Petitions Against Tract Rejected : Westlake Village: Opponents of a major project suffer a setback. Officials say they failed to include the text of laws that are targeted.

Westlake Village officials have rejected petitions filed by a citizens group seeking to overturn approval of the largest development project in the town’s history, city officials said Thursday.

City Atty. Michael Jenkins said the petitions were invalid because they lacked the text of the targeted city ordinances, as required by state law.

After the City Council approved the Westlake North residential and commercial project on Dec. 6, the group began circulating the petitions in an attempt to force the council to reverse its decision or put the issue to a binding public vote.

Shortly before the petition deadline last week, the group submitted 681 signatures, considerably more than the 483 needed to require the referendum.

Westlake North was approved under two ordinances that form a stack of documents about an inch thick. The group’s petitions contained a brief synopsis of the ordinances, but courts have interpreted state election law as requiring the laws’ full text so that signers may “see what it is they are protesting against,” Jenkins said.

Westlake North would be built on 129 acres north of the Ventura Freeway and Lindero Canyon Road. It would include 250 apartments or condominiums and a 1.4-million-square-foot commercial center with four-story buildings. The developer, Westlake Village Associates, has agreed to preserve the town’s golf course and to pay millions of dollars for street improvements.

The citizens group objects to the project’s size and the traffic it would generate.

Attempts to reach leaders of the group were unsuccessful Thursday.

In a statement mailed to the news media last week, the group said it was “flabbergasted when the city staff seemingly tried to go out of its way to find minor procedural flaws with our submitted petitions.

”. . . . We are more than confident that everyone that signed the petition was aware of this project, and they felt that the major issues associated with it needed to be voted upon.”