Bernson Complaint Halts Disputed Southern Pacific Lumberyard Construction

Los Angeles city officials issued an order Wednesday temporarily halting construction by the Southern Pacific railroad of a controversial lumberyard in Chatsworth after Councilman Hal Bernson told them to challenge the railroad firm’s building permit.

Ron Shigeta, acting head of the Department of Building and Safety’s plan check unit, said in an interview that he ordered the stoppage after department chief Warren O’Brien told him Bernson “was questioning the Southern Pacific project.”

Bernson later confirmed that he had made the call. “I asked them to do it,” said the councilman, who has clashed before with Southern Pacific. “The problem with Southern Pacific is that they think they are above God.”

Some neighbors and the parents of pupils at Chatsworth Park Elementary School oppose the Southern Pacific project, located on a 13-acre site on Devonshire Boulevard next to the railroad tracks. Lumber would be unloaded from rail cars at the facility and trucked to construction sites.

By putting 50 or more heavily laden lumber trucks a day on Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Devonshire, the project will pose a traffic and safety hazard, said Susan Amerikaner, one of the project’s most outspoken critics.

A meeting to protest the project is scheduled for 7 tonight at Chatsworth Park Elementary School.

Work on the project will be blocked temporarily as the city seeks to determine if the zoning of the site permits construction of a “transfer facility,” Shigeta said. Shigeta said it was unclear if the facility qualified as a retail or storage project--permitted by the land’s zoning--or a wholesale project, which would not be permitted.

Bernson also introduced a motion Tuesday calling on the city attorney’s office to determine if the firm’s project needed environmental clearance, which it does not now have.

Bernson, head of the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee, said that if those measures do not block the project, he will seek enactment of a temporary building moratorium along the Topanga Canyon-Devonshire commercial corridor.

This interim control ordinance would attempt to freeze the status quo until the city adopts a specific plan--which has been in the works for four years--that would encourage office and retail development in the area, not the industrial and highway-oriented commercial development now permitted.

If approved quickly enough, the interim ordinance and the specific plan could affect this project, Bernson said.

Several weeks ago, Bernson also got building officials to revoke Southern Pacific’s original building permit after they determined the project was big enough to warrant an environmental review.

The railroad subsequently reduced the size of its project and got a new permit without needing to undergo the environmental review, said Joseph Ellbracht, a Southern Pacific executive in San Francisco, in an interview.

“We’re certainly concerned about the safety and traffic,” Ellbracht said. “But the traffic to and from our facility will add insignificantly to the traffic already on those streets.”