Developers Ask to Be Dropped From Cityhood Proposal : Calabasas: Loss of undeveloped land would remove a main reason for incorporation, proponents say.

Champions of cityhood for Calabasas, their independence drive recently approved by a crucial government agency, now are struggling to head off their own secessionist movement.

Developers of nine properties representing much of Calabasas’ last undeveloped land have asked the Los Angeles County Local Agency Formation Commission to exclude them from the proposed new city’s boundaries.

Most say that they are in the midst of obtaining building permits from the county and don’t want to deal with a new bureaucracy, which they fear would enact a building moratorium.

“Uncertainty is my fear,” said Robert Zuckerman, president of Woodland Hills-based Continental Communities, the lead developer for four new housing tracts on about 200 acres south of Mulholland Highway in the southeastern quadrant of the proposed city. “We don’t know, and no one will know until after Calabasas is a reality, who are the people on the council and what their political viewpoints are and what their policies are in terms of development.”

But cityhood advocates say that if they lose the property, the new city’s most crucial role will be eliminated.

Land use and its effects on the environment pose what many regard as the most important issues to be considered by a newly seated City Council--indeed, the chief reason why Calabasas and other communities want to incorporate.

“It takes the city out of the planning business,” said Marvin Lopata, treasurer of the Calabasas Cityhood Committee. “It leaves us nothing to plan, one of the basic elements of the city. We live here. We suffer from whatever goes on and we benefit from whatever goes on. If it’s a great project, fine. If it’s a bad project, we pay for it.”

The projects’ cumulative impact on local traffic is chief among the concerns of Lopata and others on the Calabasas Cityhood Committee. They have been meeting with the developers in an effort to persuade them to withdraw their requests from LAFCO, the government agency that oversees the creation of new cities.

The cityhood committee also has been meeting individually with commission members before they vote on the developers’ requests Wednesday.

The proposal to incorporate the affluent Santa Monica Mountains community west of the San Fernando Valley must still be approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and Calabasas voters.

Cityhood proponents passed a major hurdle Aug. 8 when LAFCO approved independence for Calabasas, although it permitted eight properties to withdraw from the proposed city of 27,000 residents. The commission’s recommendation is weighed heavily by the supervisors, who must set an election date to let voters decide whether the community should break away from Los Angeles County.

Since LAFCO acted in August, however, nine property owners have responded to a 30-day grace period in which the commission accepts “requests for reconsideration,” or applications to be excluded from the new city’s boundaries.

The largest firms seeking exclusion include Continental Communities; a partnership between Agoura Hills-based Cabot, Cabot & Forbes and the Currey-Riach Co. in Calabasas, which owns a partially built, 300-acre, mixed-use project south of the Ventura Freeway and west of Lost Hills Road; and the Casden Co. of Beverly Hills, which owns the Malibu Canyon Apartments north of the Ventura Freeway and just east of Las Virgenes Road.

Continental’s Zuckerman said that even if the new council is sympathetic to developers, “which is not likely,” the time it takes to hold an election and organize a new government could result in long delays and the loss of millions of dollars to firms that are poised to build.

But cityhood advocates--who deny their aim is to block all development--are skeptical of those arguments and accuse the builders of trying to circumvent the local planning process.

“What these developers want, of course, is to get their approvals and permits from a highly permissive county, have the benefit of the Calabasas name in selling their homes, but make no contribution to alleviating the impacts of their projects on the new city,” said Dave Brown, vice president of the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation, about half of whose members would become residents of Calabasas.

“Local government, self control, and a well-planned community. That’s really, basically what it boiled down to,” Lopata said of the cityhood drive.