County Rejects Plan for 15 Homes in Malibu : Development: Neighbors complained the proposal would ruin property values in their ritzy enclave.

A developer’s plan to build 15 luxury homes overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Malibu was rejected Wednesday by Los Angeles County officials, after neighbors complained that the proposal threatened to ruin property values in their enclave of multimillion-dollar estates.

By a 4-0 vote, the county Regional Planning Commission rejected a proposal by developer Leonard Jaffe that would have allowed him to build on about two-thirds of his 17.5 acres in the exclusive Winding Way subdivision. Under the proposal, most of the rest of his land would have been donated to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy as parkland.

By law, Jaffe has the right to appeal to the County Board of Supervisors. A spokesman for Jaffe declined to speculate on whether there will be such an appeal.

“I’m sure we will come back another day and seek to go forward with plans to develop the parcel, but when, and under what circumstances, I couldn’t say,” spokesman Jim Emerson said.

The proposal may have been the last major land-use decision to come before the commission for approval before Malibu becomes a city.

The county stopped accepting applications for subdivisions and conditional use permits last March, when the supervisors set the date for Malibu’s cityhood election. The Winding Way proposal was among the last major projects in the pipeline before the cutoff.

Although voters approved cityhood last June, the supervisors have postponed the actual incorporation until at least March 28 in a bid to start work on a controversial sewer system in Malibu, and have hinted that they may try a further delay.

Malibu’s future leaders, who are pushing a measure in the state Legislature that would nullify the delay, had opposed the Winding Way project, as they have other development proposals. They contend that such matters should be left for the city government to decide.

However, residents of the exclusive subdivision appeared to carry the most weight with commissioners at Wednesday’s hearing.

“There are so few places those of us who have horses have left to go,” said Barbara Rotter, whose home is on 7 1/2 acres next to the site of the proposed homes. She said the development would destroy the “equestrian character” of the neighborhood.

Residents said that clustering the development onto one segment of the property would result in homes with an average lot size of one-third of an acre, which they contended would be out of place with the much larger estates in the subdivision.

The neighbors were opposed to creating any lot of less than an acre, said Martin Duff, president of the Winding Way Homeowners Assn. About two dozen of its members attended the hearing.

“We have homeowners with 3, 5, and 7-acre lots,” he said. “No one’s lot is less than an acre. To come in and build that many homes in such a constricted area would be totally out of character with the existing community.”

Duff accused the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy of “basically selling us out” in withdrawing its opposition to the developer’s original plans for the project.

“Once the developer offered to donate land (to the conservancy), their objections just disappeared,” he said.

Last October, the conservancy expressed concerns that the project might be out of character with the density of the neighboring homes. However, conservancy officials in December said their concerns about the project had been satisfied.