Builder Agrees to Alter Project : $5-Million Warner Ridge Redesign Elicits Both Applause, Attacks

Moving to settle a 1 1/2-year-old fight with neighbors, a Woodland Hills developer said Friday that he has agreed to a $5-million redesign of a controversial ridge-top office project at the edge of Warner Center.

Builder Jack Spound said proposed changes to his 22-acre Warner Ridge development will make his nine-building project virtually invisible from nearby homes and from the adjoining Pierce College campus.

The new layout will also funnel most traffic away from a 1,367-home neighborhood next to the project site, at the northeast corner of Oxnard Street and De Soto Avenue, Spound said.

The revision was hailed by some residents of the area, known as Carlton Terrace. Others decried it as an attempt to gloss over the disruption they say the $150-million project will bring to the community.

Spound said the changes were the result of several dozen meetings with Carlton Terrace residents and door-to-door surveys he and co-developers have conducted. Residents were being notified of the revisions this week by mail.

He said the buildings are being moved north on the site, toward Pierce College, to remove them from the line of sight of the closest Carlton Terrace homes.

Heavy landscaping has been added to the plan, including planting grass and trees over a storm-channel cover that Spound said he now plans to install along De Soto. A driveway that had been planned to connect a parking structure with Oxnard Street has been eliminated, he said.

“No building will be visible from Carlton Terrace or the college campus,” Spound said. “Moving the buildings northward won’t be apparent to anyone standing on the college.”

The revisions were tentatively endorsed Friday by David Wolf, president of Pierce College, and by Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus, who represents the area.

Wolf said he has asked that Spound meet with college administrators to explain the changes--particularly projected traffic patterns.

“A lot of incremental changes have been made over the past few months,” Wolf said. “I think we’ve lost track of all of them.”

Jim Dawson, chief land-use aide to Picus, said the councilwoman is awaiting reaction from Woodland Hills residents before taking a position on the revised project.

“Obviously the changes are significant and important,” Dawson said. But, he added, “we don’t know the extent of community acceptance yet.”

Dawson said Spound seems to have gone “out of his way to communicate with people in the area with his series of newsletters and walking the area.” A true test of the revisions won’t come until residents and officials review a new environmental impact report and public hearings are held, Dawson said.

Reaction came swiftly Friday from neighborhood leaders, however.

Representatives of two small homeowner groups that had previously endorsed the Warner Ridge development offered their support. A larger homeowner association that has steadfastly urged rejection of the office project expressed opposition.

“We hope that the changes the developer has proposed will end the controversy,” said Jeri Ardalan, president of the 67-home Warner Hill Homeowners Assn. Members of his condominium association live just south of Spound’s site.

Tom Friedman, a leader of Concerned Carlton Terrace Homeowners, whose 40 members live east of the site, said he believes “with all my heart it will add value to our houses and not detract from them. This is a class act, period.”

Disagreeing was Robert Gross, a vice president of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization and leader of Carlton Terrace opposition to the project. His 1,200-member group has urged that homes, not offices, be built on the site.

Gross said Spound’s project could lead to problems blocks away from the office site--including adding dangerous traffic congestion on Burbank Boulevard in front of Parkman Junior High School.

If anything, Gross said, the revised plan “is worse. . . . It’s still too dense, the buildings are too high and it doesn’t comply with the community’s specific plan.”

The revision would add a third seven-story building to the two first proposed, Gross said.

“The community is up in arms. He still has to go through the public hearing process. If he doesn’t believe how the community feels, he’ll find out.”