Local Elections : Antonovich Takes Credit and Flak for Developments

By LYNN O’SHAUGHNESSY

May 22, 1988 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

On the northern rim of Supervisor Mike Antonovich’s district, developers cannot build houses fast enough.

Any time a new subdivision is planned on Los Angeles County’s last frontier, hordes of people typically show up hoping that they will be the ones to move in. Deluged builders use lotteries to select the lucky buyers.

For most of the seekers, a “starter” home in the rest of Los Angeles County is out of their reach, so they flock to the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, where $175,000 or less will still buy a three-bedroom house with a back yard and a two-car garage in a preferred school district.

With his pro-development record, Antonovich, who is facing his toughest reelection bid, takes a lot of credit for the mortgage gold rush. But the two-term Republican incumbent has also taken a lot of flak.

Hundreds of students in the northern reaches of Antonovich’s 5th Supervisorial District, an area that arches from the western Santa Monica Mountains to the Antelope Valley, are attending classes in trailers because the schools are packed. At rush hour, Santa Clarita Valley motorists can wait at some clogged intersections for 15 minutes--surpassing downtown Los Angeles for gridlock honors.

“No matter where you go, to a baseball field, at the market, people say, ‘I can’t believe what they are doing out here,’ ” said Mike Lyons, an Antonovich critic. “The newcomers are even more shocked than the oldcomers.”

Growing pains in north Los Angeles County, and to a lesser extent in the Santa Monica Mountains, triggered a backlash this year that caught up with Antonovich. Eight men and one woman, most of them motivated by opposition to rapid development, jumped into the June 7, nonpartisan primary to oppose the boyish-looking supervisor.

Neither the supervisor nor the building industry is apologetic about supporting a vigorous growth policy. Turning off the spigot would lead to a housing catastrophe, they say, because the county’s population will continue multiplying whether or not new houses are built.

“Two-thirds of our growth in Los Angeles County is a result of births, not people moving in,” Antonovich said. “I don’t know how the county could tell people they cannot have a child!”

The supervisor’s philosophy is reflected in his votes.

During an interview, Antonovich could not recall a single instance since he took office in 1980 where he and the board sided with community groups and rejected a housing project. Antonovich maintains that the Regional Planning Commission, whose members are appointed by the supervisors, weeds out unworthy developments before they reach his desk.

The board also routinely allows developers to build hundreds, and sometimes thousands, more homes than zoning regulations allow. A check of board records since January, 1986, shows that the supervisors approved every zone change request of 25 or more acres.

But developers must make concessions, Antonovich emphasized. They might have to construct a road, cut down fewer oak trees or otherwise make their projects more acceptable to neighbors.

Developers say they have been taught by Antonovich to consult their sometimes hostile neighbors before unleashing their earthmovers. They complain that it is taking two or three years longer to navigate their projects through a county bureaucracy that has gotten a lot pickier.

“People think all you have to do is buy a piece of land, draw some lines, everybody smiles at it and it is jammed through,” said Jack Shine, a major developer in the Santa Clarita Valley.

But Antonovich cannot shake the perception among his critics that he is cozy with the building industry, which has given $881,139, or 48%, of the $1.8 million in contributions he has received from 1984 to mid-1987. Community activists were outraged to learn that Antonovich had formed a “Land Use Cabinet” five or six years ago made up of building industry executives, county officials and Antonovich that met regularly in the supervisor’s office. After its existence was discovered last year, the cabinet--which Antonovich said is a harmless advisory group--stopped meeting.

While the board reviews scores of housing projects in the 5th District, some are more memorable for the precedents set, the emotions triggered or the lawsuits filed.

From different parts of the district, three cases illustrate how Antonovich and homeowner constituents have parted company over growth issues:

- The “dump Antonovich” movement was started on the western edge of the Santa Monica Mountains by affluent homeowners who share their back yards with coyotes and bobcats. It was here in the early 1980s that Antonovich, as a fledgling supervisor, arguably faced his first significant showdown with his constituents over land use.

The Currey-Riach Co. proposed construction of about 1,200 condominiums and houses, as well as building 1.2 million square feet of commercial and industrial structures adjacent to Malibu Creek State Park’s rolling hills and craggy peaks.

Calabasas-area homeowners were angered because some of the homes to be built on the 516-acre development were going up in a scenic valley where the county previously had banned construction. The restriction had been imposed by the county’s Malibu-Santa Monica Mountains area plan, the culmination of four years work by a county-appointed committee charged with balancing growth with the need to protect the mountains.

As a trade-off, the county’s Regional Planning Commission ordered Currey-Riach to leave undisturbed 215 acres of hills overlooking the valley. The commission required the developer to donate the land to an agency such as the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy or the National Park Service.

The move tempered opposition from homeowners and environmentalists. Many expressed delight at protecting the hills as parkland.

But Currey-Riach balked, saying it did not want to turn over the land for park purposes and appealed to the Board of Supervisors. In the dispute, Antonovich sided with the developer, one of his major contributors, and antagonized concerned constituents all over again.

At a 1983 public hearing, Antonovich said he was worried that a park agency might try to sell its 215-acre gift to a developer. Instead, he won the support of his board colleagues to deed the land’s development rights to the county.

Community residents were “dumbstruck” by Antonovich’s logic, recalled Kenneth Wikle, an attorney, who was president of the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation.

“It was preposterous beyond belief, the idea the state Department of Parks and Recreation would take Santa Monica Mountain open space for development. . . . It was just another Antonovich pro-development ploy.”

In a recent interview, Antonovich promised that the board would not vote to return the development rights to the builder. He also pointed out his role in getting an eight-story office building in the development reduced to four stories, in line with critics’ demands.

- For the last two years, the most dogged critics of the board’s growth policies have been the Santa Clarita Valley’s five school districts.

Each time a new Santa Clarita Valley subdivision is on the supervisors’ agenda--and that’s most of the time--the schools’ attorneys make their plea. They want projects rejected unless the developers help with school construction.

The three high schools are jammed, and there is no money to build another one. Meanwhile, the inventory of classroom trailers for all grade levels keeps rising.

The developers, however, argue that requiring them to bear the brunt of school construction would trigger higher prices and put home ownership out of the reach of more people.

Building Industry

The board, led by Antonovich, consistently has sided with the builders. The supervisor has maintained that the problem can be solved by the educators and the building industry hashing it out themselves.

But talks have failed. In March, two school boards filed suit against the county for hobbling them with overcrowded schools. More lawsuits against the county are planned.

“Originally we were non-confrontational,” said Supt. Reed Montgomery of the Castaic Union School District. “As the problem got worse and worse and the developers told us they weren’t going to cooperate, we became more confrontational. What choice did we have?”

Antonovich, a former teacher, said he is sympathetic, but the schools must turn to the state for money. A state law passed in 1986, which requires developers to pay a school construction fee, precludes the county from asking them to dig deeper in their pockets, he said.

But the schools contend that a 1987 court settlement supersedes the state law. Last year, the county agreed to approve housing tracts only where there will be enough schools, roads, sewers and water to absorb new homeowners. A computerized system was devised to warn against overbuilding.

But the schools’ attorneys obtained a memo that Antonovich wrote to the county’s planning director in November asking him to change the computer system to “delete all reference to school-related issues as soon as possible. I am concerned that we may be exposed to lawsuits.”

Antonovich said he wrote the memo because he believed that the county could not legally compel developers to help the school districts.

- As development spreads like spilled milk to the far edges of the county, environmentalists are getting pushed farther back. But they are making a stand in the Santa Susana Mountains, where red sandstone boulders and rocky cliffs were formed millions of years ago.

A builder wants to create 71 estates in the mountains above Chatsworth to expand a luxurious compound of chateau, Tudor and southern-style mansions that realtors are calling the “Bel-Air of the San Fernando Valley.”

“It’s probably the worst proposed development I’ve seen in Los Angeles County,” said Carlyle Hall, co-director of the Center for Law in the Public Interest. “It’s unbelievable. It’s a complete and utter abuse of the significant ecological-area designation.”

Ecological Areas

In the bulldozers’ path are two of the county’s 64 significant ecological areas that historically have been accorded extra protections. In the 1970s, scientists deemed the area special because it serves as a wildlife corridor, allowing animals in the Santa Monica Mountains to reach the northern mountain ranges. It is also a refuge for the endangered Santa Susana tarweed, a sticky, resinous plant with yellow flowers that clings to rocks.

The Board of Supervisors agreed in 1987 to allow a builder to encroach upon a designated significant ecological area.

The board gave the go-ahead to Indian Wells Estates Inc. But the Santa Susana Mountain Park Assn. filed suit alleging that the county had to conduct an environmental impact report. Withdrawing their approval, the supervisors are awaiting the study.

But Antonovich cautioned that concerns about wildlife have to be balanced with the rights of the property owner, who could sue the county if the project is derailed. He said the tarweed and the wildlife corridor should not be bothered because the homes sit on large lots and horses will be limited to trails.

“You think one home per five acres is overdeveloped?” Antonovich asked incredulously. “I think he (Hall) is over-exaggerating, unless he wants everyone to live in one home per 100 acres.”

Meanwhile, preserving the entire wildlife corridor has become a priority of a task force made up of homeowners, environmentalists and local government agencies. Other efforts to restrict development in the mountains in unincorporated portions of Chatsworth have come from Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson. Alarmed at the county’s approval of development in the rocky terrain, the Republican councilman successfully pushed last year for 1,011 acres to be annexed to the city.

When asked about his GOP colleague’s role in the annexation, Antonovich replied, “He was probably posturing.”

ANTONOVICH’S TOP 25 CONTRIBUTORS

Contributions from January 1980 thru March 1988:

Poe Development Co., developer $48,900

Newhall Land and Farming Co., developer $43,575

Castaic Clay Mfg. Co., brick manufacturer $39,950

Shapell Industries, construction $35,875

The Holden Group/Security First, investments $34,750

Memel, Jacobs, Pierno, Gersh & Ellsworth, law $29,220

C.R. Wojciechowski, developer $28,045

Maxy Pope Alles, retired/housewife $25,550

Bubalo Construction, builder $25,400