate Jess Thomas' accurate remarks, even though he took 10 paragraphs trying. Sharili Brown Agoura Hills