County Alters Report, Reapproves Housing Project : Foes of Agoura Tract Say Supervisors Acted to Defuse Suit Over Environmental Study

In what critics called an unusual admission of error, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday retroactively changed an environmental impact report on a development the board had approved five months ago after bitter public debate.

The environmental report is now the subject of a lawsuit by environmentalists and homeowners seeking to overturn the board’s March 2 approval of construction of 150 homes at Paramount Ranch in Agoura, the former site of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

County officials said the changes in the environmental report were meant to explain the benefits of the board’s order reducing the project from 159 to 150 homes.

But a lawyer for the Sierra Club and the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, charged that the county’s real reason for altering the report was the lawsuit, which contends the report had inadequately evaluated alternatives to the developer’s proposal.

The changes adopted unanimously by the board Tuesday included a reference to an economic study, prepared for developer Brian Heller, that contends that alternatives to Heller’s proposal were too costly.

“It’s kind of extraordinary,” said Carlyle W. Hall Jr., the plaintiffs’ lawyer. “They’re confessing that they made a mistake. . . . I guess they feel they’re in a bad legal position and needed to do something.”

The board’s resolution Tuesday said the supervisors “inadvertently and prematurely” approved the project in March without completing the environmental report, leaving gaps that were filled by Tuesday’s action.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who represents the area, described the board’s action as remedying a minor oversight.

In March, “it would have been better to have closed the hearing, indicated our intent to approve the cases and requested staff to prepare the final documents for board action at a later date,” a statement from Antonovich said.

Richard D. Weiss, senior deputy county counsel, maintained that the board’s action was not motivated by the lawsuit. But he conceded that “anything that would strengthen the final environmental document . . . is going to benefit the county” in the lawsuit.

In a letter to the board, Hall disputed the findings of Heller’s study and said the board “cannot reopen the record, selectively admit only certain items . . . close the record and re-enact its March 2 actions without reopening the public hearing.”

But Weiss responded that there has already been sufficient public comment on Heller’s economic analysis, which was made public in December.

“This matter was the subject of protracted public hearings,” Weiss said. “The county has heard the nature of the opposition and understands it.”

In Antonovich’s statement, the supervisor reiterated his support for the project. The board’s action on Tuesday re-enacted all the conditions Antonovich and the board had imposed in March, including the establishment of an open-space buffer zone between the project and neighboring National Park Service property.

In the background during the board’s deliberations earlier this year was an attempt by the Park Service and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to acquire the development site for use as a park. Heller has not responded to an offer by the conservancy to buy the 320-acre oak meadow near Cornell and Wagon roads in Agoura.