Judge OKs Extension on Zoning Snag : Warner Ridge: The city gets more time to resolve the conflict between the current designation and what is called for in the community plan for the 21.5-acre site.

A judge gave the city of Los Angeles additional time to correct a zoning discrepancy surrounding the controversial Warner Ridge property in a ruling Thursday that buoyed Councilwoman Joy Picus’ hopes for blocking commercial development of the site.

With his decision, Superior Court Judge John R. Zebrowski, responding to a city request for more time, gave officials until late December to amend the area’s community plan so that only residential development would be permitted on the hotly contested 21.5-acre Warner Ridge site.

Deputy City Atty. Tony Alperin called the ruling a partial victory for the city. “We’re pleased and hopeful,” said Jackie Brainard, Picus’ press secretary.

An attorney for the embattled developer, who is seeking to build an office complex on the site, conceded that Zebrowski’s ruling “created a loophole” for the city.

The decision “opens up the possibility for them to push through a plan amendment” to cure the discrepancy between the zoning and community plan for Warner Ridge, said Robert I. McMurry, who represents Spound Co. and Johnson-Wax Development Co., partners in the Warner Ridge project.

Still, McMurry predicted that Picus will find it difficult, even with the extra time, to get the city machinery geared up to amend the community plan before the judge’s deadline.

Normally, such plan amendments take more than a year to be processed through City Hall, and changing the Warner Ridge plan will require a full environmental impact report, McMurry said.

Completing such reports can be the most time-consuming aspects of a plan amendment.

McMurry said the big fight now will be in the political arena as Picus lobbies to get city staff to prepare an amended community plan at a break-neck pace while getting her council colleagues, planning commissioners and the mayor on her side. “Now it’s a political, not a legal, problem,” he said.

For the past two years, Picus has been at odds with the Warner Ridge developers because she wants only single-family houses on the Woodland Hills property, while the owners have tried to get City Hall permission to build 810,000 square feet of office buildings.

In January, at Picus’ insistence, the City Council zoned Warner Ridge for estate-sized houses, although the property remained designated on the city’s community plan as suitable for “neighborhood-office-commercial” development.

Subsequently, the developer sued to declare the city’s Warner Ridge zoning illegal on several grounds, one of those being that state law requires that the zoning and community plans be consistent.

On June 22, Zebrowski affirmed the principle, advocated by the developer, that when zoning and community plans are out of sync, zoning must be brought into conformity with community plans, not vice versa.

Zebrowski also gave the city until Aug. 21 to rezone the Warner Ridge property for commercial development.

But with his ruling Thursday, Zebrowski gave the city an extra four months to comply with his June decision.

City officials have always argued that they may achieve consistency by bringing the plan into compliance with the zoning.

If given enough time, that’s how they would cure the discrepancy, officials said.

But Zebrowski’s ruling in June did not seem to allow enough time to amend the community plan. Thursday’s decision, however, gave the city a reprieve of sorts.

On the other hand, McMurry said, his client was pleased that Zebrowski also ruled that his entire order--including the new deadline--would not be held in abeyance if the city appealed his decision.

Unless specially noted, lower court rulings are stayed during an appeal.

With appeals taking two years to go through the court system, simply filing for an appeal would give the city more than enough time to amend the community plan.