Aides Ponder Bradley Demands on Porter Ranch

Responding to Mayor Tom Bradley’s warning last week that he would veto the proposed Porter Ranch development if it is not changed to his satisfaction, aides to Bradley and City Councilman Hal Bernson said Monday they are near agreement on all but one of the mayor’s suggested changes.

“They see eye to eye on a lot of it,” said Jane Blumenfeld, the mayor’s planning adviser. “It’s just a matter of working out the specifics. The concepts they mutually agree on.”

Today’s meeting of the City Council’s Planning and Land-Use Management Committee should reveal more about Bernson’s willingness to compromise on the project to mollify Bradley, who chose last Friday to discuss in public the concerns his staff had raised with the Porter Ranch developer as early as August.

Beverly Hills developer Nathan Shapell’s $2-billion proposal for 2,195 single-family homes, 1,200 townhouses and nearly 6 million square feet of commercial space in the hills north of the Simi Valley Freeway is scheduled to be heard today by the planning committee, which Bernson chairs. The development, which would be in Bernson’s district, would be the largest in the city’s history.

In a letter to the council and at a news conference Friday, Bradley urged several changes in the plan, such as inclusion of affordable housing and an internal transit system. Bradley also called for distribution of neighborhood retail stores throughout the project’s residential areas.

Bernson was not available for comment Monday but his chief deputy, Greig Smith, predicted that nine of Bradley’s 10 suggested changes can be resolved in committee hearings. The lone sticking point for Bernson, he said, was Bradley’s recommendation that the amount of parking in the project’s office complex be cut in half in order to promote ride-sharing and public transit.

Some form of an internal transit system, the planting of trees, the installation of dual plumbing in office buildings to promote the use of reclaimed water and programs for recycling and yard composting all can be included, Smith said.

Of Bradley’s recommendation for affordable housing, Smith said: “We’ll have to probably live with something on that issue. I don’t know what it is.”

Bradley rarely has intervened in a development issue before council action on it. Bradley aides said Friday’s news conference signaled a willingness by the mayor to become more involved in local planning matters.

Bradley’s letter to the council said he had “reservations” about the 1.5-million-square-foot regional shopping mall that would be part of the Porter Ranch development. But the letter did not call for specific reductions in a proposed mall, or in the overall size of the commercial complex, where office buildings would be as high as 10 stories.

“What the mayor did really wasn’t that significant in terms of the development,” said one city planning official familiar with the project. The official, speaking on the condition that he not be named, added: “If he really wanted to come down on it, the main issue is transportation and the amount of commercial (development). . . . I found most of the things, with the exception of the parking, pretty cosmetic stuff.”