Old Agoura's Heschel charges are 'insulting' and unfounded
Guest opinion
By Zev Yaroslavsky Special to The Acorn

Jess Thomas' recent letter to these pages (Jan. 17) regarding the Heschel West Day School deserves a thorough and blunt response.

While the Heschel project has been strongly opposed by some of its neighbors, it has garnered broad support from other area residents. Further, county planners and decision makers have thoroughly reviewed the application and imposed strong conditions, recommending approval of the school at every step of the process. Most significantly, the Regional Planning Commission voted 40 to approve the school's application for a conditional-use permit and determined that the school would be consistent with the North Area Plan that governs development on the site just off the westbound Ventura Freeway at Chesebro.

Despite the commission's findings, both the school and its neighbors appealed the decision to the Board of Supervisors.

The supervisors held two additional public hearings to solicit and consider public input on the school's application. County planners, several members of my staff and I worked for months with both the city of Agoura Hills and the Old Agoura community to address concerns over traffic, aesthetics and other impacts.

In the end, the Board of Supervisors approved the school's application with dozens of conditions that were imposed at my request. Among them were requirements that: the school pay upwards of $3.5 million to improve traffic conditions in the Old Agoura community, ensure that noise concerns are fully addressed, mandate enhanced public safety measures and establish design standards and community review processes to guarantee that the school's architecture respects the semirural aesthetic of Old Agoura.

In more than three decades of public service, I have overseen the approval of more than two dozen schools and religious institutions ranging from churches and synagogues to mosques and parochial schools. Every one of them was controversial in one way or another. Yet, good faith efforts among the project proponents and opponents enabled me to ensure that each project ultimately became a welcome member of the community.

The Heschel West Day School case differs from the others in only one respect: the ugliness of the campaign that has been waged for and against the school by some of the interested parties on both sides. Vitriol, epithets, whispering campaigns and, in several instances, plain oldfashioned bigotry have distinguished this controversy. Now spurious allegations of "conflict of interest" have worked their way onto these pages.

The Heschel West Day School project has been around for nearly 10 years. Schools are a permitted use on Heschel's property pursuant to a county conditional-use permit. Since Heschel first expressed interest in building a school on this property in 1998, I have been open and public in my views that I would support a school on this site provided that appropriate mitigating conditions were imposed as part of its final approval.

Indeed, the conditions that have been imposed on Heschel are the most stringent and comprehensive that I have ever proposed for any school. Thus, Jess Thomas' charge that a special relationship has existed between Heschel and my office, and the implication that this relationship led to the approval of the school's application, is as groundless as it is insulting. Such statements do nothing to promote the civil discourse that projects such as this demand.

I remain as committed to ensuring that the school will be a good neighbor to Old Agoura and the rest of Agoura Hills as I am to the success of the school and its future students.

Zev Yaroslavsky is the Los Angeles County Third District Supervisor.