Project Again Approved for Paramount Ranch

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday rejected a request by environmentalists to reopen hearings on the controversial Paramount Ranch housing development in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Instead, the supervisors unanimously re-approved the 150-house project, which the Sierra Club and the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation had failed to stop through a recent lawsuit.

The supervisors were required to vote again on the luxury residential development in Agoura because of a legal technicality stemming from the court challenge.

The board originally approved the project in March, 1989, but that vote was challenged by the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, who alleged that the environmental report was biased because the developer, not the county, hired the author.

The fate of the hilly, oak-dotted property has been of keen interest to environmentalists because park agencies have sought to buy the land for years. The property was the former home of the Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

In a lengthy letter to the board, Carlyle W. Hall Jr., the Sierra Club’s attorney, urged the board to require a new environmental impact report and to reopen the project to public debate. Hall called the environmental report “fundamentally flawed” and charged that a financial analysis of the project was falsified to win the board’s original approval.

Hall also contended that the project should be re-examined in light of an environmental victory in another recent court case challenging the board’s approval of a housing development. A Superior Court judge ruled that the county erred when it did not require an independent consultant to write the EIR.

In the Paramount Ranch case, the developer was allowed to hire his own consultant, which Hall contended created an “irreconcilable conflict of interest.”

But on Tuesday, Gerald F. Crump, chief assistant county counsel, told the supervisors it was not necessary to reopen the Paramount Ranch case. He said the trial judge had adequately addressed the plaintiffs’ complaints.