Calabasas Plan Wins Unexpected Support : Housing: Despite endorsement from environmentalists and homeowners, planners delay a vote on scaled-down proposal.

In an unusual alliance, environmentalists and homeowners Thursday endorsed a developer’s plan to build 550 houses, a church and a shopping center in a mountainous area of Calabasas, part of which is officially designated a sensitive ecological area.

After more than four years of debate that led to major concessions by developer Jim Baldwin, the formerly antagonistic factions declared a truce before members of the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission.

The largest of the concessions was a reduction in the scale of the project--located south of the Ventura Freeway and east of Las Virgenes Road--from the original proposal for 1,500 houses, 1.1 million square feet of office and retail complexes, a tennis club and a 250-room hotel.

But the commissioners, still skeptical about the impact of even the pared-down development on traffic and the environment, delayed a vote on the proposal until after a Jan. 8 investigatory trip to the site.

They also accused Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, of being blinded to the project’s drawbacks by Baldwin’s promised donation of 640 acres to the state park agency.

“I’m surprised at your overwhelming endorsement of this project,” Commissioner Lee Strong told Edmiston. “I’d be happier if you were a little bit uncomfortable with it.”

More than half of the 1,276-acre site is part of a significant ecological area, a formal county designation for land considered important wildlife habitat.

As open space dwindles, the county’s 61 SEAs (sensitive ecological areas) are under increasing development pressure, a recent Times investigation found.

Edmiston said if the conservancy had unlimited money, it would try to buy the Baldwin land.

But lacking that, he said, experts hired to evaluate the deal had concluded that the acreage the state has been promised contains some of the most important oak groves and wildlife habitats.

The developer also has agreed to provide $1.5 million to replant areas ravaged by years of sheep grazing.

“Given the fact that we cannot acquire the whole SEA, can we get a significant block of it?” Edmiston asked. “If we could only buy 600 acres, this is the 600 acres we would buy.”

The Baldwin site was formerly a battleground of the Calabasas incorporation movement, with the developer fighting to have his land exempted from the future city to avoid having to receive approval from yet another governmental body.

At one point, Baldwin’s sister filed a lawsuit against a state wildlands bill that formed the core of the cityhood plan.

Yet on Thursday, a representative of the cityhood movement described Baldwin’s current proposal as “a jewel within our city.” A public vote on incorporation of Calabasas, which Baldwin now supports, is scheduled for March 5.

Hunt C. Braly, administrative assistant to state Sen. Ed Davis (R-Santa Clarita), the author of the wildlands bill, said Baldwin gained community backing by scaling down the project and agreeing to set aside land along the Ventura Freeway for a possible frontage road.

“Two years ago we certainly would not have been here supporting a Baldwin development,” Braly said.