Park La Brea Tenants Win a Round in Gating Feud : Housing: Managers want to charge residents full cost of making complex into guarded community. But city officials have rejected the application.

Park La Brea residents have at least temporarily won a battle with managers of their apartment complex who want to charge tenants the full cost of making it into a fenced and guarded community.

City officials late last week threw out an application by the complex’s managers, Forest City Enterprises Inc., for permission to charge tenants $3,054,588, the estimated cost of putting up fences and gates and buying the streets inside the complex from the city.

City requirements for the project’s completion had not been met before the application was submitted, said Barbara Zeidman, director of the city Rent Stabilization Division, which rejected the Sept. 25 application out of hand.

“The (gating) system as a whole was not operating on that date,” Zeidman said. She said Forest City also failed to “provide information justifying the costs of the fences and gates.”

Forest City, which owns a half-interest in the 176-acre apartment complex, the largest in Los Angeles, has until next week to appeal the rejection. If it chooses not to appeal, it may reapply, but the new application would fall under recently instituted city rules that would allow the owners to charge tenants at most only 50% of the cost of any capital improvements.

Tenants’ representatives said they were pleased by the outcome.

“We’re delighted,” said David Hamlin, president of the Park La Brea Tenants Assn. “We’ve won the basic battle we wanted (to win),” he said.

“We had argued from the very beginning that both the spirit and the letter of the law were violated when Park La Brea applied for work that was not nearly done when the application was filed,” he said.

Park La Brea General Manager Francis Heavey said the company had not decided whether to appeal or reapply.

“I never thought the application would be rejected,” Heavey said, adding that he believed the application had been filed on time and had met all city requirements for project completion.

Making Park La Brea a gated community was first proposed in 1978. But management did not act until last fall, after the City Council changed the rules under which landlords can charge tenants for property improvements.

Park La Brea management rushed to file an application last Sept. 25 to meet an Oct. 1 deadline under the old rules. The $3,054,588 would have been charged to Park La Brea’s 10,000 tenants, amortized over five years and added to monthly rents in perpetuity.

The $12.09 monthly charge to tenants would have been subject to yearly increases based on changes in the consumer price index.

However, under the new rules, only 50% of the cost of capital improvements may be passed on to tenants. That would be in the form of a monthly $6.05 surcharge that would be dropped after six years.

Meanwhile, Hamlin said tenants of the complex are not thrilled with the gating system, which, among other things, was to keep outsiders from parking in tenants’ spaces.

“Most folks I’ve talked to are asking, ‘Why haven’t we gained significant parking spaces because of this?’ ” Hamlin said.

“There seem to be more parking spaces during office hours, 9 to 5, but that improvement seems to vanish during the evenings,” Hamlin said.

He said tenants also are annoyed by the clanging of the locked metal pedestrian gates and small traffic snarls created when automobile access gates do not open immediately.