BUSINESSES VOICE DOUBTS ON FACELIFT.

Byline: Gloria Gonzales Daily News Staff Writer

Susan Duntley wants to make sure that her printing business profits from potential changes to Thousand Oaks Boulevard, but a mile and a half east, Wayne Robb just wants the city to keep its hand off his hardware store.

``In my experience when the city wants to help, it usually ends up as more of a problem,'' said Robb, whose family has run a hardware store on East Thousand Oaks Boulevard for 50 years. ``It's a long street, and as far as I know only one person in the (Mayor's Business Roundtable) group does business on the boulevard.''

The Mayor's Business Roundtable is a group of Thousand Oaks business owners who meet Tuesday mornings to advise Mayor Judy Lazar on economic development issues. The group's president, Russell Goodenough, countered Tuesday that several of the group's members run businesses or offices on the boulevard.

Robb, and many other longtime boulevard business owners like him, have reacted to the group's recent boulevard suggestions with wariness and suspicion. The suggestions were included in a report authored by the retail committee of the Roundtable.

The recommendations, part of a study and not a boulevard plan, included ideas for marketing efforts, new signs, traffic changes and attracting anchor entertainment tenants like bookstores and theme restaurants.

The money for changes could come from city and federal funds available for revitalization, the report suggested.

``The attitude of businesses should be that we pay for it, we should have some say in how the money is spent,'' said Duntley, owner of the Copy Station, a printing shop on West Thousand Oaks Boulevard near Hodencamp Road. ``We also need to be pro-active in letting the city know what we want. Unless you work on this street, you have no idea what the needs are.''

Duntley and several other business owners have formed the West Boulevard Business Group, which is creating a priority list of changes they'd like to see in their neighborhood.

``We're going to tell the city what we want,'' Duntley said. ``We're discussing everything from whether we want trash cans on the sidewalk to traffic problems.''

Duntley added that needs of businesses in her area differed from the those of businesses near the Auto Mall, or closer to The Promenade at Westlake.

Lazar told the business roundtable Tuesday that groups like Duntley's were the solution to the revitalization problem.

``We need to break the boulevard down into smaller sections and those areas need to tell us what they need,'' Lazar said. ``Any group that came forward could sit down with staff and come up with a plan, but the merchants need to be the ones pushing this forward.''

Goodenough added that all revitalization efforts would be voluntary, and that the roundtable group would help business secure funding and act as a liaison with the city.

``If a business doesn't want our support, well, that's its right,'' Goodenough said. ``We do want to help and we think that businesses will also see this as a way they enhance the ambience and make the area more user-friendly.''

But critics like Robb believe that ambience improvement efforts will make it harder for customers to get where they want to go.

``This street is designed for destination shoppers, and I worry that they'll pretty it up so much that people can't drive on it,'' Robb said. ``Anything that makes it harder to pull into these stores will put more people out of business.''

Many of the revitalization suggestions encourage slowing traffic or increasing pedestrian destinations along the boulevard.

``There's a lot of confusion out there about plans for the boulevard,'' said roundtable member Rick Lemo.

``But the bottom line is we've got to get people in here to tell us what they want. And you never hear people say that business is so good that they don't need any help.''

Goodenough encouraged all business owners to provide feedback at any Mayor's Business Roundtable meeting. They are held Tuesday mornings at the Oak Room in the Civic Arts Plaza, beginning at 8 a.m.