Panel Questions Growth Curbs, Postpones Vote on General Plan : Limits: Developers want to build 38,000 units in the Santa Clarita Valley, which the proposal would restrict.

Los Angeles County planning commissioners refused--at least temporarily--on Thursday to approve a proposal that would sharply scale back plans to build 38,000 residential units in the Santa Clarita Valley.

The Regional Planning Commission did not express displeasure with the basic elements and philosophy of the proposed general plan. But the commissioners did question how the plan, a broad blueprint for controlling development, would be applied.

Is the new plan merely a set of recommendations that can be easily changed, the commissioners asked. Or is the plan a rigid planning document that will kill proposals for thousands of new dwelling units?

To help answer those questions, commissioners asked the staff of the Department of Regional Planning to draw up guidelines on how the new general plan would be used.

The proposed general plan would guide growth for 20 years in the Santa Clarita Valley, the fastest-growing region in the county for the past four years.

The plan, written by the Department of Regional Planning after several public hearings, was more than two years in the making. It must later be approved by the Board of Supervisors. The Regional Planning Commission will take up the issue again May 14.

The commissioners spent more than two hours discussing the complex and often confusing issue. “I’ve discovered through our conversation that I don’t really understand what we’re doing,” Commissioner Sadie B. Clark said. Central to the debate over the new general plan are 41 requests by developers to construct 38,000 houses, condominiums and apartments in the area.

The 41 proposals would not be allowed under the existing Santa Clarita Valley general plan, and developers have asked that their proposals be included in the new plan.

But officials with the Department of Regional Planning have said roads and public services could not immediately support such growth. They have instead recommended that only 12,500 units be allowed under the new plan, which would uphold a county policy to keep the valley’s population under 270,000 by the year 2010.

Technically, however, developers whose projects are not included in the new plan could come to the commission later and request amendments to the plan that would allow their projects to proceed.

The question facing the commissioners, therefore, was whether they would strictly adhere to the new plan or allow exceptions. There were no clear-cut answers to the question Thursday. Commissioner Lee Strong said the commission would still have to consider projects on a case-by-case basis under the new plan. But the plan is valuable, he said, because it sets the guidelines for growth.

“We’re simply saying these are the rules we’re going to play by,” Strong said.

Charles Moore, principal deputy county counsel, predicted that, if the new plan is adopted, developers will not be able to obtain plan amendments as easily as they have in the past. “It will be a restriction on future amendments,” Moore said.

Officials with the city of Santa Clarita and area community groups have repeatedly complained that the county routinely let developers amend the plan at will. In time, the community groups charge, the plan became meaningless because it was not followed.

Even the commissioners agreed that developers, and not the existing general plan, had set the pace for growth in the area during the 1980s. Strong said plan amendments were granted “without any understanding of how that was affecting the entire Santa Clarita Valley general plan.”