Porter Move: Questionable Process

The Times on Sunday encouraged Mayor Tom Bradley to hold to his commendable insistence that the proposed $2-billion Porter Ranch development be significantly modified so as to ease its impact on the northwest San Fernando Valley. Just at deadline time, the mayor’s office has subsequently revealed, Bradley and Councilman Hal Bernson were cutting a deal that achieves some of the mayor’s demands, but far from all.

Bernson, whose district includes Porter Ranch, said he supported the project of developer Nathan Shapell in part because of the attendant public works that Shapell would finance, such as highway access and land for schools. OK, but the scope of the Chatsworth-area project that will spread across 1,300 acres of hillsides makes it the biggest such development in city history. The mitigation agreement worked out last week would not significantly reduce the traffic congestion and air pollution to result from more than 3,000 homes and town houses and some 6 million square feet of office and shop space. More to the point, Shapell did not have to back down on the density of the lucrative commercial development.

That the project will feature some additional affordable housing and a transit system is because the mayor chose to challenge it at all. The fact that the mayor did not get all he might have is no reason to flatly oppose the development. Still, one has to wonder about the land-use approval process: Should such major decisions be negotiated this late in the game almost exclusively, in private, by a mayor and a city councilman?

Eyebrows inevitably will arch when it is understood that Shapell contributed more than $11,000 to Bernson’s campaign fund and more than $40,000 to Bradley’s in the past five years. Credibility is stretched even further when the public learns that former city Planning Commission Chairman Dan Garcia provided Shapell with legal expertise in getting the project through the city bureaucracy. And Shapell’s lobbyist is Robert M. Wilkinson, who used to represent the Porter Ranch area on the City Council.

There is no suggestion that Shapell’s contributions got him anything. Nor is it to suggest that the decision is necessarily a bad one because so many vested interests had their hands in the action. But if ever a project seemed to have high-powered influence behind it at City Hall, this one did.

The history of Porter Ranch is a case study in the urgent need for effective campaign finance reform in Los Angeles and throughout Southern California. Even the suspicion that Shapell’s big campaign bucks and his high-priced lobbying talent might have gotten him special treatment at any point strains the integrity and credibility of the system.