Porter Ranch Plan Too Big, AQMD Says : Planning: Air quality officials say the project could damage the environment. The district adopts a ‘more aggressive’ stance.

Regional air quality officials, who have never before leveled detailed criticism at an individual development project, said Wednesday that the huge Porter Ranch proposal is potentially detrimental to air quality and should be scaled down.

The criticism by the South Coast Air Quality Management District reflects both the size of the $2-billion Porter Ranch project--the largest single mixed-use development in Los Angeles history--and of the district’s view that air quality improvements must be accompanied by at least some controls on growth.

AQMD spokesman Bill Kelly acknowledged that the district was taking “a new step” by releasing its 11-page analysis of Porter Ranch, a residential and commercial project planned for 1,300 undeveloped acres in the hills above Chatsworth.

Kelly added that scrutiny of large development projects is a policy that officials at AQMD “intend to pursue more aggressively” in the wake of the district’s adoption of an air quality management plan last year.

The district’s criticism of Porter Ranch as it awaits action by the Los Angeles City Council is also sure to spark debate about how actively the district should be involved in land-use decisions.

“For AQMD to get involved in discussion on a development project at this stage is probably unprecedented,” said William G. Luddy, president of the Los Angeles Planning Commission.

Daniel P. Garcia, who was Luddy’s predecessor at the helm of the Planning Commission and who now represents the Porter Ranch developer as a private attorney, was more blunt.

“If I was a councilperson from any city or county in the region, I would take this letter to be a declaration of war by the AQMD on local decision-making,” Garcia said.

The Porter Ranch proposal is for 2,195 single-family homes, 1,200 townhouses and nearly 6 million square feet of commercial space, including a high-rise office complex and a regional shopping mall. The developer is Nathan Shapell, a prominent Beverly Hills builder.

The AQMD’s comments on Porter Ranch were made in the form of a criticism of the project’s environmental impact report.

Specifically, the air district discounted the developer’s contentions that Porter Ranch would contribute to a balance of jobs and housing in the northwest San Fernando Valley. The district said the project would not necessarily bring jobs and houses closer together because “many of those jobs will not pay enough to allow those people to live in that area,” Kelly said.

Among the 39 recommendations the district made for Porter Ranch were suggestions that the project’s commercial elements be scaled down and that its environmental report demonstrate “that the price of project housing matches the income of the people employed in the project area.”

Paul Clarke, a spokesman for Shapell’s Porter Ranch Development Co., said the district’s assessment of the jobs-housing balance was inaccurate. He said he assumed that the district used the same methodology as the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which last year criticized the project’s jobs-housing balance but later toned down its criticism.

“SCAG admitted they were wrong, so I’m sure the AQMD will have to admit they are wrong too,” Clarke said.

Clarke also said the air district’s findings were based on outdated information about the project’s size, which has been reduced from 7.7 million square feet of commercial space to about 6 million.