The Questions Simi Valley and Moorpark Residents Have Been Afraid to Ask Out Loud
Sylvie Belmond 
One Room, One Night, Many Answers: Simi Valley And Moorpark Leaders Are Taking Your Questions
(CLAIR | Simi Valley, CA) — If you’ve ever sat stuck in construction traffic on Los Angeles Avenue, watched a fast-moving e-bike cut through a crowded sidewalk, or wondered who’s actually in charge when something goes wrong in your neighborhood, April 22 is your night.
A safety leadership forum organized by Ventura County Supervisor Janice Parvin will bring local officials together at Tierra Rejada Golf Club in Moorpark for an evening built around one thing: your questions. The panel includes Parvin, Simi Valley City Manager Samantha Argabrite, Moorpark City Manager PJ Gagajena, Moorpark Police Chief Nick Odenath and Simi Valley Police Chief Steve Shorts. Instead of prepared remarks and slide decks, the discussion will follow questions submitted by residents during registration. If you have something on your mind, you can put it on the agenda before you ever walk in the door.
There’s no shortage of things to ask about.
Property crime is one of those conversations that never fully settles in either city. In Simi Valley, the police department’s Nixle feed shows a steady drumbeat of vehicle burglaries, theft cases and the kind of opportunistic crime that picks up when residents let their guard down. The department’s own numbers, released in February, show overall crime fell again in 2025, with property crimes down more than 13 percent from the year before. Chief Steve Shorts credited both his officers and the community, but added a note of caution: a decline is not the same as the problem being solved. For residents wondering how that progress holds, or what the city’s automated license plate reader network actually does on their street, this is a chance to ask the person running the department directly.
Electric bikes add another layer to the conversation. Across Simi Valley and Moorpark, they’ve quietly become one of the more tangled safety issues of the past few years. The videos circulating in local social media groups tell part of the story: riders cutting through sidewalks, moving fast through shared paths where people are walking dogs or pushing strollers. The numbers behind those clips are harder to ignore. Between January 2021 and the end of 2025, Simi Valley recorded 141 collisions involving bicycles or e-bikes, among them six people killed and 131 injured. In most of those crashes, investigators found the rider at fault, usually for ignoring basic traffic rules. The Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, which polices Moorpark, issued a public advisory on the same problem in the summer of 2024, reminding residents that electric motorcycles marketed as dirt bikes are not street-legal and can be impounded on the spot. Simi Valley has since tightened its rules for sidewalks and shared paths. The push and pull between enforcement and education, though, is still going.
Traffic on Los Angeles Avenue in Moorpark runs on its own timeline. The road cuts through the center of the city as part of State Route 118 and has moved commuters and commercial trucks through the area for decades. Caltrans is currently repaving a stretch of nearly three miles between Montair Drive and Spring Road, with the work expected to wrap up in fall 2027. For now, overnight lane closures, slower speeds and construction noise are part of the routine. The complication is that Los Angeles Avenue is a state highway, not a city street, which limits what local officials can do about it. A second Caltrans project, a slope repair east of the city on the same highway, is running at the same time, with one-way traffic control in place through at least winter 2026.
That disconnect between what residents want fixed and what any one agency can actually do is a real and recurring frustration in local government. Decisions about safety, roads and development in this part of Ventura County rarely land on one desk. They move between cities, the county, Caltrans and law enforcement in ways that are hard to track from the outside. When something goes wrong on a state highway running through your city, figuring out who to call, let alone who can act, takes more effort than it should.
That is exactly the kind of thing a forum like this one can help clarify. When city managers, police chiefs and a county supervisor are in the same room answering the same questions at the same time, residents get a better read on how the pieces fit together and where to go when something slips through.
The format keeps it simple. Residents submit their questions when they register. Those questions drive the evening. There is no script, no panel agenda set in advance. The community sets the table.
The forum begins at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, April 22, at Tierra Rejada Golf Club, 15187 Tierra Rejada Road in Moorpark. Free to attend. Registration required.
Register and submit your question here: https://lnkd.in/gnY5vQu3
Ask the question. Hear the answer.
