Parents Say Firm Promised to Sell School Site : Protest: Calabasas residents vent their anger over The Lusk Co.’s failure to provide land for a new elementary facility.

More than 100 parents and their children gathered Saturday on a vacant lot in Calabasas to protest against a developer who they say has failed to honor a promise to sell the parcel for construction of an elementary school.

For several years, the Las Virgenes Unified School District has been engaged in a costly legal battle with The Lusk Co. to purchase a nine-acre parcel of land for a school at Parkway Calabasas and Paseo Primario. District officials said that Lusk agreed to sell them the land during negotiations for permits to build an 870-house development.

Instead, district officials charge, Lusk has obstructed their efforts to acquire the land, forcing the district to initiate condemnation proceedings.

After the district filed a lawsuit, Assistant Supt. Donald Zimring said, the developer continued to try to prevent the district from taking the land by mounting a flurry of legal challenges.

“It’s all a pattern of delay--sort of sleight of hand in the real estate development business,” said Arnold Graham, the district’s attorney. “They are using the legal processes to string out the school district.”

An attorney for The Lusk Co. denied that the firm has deliberately attempted to prevent the district from buying the land. He blamed the district for the delay, saying that officials have never offered Lusk a reasonable price for the prime real estate.

“My client believes that it is in the best interest of everybody--including my client--to have a school built in the area,” Robert Hutchins said. “But from an economic perspective, it is impossible for us to sell the property at a number dramatically lower than the value.”

Hutchins said that Lusk values the land at $6 million, but the district offered only $1.2 million.

Graham, however, said that the Lusk appraisal is too high, because it presumes that the developer will build luxury houses on the land if it is not used for a school.

The district has already spent $100,000 in legal fees in its efforts to obtain the land and may be forced to abandon their efforts, Zimring said. A mandatory settlement conference is scheduled for Jan. 29. If the issue is not resolved, the district may start looking for a new site.

That possibility infuriates area parents, who said that they bought their houses in the Lusk development in part because they believed that a school would be built there. If no new elementary school is built, their children will have to attend school in Agoura Hills, because the two Calabasas elementary schools are overcrowded, parents said.

“I bought a home from The Lusk Co. two years ago, and they told me and everyone else that ‘you are moving into the Las Virgenes school district, and you are going to have a school right across the street,’ ” said attorney and resident Alex Robertson, the keynote speaker at the Saturday rally.

Robertson said that The Lusk Co. has “pulled every legal delay and stall tactic possible” in an effort to prevent the district from obtaining the land. He said he is considering filing a class-action lawsuit for fraud and misrepresentation against the company on behalf of the homeowners.