Brickbats for Granite Sidewalks : Beverly Hills: A protest by office building owners paid off, and planners are rethinking a $50-million beautification plan.

Outraged at the thought of paying as much as a million dollars a year for granite sidewalks and hanging flowerpots, Beverly Hills office building owners prevailed on the City Council on Wednesday to rethink a $50-million beautification plan for the downtown business district.

More than 125 building owners, managers, tenants and landlords jammed the council chambers to protest the charges, which fall more heavily on taller buildings that were erected before the city imposed a three-story height limit in 1964.

After a public hearing that lasted until midnight, the City Council voted to ask its planners to come back Dec. 5 with a list of cheaper alternatives.

The plan originally was to change the look of the triangle-shaped downtown area and adjacent South Beverly Drive by replacing concrete sidewalks with $10 million worth of granite paving stones.

There would be valet parking zones, designer trash cans, automatically sprinkled flowerpots, old-fashioned lampposts and other accessories, all of them intended to help the city’s retailers meet the challenge from newer shopping centers elsewhere on the Westside.

Council members suggested that costs could be cut by dropping a few streets from the project, letting developers of new buildings along Wilshire Boulevard pay for their own sidewalks and going along with appeals from South Beverly Drive property owners to be left out.

The audience applauded a suggestion to drop the granite altogether, but city staffers reminded council members that they voted to use the costly stone when the design was submitted to them earlier this year.

A separate maintenance district would be set up to clean the granite every three months, said Mark Scott, director of environmental services.

“In the long run, it’s not going to be as dirty a sidewalk (as concrete),” he said.

The urban design program is part of a two-year revitalization that already has seen the creation of several hundred new parking spaces at city expense.

The latest proposals would be funded in part by the city but mostly through assessments on property owners under the state’s Municipal Improvement Act of 1913.

The city hired the engineering firm BSI Inc. to figure out how much each property owner should pay, using a complex formula that takes into account how much sidewalk fronts each lot, among other factors.

Owners of older buildings that exceed the three-story height limit were assessed more because they earn more revenue per square foot of land than the owners of low-rise buildings, planners said Wednesday night.

“If we’d done it differently, we’d have every retailer in here complaining they were being charged for every high-rise,” said Jeff Cooper of BSI.

At Wednesday’s meeting, called under a provision of the act that blocks such an assessment if owners of more than half the affected land area protest, high-rise owners and their representatives complained that the charges caught them by surprise.

“This is not Boston. This is not a tea tax. We certainly don’t plan to dress up as Indians, but taxation without representation remains the issue here,” said Steve Terwilliger, vice president of a firm that operates a 10-story office building on Wilshire Boulevard.

Some protesters said the rental market has been flat in Beverly Hills for several years and argued that now is not the time to increase costs.

“Rental rates are already as high as the market will allow. Any attempt to pass through (the cost of the improvements) will lead to an increase in vacancies and a decrease in the market value of the buildings,” said Harry D. Blank, a real estate appraiser.

Others said they like Beverly Hills the way it is, or accused the City Council of gold-plating the project for its own glory.

“Will your next step be a Walk of Fame with your names in gold letters on the granite sidewalks?” asked Gigi Zakwin, manager of a building on South Beverly Drive.

Ron Sims, representing the owners of a building at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Roxbury Drive, said the use of granite would be “folly.”

“I am sure Mr. (Max) Salter (the mayor) would never approve it for Beno’s (Salter’s chain of clothing stores) if he were a tenant in Beverly Hills,” Sims said.

“I can’t afford the rents,” Salter replied.

“Nor the assessments!” Sims shot back.

“When you talk about $50 million, it sounds like a lot of money, but it’s not a lot of money when you’re talking about a whole area,” Salter said later.

He warned that Beverly Hills could go the way of Hollywood Boulevard and the Miracle Mile, two shopping areas that once prospered but now are plagued by vacancies, if it does not keep up its looks.

By the end of the evening, Cooper, the assessment engineer, said protests had been received from owners making up 41.25% of the proposed district, not enough to block the program.

Responding to charges that high-rise owners were ignored during the planning process, the city’s Scott said planners had concentrated their attention on retailers.

They believed that all property owners would benefit from the changes, and expected opposition from merchants more than from owners of office buildings, he said. “We regret very much that we didn’t have more involvement earlier in the process,” Scott said.