City Council approves renovations for The Oaks

The Oaks mall renovation project was approved Monday night by the Thousand Oaks planning commission in a 4-1 vote, with Chairperson Janet Wall casting the opposing vote.

"I'm in favor of the upgrade and the expansion-it's going to be lovely. What I'm concerned about is the shared parking theory," Wall said after the meeting.

The Thousand Oaks City Council candidate doesn't believe there will be enough parking for customers, which she said was the case when The Promenade shopping area first opened, before adjustments were made.

Because of that concern, Wall had asked that the first and second phase of the renovation be separated so the first phase could be approved during the Monday night planning commission meeting. The second phase could be addressed after the parking in the first phase was assessed, she said.

"If there was not enough parking after phase one, we could look at reassessing phase two to add another parking structure," Wall said.

She was out-voted by the other commissioners, and now The Macerich Company, which owns The Oaks mall, can move forward after about three years of work with city staff on the renovation plans.

This is the first comprehensive renovation and expansion plan since the mall was built in 1974 and opened in 1976, according to Director of Community Development Planning Division John Prescott.

The project will renovate and expand The Oaks mall, adding a total of 230,402 square feet of building area to the 1,092,887 square feet of space that now exists.

One of the former Macy's stores will be expanded to accommodate a larger Macy's. A Nordstrom will be added as well as another department store and an open-air lifestyle plaza that will include a 14-screen theater, four freestanding restaurants and additional retail space. There will also be two multilevel parking decks and added landscaping.

Many buildings will be demolished to make room for the expansion. Thirty-eight oak trees and one sycamore tree will be taken down. Twenty-one oaks and 13 sycamores will be transplanted and about 350 new oak trees and 40 sycamores will be planted.

When both phases are complete, there should be about 1,700 trees on the 90-acre-plus site, Wall said.

The cork oak trees to be removed aren't thriving, Wall said. After 30 years, they're only about 10 feet tall and will be replaced with coast live oaks or valley oaks, which do better in the setting, she said.

The five-hour meeting was well-attended, with about 150 present and about 30 members of the public taking an allotted three

minutes each to speak. The Oaks expansion project was the only topic addressed by the planning commission at the meeting.

It was decided there would be no store signs on the parking garages, but more signs than usually allowed in Thousand Oaks would be permitted on the outside of the mall. Building signs for businesses that don't have doors to the outside were allowed.

The commission approved about 17 monumental signs on the site compared to the three there now for installation when the mall is complete.

It was also decided Nordstrom would have to be consistent with the rest of the mall and have an 18inch planter decorating the outside of the store.

Daryl Reynolds brought up the need for higher benches for the elderly and the disabled.

Before approval, traffic issues, air quality and other environmental factors were also addressed in the extensive report described by Prescott as the best project staff could recommend to the planning commission.