W. Hollywood Councilman Seeks Ouster of Planner

West Hollywood City Councilman John Heilman said Thursday that Planning Commissioner Peter Weinberger should be ousted for saying that the City Council showed anti-Iranian prejudice and acted like a lynch mob when it voted Oct. 19 to reject a proposed development on Sunset Boulevard.

“There’s just no place in this community for somebody to make those wild accusations and be a representative of the city on the Planning Commission,” Heilman said.

But Mayor Alan Viterbi came to Weinberger’s defense, saying that he has contributed a unique perspective to the commission’s deliberations on controlled growth, affordable housing and historical preservation.

“I think this is a cheap political ploy on the part of John Heilman, and I’m frankly more than a little disgusted,” Viterbi said.

Controversial Project

At issue was a proposal to build a four-story 75,000-square-foot commercial complex on Sunset between Horn Avenue and Sherbourne Drive.

The project was approved by city planners and endorsed by the Planning Commission by a 6-0 vote. Some residents who originally opposed it spoke in favor of the project at the Oct. 19 meeting, but a larger group was against it and the City Council voted 4 to 1 to reject the proposal. Viterbi’s was the only dissenting vote.

“I think referring to 80 people who took the time to come to the council meeting and spent the whole evening there, to refer to them as a lynch mob, is insulting,” Heilman said. “And then to accuse the council of acting out of some racial prejudice in turning down the project and responding to the community, that’s not acceptable as far as I’m concerned.”

Heilman said that the planning commissioner “can no longer effectively function,” but Viterbi said he will stand by Weinberger, who was his appointee. Weinberger can only be removed from office with Viterbi’s consent.

Despite that, Heilman said he would continue with his effort to have Weinberger taken off the Planning Commission at the City Council’s next meeting, which is set for the West Hollywood Park auditorium on Monday.

“I’m going to do everything in my power to get rid of him,” Heilman said.

Viterbi said the controversy may have been fueled by the city’s coming April elections, in which he and fellow incumbent Abbe Land will take on at least two challengers.

“It’s clear that the people who are promoting this are people who are jockeying for election in the spring,” Viterbi said.

He was referring to twice-failed candidate Ruth Williams, who called on him at a press conference to remove Weinberger from office.

“If not, we can only assume that the mayor has the same contempt for the members of this community as his appointee,” she said, adding that previous calls on Viterbi to muzzle the sometimes-irascible commissioner had been ignored.

Weinberger’s latest comments evoked “feelings of outrage and complete disgust,” Williams said.

Although Viterbi said Heilman was “playing political games,” Heilman said there was nothing to that accusation or to the suggestion that he may be trying to find a way out of endorsing his colleague when the campaign opens in January.

“I may very well endorse Alan despite this,” he said.

Accusation of Bias

The controversy was sparked by Weinberger’s comments after the Oct. 19 meeting, when he told a local newspaper that “one of the main reasons they turned it down is because of prejudice against the developer because he is an Iranian.”

In an interview, Weinberger said that council members have since told him that that was not the case. Developer Ali Ebrahimi also said he did not think that his ethnic background figured in the council’s decision.

“If they say it’s not true, I’ll take their word for it and I’ll retract it entirely,” Weinberger said.

But he maintained that prejudice was a factor elsewhere in city government. He said that several Iranian-born developers told him they felt their origin counted against them at Planning Commission meetings.

However, Weinberger said he stood by his characterization of the City Council’s decision to block the project as “following the direction of a lynch mob.”

Little Deliberation

Praising Ebrahimi for making a series of concessions in an effort to win city approval for the project, Weinberger said that the City Council voted it down without any real deliberation.

“I must admit my comments were in a moment of anger, but frankly, there comes a point where you just see an outrageous action and you’ve got to speak up,” he said.

In the course of 14 months of negotiations, Ebrahimi agreed to pay for a new traffic signal, install a planted median strip on Sunset Boulevard, provide parking for the nearby Spago restaurant and hire an off-duty sheriff’s deputy to ease congestion at the site, city Planning Manager Howard Zelevsky said.

“He’s been up front and good developer to work with,” Zelevsky said. “He’s stuck to his word and we’ve had good relations. I believe the neighbors would say the same thing. They’re just opposed to the project.”

Ebrahimi also proposed to include an open plaza and a combination of restaurants, stores and offices to spread out the impact of the development.

“He started out with none of this, and this is what we extracted from him,” Weinberger said. “The result was fabulous aesthetics, a wonderful project and somebody dealing in good faith with the community. I was stunned and quite angered, because that type of developer is the type we want to encourage. The message they (the City Council) sent was, ‘Don’t deal in good faith with West Hollywood.’ ”

Weinberger and Viterbi said they were concerned that the decision might make other developers chary of trying to build anything new in the city, but Zelevsky disagreed.

“I believe there will always be somebody out there willing to take a chance on developing, especially in this city, which is vibrant and has many things going on,” he said.

In fact, Zelevsky said the Sunset project may not be completely dead. Ebrahimi said he is trying to work out a more acceptable project for the site, which is now occupied by a motel and a rental-car lot.

“They did ask me to come back with an alternative project, but they did not give me any guidelines about what the alternative project should be,” he said.

New Uncertainties

Ebrahimi said the City Council may go along with a three-story project, but he has yet to determine whether he would make enough money on a scaled-down building or whether neighborhood opponents would go along with it.

“I don’t know if making it a floor lower is going to make the neighbors happy, and mostly the City Council was responding to the neighbors,” he said.

Rose Borne, president of the Shoreham Towers Homeowners Assn., said her neighbors would prefer to see a one- or two-story development at the site, which lies just below their apartment house.

Anything bigger would interfere with their views and drastically worsen existing congestion, she said. Sherbourne Drive and Horn Avenue provide the only access to the Shoreham Towers complex.

“He presented a very lovely project, but our main concern was that we felt it was just too big for the area,” she said. “Of course we’d be willing to sit down and talk with him, but he can’t give us anything we’d accept except for a smaller project.”

Borne said that the members of her group who attended the Oct. 19 City Council meeting did not constitute a lynch mob.

“We came down as concerned West Hollywood residents,” she said. “We were orderly, we were quiet.”

Most of the residents of Horn Plaza, a building whose views would not be affected by the proposed development, said they liked it because it promised to relieve their chronic problems of parking and traffic congestion.

They found the offer to provide special parking for Spago-bound limousines especially appealing, saying that the luxury vehicles frequently block their way to and from Sunset Boulevard.

Horn Plaza resident David Weisfield said he originally opposed the project but changed his mind after meeting with Ebrahimi and city officials.