Building Permit Ban Would Guard Oaks : Environment: Under the proposed, stronger measure, builders could be barred for a decade for illegally cutting trees.

These are tough times for Quercus agrifolia.

At least that’s what Anson Burlingame--who has become something of a lobbyist for oaks--and other environmentalists are saying.

The Los Angeles City Council passed a law in 1980 to protect the California live oak and its indigenous-to-California relatives, including the Valley oak (Quercus lobata), from bulldozers and chain saws.

But in an era of megabuck development deals, the mild law--mixed with the relatively steep cost of complying with the ordinance and the city’s sporadic enforcement--may be losing its deterrent value.

“The economics has gotten to the point where it offers an invitation to cheat, and the oak trees are the losers,” said Burlingame, a retired builder from Tujunga, as he ranged through City Hall recently trying to marshal bureaucrats to investigate the latest report of an illegal oak tree removal.

But Burlingame and fellow oak tree paladin Gordon Murley, president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Homeowner Assns., hope the City Council will soon tilt the equation to make the illegal slaying of oaks a riskier enterprise.

Their dream is a law that would empower city officials to revoke any building permit issued to a developer who has violated the city’s oak tree protection law. They also want the revocation to remain in force for 10 years. If the malefactors have no outstanding building permits, they would be barred from getting any for 10 years.

In short, these oak tree radicals want to inflict a 10-year development ban on lawbreakers. Hitting developers in the pocketbook is where it will hurt them most, say the pair, who contend more than 1,000 oaks have been illegally felled since the oak tree law took effect 10 years ago.

That law makes it a criminal misdemeanor to destroy a mature oak without first obtaining a city permit--to be granted after city officials determine that the destruction is needed to allow for reasonable use of the property and the landowner agrees to replace each felled tree with two new ones. A misdemeanor is punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.

Any oak eight inches or more in diameter--measured at a point 4 1/2 feet above the ground--is protected by the law. The ordinance does not apply to oaks located on lots of less than one acre nor to any scrub oak.

Raymond Gandara, a senior tree surgeon with the city’s Board of Public Works, said malicious destruction of oaks is rare.

“A lot of the times, trees are illegally removed because people just aren’t aware of the ordinance,” said Gandara, whose unit is involved in enforcing the law.

More often than not, illegal removal incidents are settled by requiring the builder or developer to replace each illegally removed tree with two trees of a size larger--and more expensive--than what would have been required if they had complied with the letter of the law, Gandara said.

One of the larger recent applications to remove oaks was filed by the multimillion-dollar J. Paul Getty Art Center, now under construction in the hills above Brentwood.

A report filed by the art museum said no oaks were growing on the 105-acre parcel. But a sharp-eyed Department of Building and Safety official, visiting the site during an early construction phase last November, spotted a large, felled oak and reported it to city officials.

The museum was warned that the law had been violated and subsequently it filed applications to remove 44 oaks. The city has granted all of Getty’s applications and rejected the option of asking the city attorney’s office to prosecute the museum for illegally destroying one tree.

The road to strengthening the 1980 law has been a rocky one.

The council actually adopted a motion directing the city attorney’s office to draft a tough, 10-year development ban amendment, like the one Burlingame and Murley desire--five years ago.

But the proposed ordinance, finally presented to the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee two weeks ago amid some vague apologies about the delay, got a cool reception.

The city attorney proposed to allow developers, on appeal to the city’s five-member Building and Safety Commission, to regain their building permits and continue with their projects if they agreed to make amends for their illegal oak tree destruction. Such restitution, for example, could take the form of agreeing to plant replacement trees, said Deputy City Atty. Henry G. Morris.

Councilman Hal Bernson, the planning committee’s chairman, complained that the city attorney’s version was weaker than the ordinance the council had envisioned.

“I want developers to know that if they violate the law, their land will lie fallow for 10 years,” he said. Bernson was one of the authors of the 1985 motion; the other author, Councilman Howard Finn, died in 1986.

Flatly denying the building permits, Morris said, might be viewed by a court as so onerous as to constitute a “taking of a substantial property interest” which would require the city to pay the developer some compensation for the loss of use or value of their land.

Morris said that although the amendment his office had drafted might not live up to the expectations of oak tree hard-liners, it would impose a new level of deterrence. Under the law proposed by the city attorney’s office, the city could impose punishment that would be separate from any criminal prosecution under the existing law, Morris said.

But the critics also complained that the City Council, not the Building and Safety Commission, should be the court of last resort in setting the level of restitution imposed on a developer. City bureaucrats “don’t care about the trees” but the elected officials will, Murley said.

As an upshot of all this displeasure with the proposed ordinance, Bernson ordered the city attorney to go back to the drawing board and see if there were a way to make it tougher.

If the law is not toughened, environmentalists like Burlingame fear that the rising cost of complying with the existing law will make it increasingly tempting to take the risks of ignoring the law altogether.

A major problem with the 1980 law is that the cost of complying with requirements to gain official approval to destroy an oak can be sizable.

An application to remove an increment of 10 oaks costs $121. The retail cost of buying two replacement trees of the size required by the city--three inches in diameter--is about $700, said Valley Crest Tree Co. salesman Mike Domingo.

The city’s goal is to process an oak tree application in 30 days. During this period, an inspector from the city’s Bureau of Street Maintenance is supposed to examine the affected trees and determine if their removal is needed. Each application must then go before the city’s five-member Board of Public Works and win its approval.

Enduring such a slow and costly process makes it tempting to consider skirting the law, and that’s why tougher penalties are needed, oak tree activists say.

They also contend the city’s prosecutions under the existing law have been feeble and inept.

Murley and Burlingame said that one of the city’s four prosecutions under the law was dismissed last March by a judge because the city attorney failed to file the entire complaint in a timely manner.

In that case, the judge threw out nine counts of illegal oak tree destruction against Kris Rigdon, the developer of a woodsy 42-acre parcel in Sunland, stemming from a January, 1988 incident.

Deputy City Atty. Vincent B. Sato said the city is appealing the judge’s ruling in the Rigdon case.

In another case, the oak tree protection law was ruled unconstitutional by a Municipal Court judge. That ruling--not binding on other judges--was rendered in a case against Michael Miklenda, who was accused of bulldozing more than 50 oak trees in 1987 in Benedict Canyon to make way for construction of a luxury home.

City Atty. James Hahn even held a news conference to denounce Miklenda for an “outrageous act” as his office filed charges against the builder.

After the case was stopped by the judge’s ruling, Miklenda did agree to pay $3,000 to the Tree People, a nonprofit group that plants trees.

The city attorney’s proudest moment in enforcing the oak tree ordinance occurred in 1986 when Jasin Co., an Encino-based development firm, pleaded guilty to killing four 300-year-old oak trees and agreed to a settlement estimated at $31,000.

The city attorney’s record is of little solace to Burlingame.

“We’re losing oaks all the time,” he said. “What’s left in the Valley are the remnants of a grand old forest.”