Zoning Referees Keep Their Cool While Taking the Heat

After seven years as an associate zoning administrator for the City of Los Angeles, Willie Girard has heard more than his share of arguments.

He has heard homeowner groups from quiet neighborhoods bicker with priests from crowded churches. He has heard horse owners trade barbs with developers. He has heard quarrels over liquor stores, gas stations, massage parlors, private schools, dance halls, drive-ins and homes for the aged.

As one of three city officials assigned to handle zoning disputes in the San Fernando Valley, Girard has had little choice but to take the contentiousness in stride.

“It’s sort of like working as a dentist. We are always dealing with pain,” Girard joked recently. “It’s rare to hold a hearing where everyone is happy.”

With fellow administrators James Crisp and William Lillenberg, Girard has made a career of mediating disputes involving the city’s many zoning regulations. On almost every Friday, one of the three can be found in the meeting hall of the Van Nuys Women’s Club on Sylvan Street, where most of the arguments are settled.

Combined, the three have worked 77 years for the city, holding various planning positions before they were appointed to the administrative jobs, which pay from $49,000 to $60,000 a year.

Each has spent hundreds of hours behind the folding dinner table at the women’s center and thousands more in the cramped City Hall offices of the Planning Department. Each has heard arguments that range from banal to bizarre and involve everything from modest house additions to million-dollar projects.

“It’s the kind of job that can bury you,” Crisp said. “Some days you find it extremely exciting, while at other times it seems endless.”

Since their office was created by the Los Angeles City Council in 1941--in response to widespread charges of zoning corruption in the city--associate zoning administrators such as Girard, Crisp and Lillenberg have been front-line troops in the city’s continuing struggle to control the shape and texture of its neighborhoods and business and industrial areas.

Protected by Civil Service laws and appointed to open-ended terms by Franklin Eberhard, chief zoning administrator, they are not nearly as visible as the more politically oriented members of the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals, which reviews their work on appeal.

Unlike the city’s Planning Commission, associate zoning administrators have no power to change zoning classifications.

They also have little to do with disputes involving properties specifically assigned to the Planning Commission, including parks, the Los Angeles International Airport, large private schools, county projects and cemeteries. They have no voice in the location of prisons or toxic disposal sites.

But, when it comes to the day-to-day zoning needs of most of the rest of the city, associate zoning administrators are in the line of fire. Though not lawyers, they frequently pass judgment on disputes involving the nuances of city regulations. Though not police officers, they have the power to close down a business by revoking a conditional use permit. Though not politicians, they are sometimes drawn into heated political issues.

As a result, there is no such thing as a “typical” zoning hearing at the Van Nuys Women’s Center. At times, a dispute will fill the hall to overflowing, with contending parties arriving with lawyers and lobbyists. At other times, the hearing will draw no audience at all.

All of the hearings, however, are conducted according to quasi-judicial rules. Those who file the request or complaint are called to state their case and answer questions. Supporters and opponents follow suit. After a brief rebuttal, an administrator either makes a decision or promises to issue a written finding within 75 days.

At times, the hearings can take strange twists.

Crisp, who worked as an administrator in the city’s Westside zone before moving to the Valley, recalled that a woman once collapsed on the floor after being told that she would not be allowed to build tennis courts in the yard of her Bel-Air home.

Girard, who once worked the San Pedro area, said a woman arrived at a hearing involving a controversial drive-in theater with a collection of used prophylactics, which she said had been discarded by drive-in patrons.

Strange or not, the cases themselves fall roughly into three groups. First come what Lillenberg calls the nickel-and-dime cases, in which a homeowner files for permission to build a larger-than-standard addition to his house, or a higher-than-standard wall in his backyard. Typically, these cases are the most quickly dealt with, although a few are far from painless.

Fights Between Neighbors

“Sometimes you get some terrific arguments over what we call ‘spite fences,’ ” Lillenberg said. “You get neighbors fighting like cats and dogs over six inches of masonry.”

The second group, more common than the first, involves larger and often more complicated requests for variances from zoning regulations. A film company, for example, might ask for permission to develop its film in an office in a commercial zone, even though the process is restricted to industrial areas.

An apartment house owner might ask permission to reduce his parking capacity below the required limit, arguing that street parking is readily available. A gas station owner who set up shop before his neighborhood was zoned residential might try to add a towing service, even though towing services are normally illegal in residential zones.

In those cases, Lillenberg said, the administrators adhere to a series of complicated requirements and the county’s General Plan.

Agenda Is Changing

But lately the agenda, posted weekly on the doors of the women’s center, has been changing to make way for cases involving the issuance and revocation of the conditional-use permits, which govern the operation of everything from churches to massage parlors. Most of these permits, required by the City Council, are granted and monitored by the associate zoning administrators. Conditions are attached to control crowds, traffic, litter or noise at a site, on pain of revocation.

In recent months, hearings involving some of these permits have brought the administrators into the limelight. Among them:

Last February, Crisp rejected a proposal to permit liquor sales in a pool hall that was just steps from a Pacoima mental health clinic. Crisp said he found it “almost inconceivable” that the request would even be made. Although liquor licenses are granted and revoked by the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board, Crisp acted under a 1978 law forbidding the sale of liquor without a conditional use permit.

Last March, in what was then the latest twist in a continuing fight between a group of Sun Valley homeowners and supporters of one of the nation’s largest Thai Buddhist temples, Crisp refused to alter the temple’s conditional use permit to allow construction of a 38,000-foot Sunday school addition.

The decision, one of several recent cases involving the growth of church-related schools in the San Fernando Valley, came after neighbors complained that temple supporters had repeatedly failed to observe a series of restrictions on crowd size, noise and litter control.

Crisp’s decision was later overturned by the Board of Zoning Appeals, which said the temple could build the Sunday school complex. A second appeal is pending.