Developer Who Vowed to Donate Parkland Now Wants to Be Paid

A developer who originally promised to donate parkland and a school site in exchange for permission to build a large housing project in the Santa Monica Mountains area of Calabasas is now seeking to be paid for the land out of tax funds.

The proposed arrangement is unusual but legal. Representatives of the developer, The Baldwin Co., describe it as creative financing. However, Calabasas community activists who helped negotiate the promised land donation question whether it is fair.

“When is a gift not a gift? When it comes from The Baldwin Co.,” said David Guthman, vice president of the Calabasas Park Homeowners Assn.

The proposal was disclosed Thursday at a meeting of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, which postponed voting on the financing and on the development until Tuesday to give county administrators more evaluation time.

The Baldwin Co. wants to build 550 houses, a church and a commercial center on 1,250 acres of rugged land southeast of the Ventura Freeway and Las Virgenes Road, partially in a county-designated Significant Ecological Area.

A community outcry about the size of the project, its location and plans to uproot more than 1,800 oak trees was silenced by dozens of signed agreements in which the developer pledged, among other things, to donate 640 acres of land to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy for a wildlife corridor and eight acres to the Las Virgenes Unified School District.

In recent weeks, however, the developer took steps to be reimbursed $35.2 million for the land. The money would come from $89 million in bonds sold on behalf of a tax assessment district, which would recoup the money from a special tax on future property owners in the district.

It would be added to the expenses for which the bond issue was originally intended to raise funds, such as moving a road, digging a flood-control basin and relocating a gas pipeline to accommodate several development projects in the area.

Robert Burns, president of The Baldwin Co., said the land would be given to the conservancy and the school district even if county supervisors do not establish the assessment district.

Calabasas residents said they feared that in the future residents of such a district would vote against proposed tax increases for community improvements if they already are saddled with the special tax.

But Burns said the company will reduce the prices of the houses it builds to compensate for the property tax increases caused by the district.

He said the company only turned to the taxation district as a financing source because the economic slowdown has made it increasingly difficult to get loans to start housing projects.

“We need the money from the sale of the wildlife corridor to finance the grading and infrastructure of our project, which will enable us to get construction loans to build it,” he said.

If approved by supervisors, the district would be established under the Mello-Roos Community Facilities Act, passed by the Legislature to counteract the impact of property tax-cutting Proposition 13.

The 1982 legislation allows developers to ask that public bonds be sold to provide them with up-front money for improvements that benefit the community, such as sewers and fire stations. That bond debt is then paid off through increased property taxes by future property owners.

County tax authorities said use of Mello-Roos financing to reimburse a developer for dedicating land has been approved only once before in Los Angeles County--in 1989--for an elementary school site in the Santa Clarita Valley.

Parks were included in the Mello-Roos rules, said Dean Misczynski, consultant to the Senate Office on Research. But Misczynski said few developers have used the money for parks.

Stephen Casaleggio, a San Francisco attorney who specializes in coordinating creation of assessment districts, said park improvements are increasingly included in Mello-Roos districts, but rarely the parkland itself.

“Most cities and counties are more heads-up than that,” Casaleggio said. “They just say, ‘You will dedicate the land.’ ”

Supervisor Ed Edelman said he will try to exclude Baldwin’s park and school land from the Mello-Roos district. “I’m bothered that the gift of open space is going to be paid for on the backs of the people who purchase the future homes,” Edelman said.

But Thomas A. Tidemanson, the county’s director of public works, said such criticism is naive because, regardless of the financing source, the future house and commercial property buyers will pay the bill in the end.

“Included in the cost of the houses is the cost of all the property they gave away, all the infrastructure, all the road improvements and whatever profit they think they can make.”