The almost 15-year push to create a new town center for Agoura Hills south of the 101 Freeway suffered a major setback this week when the City Council voted to uphold denial of The Ave (Agoura Village East) development at the southeast corner of Kanan and Agoura roads, a key component in the city’s broader Agoura Village plan.
The 4-1 vote with Mayor Denis Weber as the only council member to support the 18-acre commercial and residential development puts the project on mothballs unless the builder—Westlake Village-based California Commercial Investment Companies—and the city can reach an accord on issues such as building height, building setback from the street, and number of units allowed in some of the buildings’ vertical mixed-use makeup.
The project calls for 118 apartments, 120-room hotel, and retail, restaurant and office space. It falls under the guidelines of the 2008 Agoura Village Specific Plan, a 180-page document that lays the groundwork for new retail, residential and business opportunities along Agoura Road east of Kanan Road.
The City Council voted Sept. 8 to uphold the July Agoura Hills Planning Commission denial of The Ave project.
Eight of the 15 buildings exceed the city’s 35-to-45-foot height limit. Five of the buildings, including the hotel and office, don’t meet the city’s guideline on proximity to sidewalk and street, city planner Allison Cook told the council at Wednesday’s hearing.
After sparring with the developer for more than six years over building elevations and other issues, city planning staff announced it would not proceed with an environmental impact report on the project, effectively closing the book on The Ave and giving the planning commission a green light to deny construction, which it did.
“It does not comply with the standards of the Agoura Village Specific plan,” Councilmember Illece Buckley Weber said.
The project’s proximity to Ladyface Mountain and pressure from outside environmental groups have created a years-long uphill battle for the developer, which eventually received from the city a “deemed complete” status on its project application, only to see fortunes reversed when the builder failed to meet the finer points of the village specific plan.
Regarding traffic issues, the developer said it was handicapped by mixed signals from the city on whether or not it intended to build a new traffic roundabout at the Kanan-Agoura intersection, or leave the busy four-way stop the way it is now. Confusion also arose on technical issues such as whether the height of buildings should be measured from natural grade level or construction pad level.
“This is not an easy property to develop under any circumstance,” City Councilmember Linda Northrup said, but she added. “They can’t build what the plan doesn’t allow. These standards are objective.”
Councilmember Deborah Klein Lopez also supported the planning commission’s denial of the project.
“I want to be sensitive to the history of the Agoura Village Specific Plan,” she said. “The point is that projects that are square pegs that are trying to be fit into a round hole have come before the council, and I’m not inclined to make the mistake of trying to push that square peg in.”
“Egregious abuse”
Dave Rand, spokesperson for California Commercial Investment, railed against the city’s stringent development guidelines and said The Ave suffered “death by a thousand processing cuts.”
Projects up and down Agoura Road have faced equally tough scrutiny by city planners and court judges.
In 2020, the presenters of the Cornerstone residential and commercial development at Agoura and Cornell roads were forced to abandoned their project following a judge’s ruling that the homes and businesses planned for the top of a scenic knoll at the intersection of the two roads had numerous environmental shortcomings.
“We have spent seven-and-a-half to eight years, millions of dollars of investment . . . working diligently on this project over the many years,” Rand said. His client became the victim of an “egregious abuse of discretion and process,” and Rand referred to the “brokenness of the process which exists here in the Agoura Village Specific Plan area.”
“The system in this city is set up for applicants to fail,” Rand said.
He warned that the city is in danger of missing its state-mandating housing requirement by denying The Ave and its proposed 118 apartments.
Both sides of the prime intersection at Kanan and Agoura roads are pegged for development. Across the street from The Ave on the southwest corner of the intersection is another mixed-use project known as West Village that would bring 39,000 square feet of commercial space and 78 residential units to the base of Ladyface Mountain. It too, remains bogged down in the planning process.
Rand told the City Council members, “You require plan check level, building permit level plans, engineering drawings that makes it impossible for you to fulfill your own housing element commitments to the state of California, which say you’ll get projects approved in one year in the City of Agoura Hills. That is fundamentally impossible,” he said.
Weber accused his City Council colleagues of not taking advantage of the decision-making flexibility permitted under the Agoura Village plan guidelines that might have led to a workaround for The Ave.
“We think we can right this ship. We would request you to right this ship,” Rand told the City Council.
Cities in California are coming under increasing pressure to approve developments that bring much needed housing to local communities, and navigate choppy legal waters if they don’t. The City of Calabasas faces two current lawsuits over its recent denial of a mixed commercial and residential development at the intersection of Las Virgenes and Agoura roads, similar to The Ave.
The City of Agoura Hills promised to review its Agoura Village Specific Plan to provide needed updates in the document that might prevent the kind of irreconcilable differences between city and developer that doomed The Ave.