Odd Border Makes Toeing the Line Tough

For years, the Maimonides Academy, an orthodox Jewish grade school, has wanted to expand and renovate its antiquated facility. When the school applied for the necessary permits, the city of Los Angeles said, “Fine, go ahead.”

But there is this little problem....

Much of the school’s campus, which is directly behind the Sofitel Hotel near the Beverly Center, is in West Hollywood, and that city, impelled by residents opposed to the project, is saying, “No way.”

“We try to be a good citizen in two different cities,” said a long-suffering David Nagel, the developer who heads the school’s building committee. “We try to placate both and play by the rules of both, but this is the most difficult thing I’ve ever faced. Getting permissions is always difficult, but here we’ve got to do it twice.”

The L.A.-West Hollywood boundary is a comical series of drunken zigzags and abrupt right angles that dissects about two dozen businesses, apartment houses and single-family homes. It is the fruit of how L.A. expanded, by taking bites of unincorporated areas and leaving other morsels to be digested by later-arriving cities, such as West Hollywood, which, when it became a city in 1984, ended up shaped like an open pipe wrench.

Various official entities have made accommodations over the years to deal with the split properties, but a certain amount of confusion and frustration is nonetheless endemic among property owners. Which police department do you call when you’ve got a problem? Is a renter in a divided apartment building subject to Los Angeles or West Hollywood rent control laws? Which city gets the sales tax revenue when the city line runs right down the middle of a business?

The Maimonides Academy balances precariously on the city line. The portion of the school’s property in West Hollywood is next to a residential area. Its Los Angeles property, which is zoned commercial, fronts busy La Cienega Boulevard. Five years ago, the school approached West Hollywood officials with plans for a new three-story facility with a playground on top, and the plan immediately drew the wrath of some neighborhood residents.

So the school reconfigured the plan, shifting the bulk of the project to the Los Angeles portion. This time the academy took its project to Los Angeles first.

“It only made sense to start in Los Angeles, to see if they would allow us the increased density there,” Nagel said. “Unfortunately, West Hollywood took that the wrong way. They said, ‘We want to control the process,’ and it didn’t make sense to us. L.A. should control the process if L.A. is where all the intensity of development is. But we didn’t want to get between the two cities. We told them, ‘You guys work it out.’ ”

The cities failed to do so, and L.A. won designation from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research as the “lead agency” in the project. Subsequently, L.A. gave the school approval for both a zoning variance and an exemption from having to prepare an environmental impact report.

West Hollywood, which has more exacting permit requirements, has appealed L.A.’s decision to the Los Angeles Planning Commission, challenging the environmental exemption and the school’s traffic study.

“I think our point right now is that without doing an environmental impact report, we don’t know what’s acceptable or unacceptable,” said Lauren Meister, who lives a few houses away from the school and has been active in opposing the school’s plan. “At some point, you go to court.”

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The peculiar past of the area that is now West Hollywood explains why the two cities today share some properties.

For most of the 20th century, the area was unincorporated county land where official regulation was relatively lax by comparison with that inside L.A. city limits. The Sunset Strip on the territory’s northern edge became the playground of early Hollywood stars because of its many entertainment spots, licit and illicit. Mobsters such as Mickey Cohen, an influential man on the old Strip, found it more convenient to deal with county authorities than their counterparts in the city, said entertainment industry historian Alan L. Gansberg.

From about 1900 to 1930, Gansberg said, Los Angeles chipped away at the unincorporated area by offering city water to homeowners in exchange for annexation. That sometimes resulted in a given house being in L.A. while the house next door remained in the county.

With the surge in L.A.-area population after World War II, developers combined some of the lots on which those small houses sat, then built apartment buildings and commercial structures on them, even though some of the combined parcels now straddled the city boundary.

Shortly after West Hollywood was incorporated, white lines were painted on streets where the city line intersected properties. In a few places, the lines, with “LA” painted on one side and “WH” painted on the other, are still visible, although usually faint.

One such place is on Edinburgh Avenue, a little north of Romaine Street. There the line runs through the side of Romaine Towers, splitting the 48-unit apartment building nearly in half.

With the building’s rear apartments in West Hollywood, and those in front in Los Angeles, the question arises as to which police agency, LAPD or the West Hollywood sheriff’s station, responds to calls. The building, at 8011 Romaine St., pops up as a response address in both departments’ computerized communications systems.

The 911 emergency telephone system probably handles the matter automatically, said Ella Sotelo, the 911 coordinator for Los Angeles County. When renters call the telephone company to order phone service, emergency calls are automatically routed to a police agency, based on which city they say they live in, as long as their address checks out as being in that city. And 8011 Romaine checks out as being in both West Hollywood and L.A.

Thus, “even if they give the phone company the wrong information about which city they’re in, they’re going to get some police response,” Sotelo said.

The quirky city boundary also presents issues for police officers making routine traffic stops. “We don’t always know where the border is,” said Sgt. Roger Jackson of the LAPD’s Hollywood Division. “Our people are forever following somebody and crossing the line into West Hollywood because it’s so easy to do. And if you end up writing a ticket, you have to cancel the citation because we don’t have ticket-writing authority there.”

Police officers aren’t the only people affected by the split personality of Romaine Towers. Renters in the West Hollywood portion enjoy broader tenants’ rights than their neighbors across the hall in Los Angeles. West Hollywood’s rent control law specifies, for example, that landlords replace carpeting every seven years and repaint walls every four years. L.A. law is less specific, requiring replacement only of “deteriorated or defective” walls and floor coverings.

Moreover, the front and back halves of Romaine Towers are in different property tax rate areas. The building’s owner receives two yearly property tax bills, one of about $11,000 for the L.A. part of the structure, and one of about $8,200 for the West Hollywood segment.

For individual homeowners whose properties are split, the necessity of paying two property tax bills was obviated by state legislation that allowed parcels of less than 25,000 square feet to be assigned to one tax rate area.

Morris and Evelyn Fromer for four decades have lived in a small house on North Flores Street that the border cleaves nearly in half. Cooking in one city and watching television in another, all without leaving the house, hasn’t created much difficulty for them, Morris said, although having to deal with two property tax bills used to be an annoyance.

Nowadays, the Fromers’ property is wholly in a tax rate area that benefits the city of Los Angeles. “I used to figure I lived in Los Angeles County. Right now, I’m mixed up, but I don’t care,” Fromer said. “My wife’s glad at least that she doesn’t have to do two bills.”

Commercial and industrial properties that straddle the city line are subject not only to the property tax dichotomy but also to the two cities’ different business tax rates. For a retail establishment, Los Angeles’ tax is $1.43 for every $1,000 of gross revenue; West Hollywood’s is 48 cents.

The cities apply their respective business taxes to a retail store split between them based on the percentage of the square footage in each municipality. “If 60% of it is in Los Angeles, the city will take 60% of the gross revenue and apply the L.A. business tax,” said Terry Mannochio, chief of the tax and permit division of L.A.’s Office of Finance.

In Los Angeles County, the sales tax rate is 8.25%, about an eighth of which goes to the city in which a given sales transaction occurs. The method for determining which city gets revenue from the sales tax generated in businesses split between cities is a little more poetic.

“It’s where the most cash registers are,” said Anita Gore, a spokeswoman for the California Board of Equalization, which sets the applicable rules.

Sales tax revenue born in the Comedy Store, a club on the Sunset Strip, probably flows to West Hollywood, even though a significant portion of the building is in L.A. (the Board of Equalization would not confirm where the club’s tax money goes; it may not release information about taxpayers). The club’s main cash registers are located close to Sunset Boulevard, in West Hollywood.

Dean Gelber, the Comedy Store’s general manager, was unaware the club straddled the city line. “I thought it passed above us and we were completely in West Hollywood,” he said. “We generate plenty of money for West Hollywood. I should get an honorary key to the city every year.”

The untidiness of the situation nags at some officials, who’d like to see the city limits clearly defined and approved by the Local Area Formation Commission, which oversees municipal boundary changes in L.A. County.

“One of the things on my list of things to do during my tenure as a councilman is to work with Los Angeles to identify all the divided properties and then come up with an equitable arrangement for cleaning up those properties,” said West Hollywood City Councilman Jeffrey Prang. “Anything that’s over 50% in West Hollywood we’d get, and anything that’s over 50% in L.A., they’d get.”