Santa Clarita Schools to Sue County Over OK of Condos

Two school districts in the Santa Clarita Valley plan to sue Los Angeles County, maintaining that it ignored a computerized monitoring system designed to ensure that homes are not built in areas without enough schools, roads, sewers and other basic services.

The boards of the William S. Hart Union High School District and the Newhall Elementary School District each voted unanimously this week to authorize the filing in February of a joint lawsuit.

The plaintiffs will seek to block construction of a 180-unit condominium project by The Homestead Group Associates, said Wendy Wiles, a Newport Beach attorney representing the two districts. The project was approved last year by the county Regional Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors.

Wiles said Homestead also will be a defendant in the suit.

“Everyone acknowledges the school districts are over capacity,” Wiles said. “To permit the construction of more subdivisions in the Santa Clarita Valley is putting the districts in a severe crisis situation.”

The Homestead project would add relatively few children to schools in the districts. But school-district officials said any added students would strain their systems.

“We’re in the position now, even if they produced a few kids, it’s still more than what we have capacity for,” said James Bown, director of support services for the Hart school district.

Furthermore, the project was chosen as a target because it was the first development to clear the entire planning-approval process that would add students to the systems, Wiles said.

A Homestead spokesman said the company is merely a “pawn” in the conflict.

“The school has an argument with the county. We just happen to be the first ones to come along,” said Bob Sims, vice president of Engineering Service Corp., the project’s engineering firm.

School officials warned that other developers might be included in the suit if the Board of Supervisors continues to endorse new housing construction that would aggravate classroom crowding.

The districts maintain that the Homestead project should be blocked because the county did not follow court-mandated computerized guidelines for approving housing developments.

The county’s development monitoring system, or DMS, demonstrated that there were not enough classrooms in either district to handle new students projected to live in the condominium project, Wiles said.

If the condominium project is built in the Newhall area, the DMS found that it would necessitate adding one elementary classroom, a third of a junior high classroom and half of a senior high classroom.

According to DMS guidelines, a project normally would be rejected or scaled back unless the developer could offer ways to mitigate projected crowding in classrooms.

The county agreed to use the DMS last spring as part of a court settlement ending an unrelated 14-year civil battle over growth controls in the county’s unincorporated areas. The DMS is designed to ensure orderly growth in the booming unincorporated areas of the county--including the Santa Clarita, Antelope and east San Gabriel valleys, Malibu and Las Virgenes.

County officials said they are following the DMS guidelines in approving construction.

But Ray Ristic, a county planning official, said schools pose a special problem because of a 1986 state school-financing law. He said the law, which allows school districts to charge developers up to $1.50 a square foot for new school buildings, precludes the county from requiring developers to further compensate districts.

The Hart and Newhall districts disagree with the county’s interpretation of the state law. Officials of the districts want the county to consider, in some cases, requiring developers to build schools or donate school sites.

The officials also suggest that the county should reject some projects, scale down others and phase in some over longer periods.