Work-Furlough Proposal Denied : Development: Officials reject a plan to convert a retirement hotel into an alternate jail facility, citing concern for the fate of the home’s 80 elderly residents.

The City Planning Commission on Thursday rejected a proposal for a prisoners’ work-furlough residence in Studio City--but not until commission President William G. Luddy strongly condemned what he termed “a Willie Horton staff report” for pandering to neighbors’ fears.

Luddy also criticized the program’s sponsors for failing to address parking and, more important, the fate of 80 elderly residents who would be displaced by conversion of their boarding house into an alternate jail facility.

When an owner of the home said residents could choose to remain there once it becomes a work-furlough facility, Luddy and his colleagues expressed disbelief and called for a vote.

“A Willie Horton report; a Frankenstein proposal,” Luddy said after the commission unanimously denied the program a conditional use permit.

His reference to Willie Horton recalled the controversial political ads of President George Bush’s campaign, which tried to discredit opponent Michael Dukakis by linking him to a state prison furlough program approved prior to his election as Massachusetts governor. Horton, a black convicted murderer, raped a white woman after escaping from a weekend furlough.

Luddy said later he characterized the work-furlough proposal itself as “Frankenstein” because it appeared to be a “pieced-together monster,” hastily conceived to bail out a failing board-and-care home.

Only 80 of the home’s 146 beds are filled, and the facility is losing $10,000 a month, its operator, Donald Gormly, said.

The rejected plan called for changing the Ventura Retirement Villa, at 11201 Ventura Blvd., into a residence for nonviolent lawbreakers. Participants, most of them convicted on drunk-driving charges, would have been allowed to continue working at their own jobs while serving their jail sentences.

No one with a history of violence would have been eligible, said Carl E. Curtis, director of Los Angeles County’s work-furlough program.

The facility, part of an effort to ease jail overcrowding, would have been the second of its kind in the county.

During Thursday’s meeting at the Van Nuys Woman’s Club, Curtis testified that he was dismayed by hearing examiner Richard M. Takase’s repeated use of the word convict in his staff report.

Curtis said the word convict connotes “a dangerous, predatory felon,” and was an unfair description of his program’s participants.

He also said Takase exaggerated the program’s dangers by describing how the drunk drivers--denied the use of their driver’s licenses--would stand in the same lines as the public while waiting for city buses.

Most of the 16 people who testified Thursday opposed the plan, many of them elderly, longtime residents of the neighborhood. One Chiquita Street mother, Julie Boyd, said she considered drunk drivers dangerous because she was once involved in a head-on crash with one and might have been killed if not for her seat belt.

After the public testimony, Luddy called Takase’s report outrageous and unprofessional, and said it “goes off into scare tactics.”

Takase said later that he was surprised by Luddy’s comments and that “I was certainly not kowtowing to any crowd.”

He said the criteria for granting a conditional use permit included “finding that the location will be desirable to the public convenience or welfare,” so he was obligated to note the program’s lack of popularity.

His report was based on an Aug. 20 hearing.