Park Supporters Back Supervisor Realignment : Politics: The Santa Monica Mountains would be included in Ed Edelman’s district. He is seen as sympathetic to the conservation cause.

Park advocates involved in efforts to preserve the Santa Monica Mountains are keeping their fingers crossed in hopes that a court-ordered redrawing of Los Angeles County supervisorial districts will survive an appeal by the county.

Conservationists say the boundary realignment, intended to create a Latino majority district, will also help their cause by putting the mountains in a single district to be served by Supervisor Ed Edelman. They consider Edelman more attuned to environmental concerns than the area’s current representatives, Mike Antonovich and Deane Dana, who have traditionally sided with developers.

“I think it augurs well,” said one conservationist, who would not allow herself to be quoted by name. “I kneel by the side of my bed each night and pray that map goes through.”

Paul Tryon, executive officer for the Los Angeles/Ventura region of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, acknowledged that the redistricting “has a potential of boding less favorably for us as an industry” in the Santa Monica Mountains. But Tryon said the association will go on working “with the Board of Supervisors . . . regardless of how their boundary lines may be drawn.”

The redistricting map drawn by civil rights groups was approved Aug. 3 by U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon. He ruled in June that the supervisors had intentionally discriminated against Latinos by drawing the existing district boundaries so as to dilute their voting strength. The county appealed that ruling and last week got the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to stay implemention of the reapportionment plan, pending a hearing scheduled for today.

The Santa Monicas currently are split into three districts. Edelman’s district includes the eastern end of the mountains from Griffith Park to the San Diego Freeway, but Dana and Antonovich represent the less-developed western areas where most development battles are being fought. Dana’s current district includes the Malibu coast and the Santa Monicas’ southern slopes, and Antonovich’s includes the oak-studded valleys and hills of Agoura.

Kenyon’s order would push Edelman’s 3rd District westward through the mountains to the Ventura County line. Antonovich would also yield to Edelman much of his current base in the San Fernando Valley, including portions of the Simi hills.

Dana and Antonovich, part of the Board of Supervisors’ conservative majority, have received lavish support from real estate interests and have usually sided with them in development battles.

Edelman, while no “flaming environmentalist,” in the words of one activist, has been more receptive to environmental concerns. In two recent cases, he cast the only dissenting votes on controversial projects.

“Edelman has voted . . . our way more than any other supervisor,” said David Brown, vice president of the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation and chairman of the Sierra Club’s Santa Monica Mountains task force. “He’s tended to be the one supervisor who held out for reasonable planning,” Brown said.

Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state agency that acquires parkland in the mountains, said Edelman would be likely to take “a much more careful look at the cumulative impact” of development than Antonovich and Dana.

The realignment “will make a difference for preservation of the mountains,” said Barbara Fine, vice president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., adding that she was not speaking on behalf of that organization.

Each of the five supervisors has a single vote, and redistricting would not change that. However, supervisors typically vote the wishes of the colleague in whose district a project is located.

Edelman, who was reelected in June to a four-year term, cannot be counted on “as a knee-jerk vote for anything,” his press deputy, Joel Bellman, said.

“He hasn’t been adamantly, inflexibly anti-development,” said Bellman, “but I think it’s fair to say he’s been one of the more sensitive board members” to environmental and homeowner concerns.

Edelman alone has escaped the ire of critics who have accused the supervisors of undermining efforts to acquire lands needed to complete the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

The mountain park is struggling against tight budgets and soaring land prices. Critics, including some members of Congress, have accused the supervisors of inflating land prices by agreeing to “upzone” mountain property to allow more intensive development than county plans provide. The supervisors have said they are balancing the needs of the park with the rights of property owners to develop their land.

A recent controversy involved the Paramount Ranch project, a proposed luxury housing development on an Agoura site that the government hoped to buy for the recreation area. The tract was zoned for 103 homes, and park supporters urged supervisors to hold the line there. This, they said, would reduce the project’s impact on adjacent federal land and give the government a better chance to acquire it. With Edelman dissenting, the supervisors voted 3 to 1 last year to approve construction of 150 homes.

In another case last December, Edelman dissented from the board’s 4-1 approval of a controversial golf course, country club and housing development in Corral Canyon in Malibu. Bob Hope, owner of the tract, has since canceled the project as part of an effort to win support for his Jordan Ranch development in eastern Ventura County.