Plan Sinks for Homes at Reservoir : Controversy: An aide to Mayor Bradley says the proposal for teachers’ housing appears to be dead.

A top aide to Mayor Tom Bradley who initiated the idea to develop faculty housing on city-owned Chatsworth Reservoir said Wednesday that he will meet tomorrow to clarify for Councilman Hal Bernson his concept for the 1,323-acre site.

But Art Gastelum, director of the Mayor’s Office of Economic Development, said he would not use the meeting to lobby Bernson to support the idea of faculty housing at the reservoir, a dry lake bed in the west San Fernando Valley.

Bernson “has reached conclusions based on news reports that were not accurate,” Gastelum said. “I owe him the courtesy of explaining to him what the concept really is--what the concept really was.” Such a courtesy explanation is what is intended with tomorrow’s meeting, he said.

“I’m not trying to revive this thing at the Chatsworth Reservoir,” Gastelum said. “As far as I know it’s dead.”

Bernson could not be reached for comment about the meeting.

Bernson sharply opposed any plan to develop 5,000 housing units for faculty at the reservoir. Last Saturday, The Times reported that such a plan was being prepared for the site.

The plan was described as moronic by Bernson, who called the reservoir “one of the most ecologically sensitive areas in the city of Los Angeles.”

But Gastelum said Wednesday that his idea was to build 500 homes for faculty--over 10 years--on 156 acres of the reservoir, which is owned by the city’s Department of Water and Power. “Ninety-five percent of the property would’ve been open space. The parcels I was looking at surrounded the reservoir,” he said.

The idea was to offer low- to moderate-priced housing for sale to teachers as an incentive for them to move to Los Angeles. The idea of using housing as a lure is still being explored by Gastelum.

Gastelum said the parcels he was reviewing for development lie outside the actual reservoir, which is bounded by a concrete embankment.

Gastelum, who also is Bradley’s liaison to the DWP, said the reservoir is grossly under-utilized. “DWP has an asset there that’s not doing anything. We shouldn’t leave it the way it is,” he said. “It’s costing $100,000 a year just to cut the weeds there. It doesn’t make sense.”

The property now sits idle. Trespassing is forbidden. At the very least, hikers and naturalists should be able to trek through the area, Gastelum said. Very infrequently naturalist groups are permitted to enter the property, for example, to count the migrating Canada geese that use a pond at the north end of the property, DWP officials said.

The reservoir, built in the 1930s primarily to provide irrigation water for orchards and farms in the West Valley, was drained in 1969 to prepare it for improvements. It has been empty ever since. In the early 1970s plans to restore the reservoir were dropped due to the high cost of complying with new state laws about the earthquake safety of dams, such as the one at the reservoir.

As recently as March, 1988, DWP was exploring possible sale of portions of the property. In a March, 1988, letter DWP real estate executives objected to a proposal to zone the property for agricultural use on the grounds that such a restrictive designation would hurt the property’s value, as DWP contemplated selling “substantial portions” of the reservoir.

But DWP now has no plans to dispose of any part of the property, said Ted McGillis, DWP assistant chief real estate officer. Its current status will continue until the agency gets other directions from the district’s councilman, the mayor and the DWP board, said Ed Freudenberg, DWP press secretary.

Bradley’s office tried Tuesday to defuse the controversy stirred up by last weekend’s accounts of the faculty housing plan. In a letter to Bernson, Bradley said that the plan was only in its infancy and that the threshold question of whether UCLA or the Los Angeles Unified School District were even interested in it had not been answered.