Woodland Hills Office Project Gets Final OK : Defenders of Stream Lose Out to Developer

Woodland Hills residents Wednesday lost a six-year fight to shield their community’s last free-flowing stream from development as final approval was given to build a $5-million office building up to the creek’s edge.

A Los Angeles city land-use administrator approved landscape plans for the two-acre project in the 23000 block of Mulholland Drive, near the former home of actress Betty Grable.

Approval of the planting scheme was the last hurdle facing the project, which received its basic city approval in 1981.

Wednesday’s action once again prompted cries of outrage from neighbors of the project, who accused the city of failing to adequately protect a rustic, half-mile stretch of oak-lined Calabasas Creek. It is Woodland Hills’ only year-round stream that has not been turned into a concrete-sided flood channel. The project approved Wednesday does not call for channelizing the creek, but, in building up to its edge, would strip vegetation.

‘It’s Absurd’

“It’s foolishness in our minds for the developer not to capitalize on all of this,” homeowner Stephen Stapley said Wednesday afternoon as he hiked along the heavily wooded side of the slow-flowing stream. “There’s no reason someone can’t use some imagination and preserve this. It’s absurd.”

The project was defended by Irwin Cheldin, president of a Los Angeles insurance holding company that plans to move its headquarters to the site.

“We’re going to make it so much prettier and so much better than it is now,” Cheldin said. “You see how dirty and messy that place is. They throw their junk into it. The oaks are diseased and dying. Those people have never done anything for that property.”

The homeowners live on the east side of the creek in a subdivision carved in the early 1960s from the one-time country estate of Grable and her husband, band leader Harry James.

Joint Ownership

Seventeen families jointly own the east side of the stream. They also claim an easement that crosses part of Cheldin’s property and connected with a Grable-estate bridge over the creek before the bridge was washed away several years ago.

Homeowners contend that they negotiated a private agreement with a previous owner of the project site. That landowner promised to pay residents next to the creek $5,000 each to finance thick new landscaping to screen their view of the commercial development, residents say.

However, the agreement evaporated when Cheldin’s Unico American Corp. acquired the property. The landscaping plan approved by the city Wednesday calls for Cheldin to plant two oak saplings for each of the approximately 20 mature oaks he will be permitted to chop down along the stream when construction begins--as early as next week.

No Environment Report

Homeowner Joseph Jedrychowski, whose backyard borders the stream, complained that city officials approved development four years ago without visiting the site or requiring an environmental assessment.

“This is the only natural area left in Woodland Hills,” Jedrychowski, a UCLA dentistry professor who has lived next to the stream for 11 years, said Wednesday. “How can you look at this place and say it doesn’t have an environment? Yet the city waived the environmental impact report for it.”

Stapley, a real estate banking executive who says he built a $400,000 home on a hill above the stream two years ago after “falling in love” with the rustic creek, said the city is ignoring preservation guidelines spelled out in its adopted Canoga Park-Winnetka-Woodland Hills district plan.

“In my work, I’ve sat across the table with developers. I know what can be done here. They can build something other than a two-story shoe box,” Stapley said.

1978 Zone Change

Cindy Miscikowski, an aide to Woodland Hills-area City Councilman Marvin Braude, said the project’s various city approvals have followed accepted municipal procedure and date from a 1978 zone change for the site. The pending oak-chopping is “totally consistent” with the city’s oak protection ordinance, she said.

Miscikowski said Wednesday’s hearing was held to ensure that landscaping would help shield homeowners from Cheldin’s building now that the residents’ agreement with the previous landowner is no longer in effect.

Cheldin said late Wednesday that he has no plans to redesign the 43,000-square-foot building to suit homeowners.

“The site will be planted like a garden,” he promised. “Right now, that area is a big garbage heap, a mess. This is going to be our home, too. We want it real pretty.”