Planners Balk at 20-Year Shield for Porter Ranch Project : Development: Commissioners express concerns over a ban on future growth restrictions. They seek a clearer accord before voting.

Los Angeles city planning commissioners Thursday gave a cool reception to a proposal to shield the Porter Ranch development from slow-growth restrictions for 20 years, encouraging the proposal’s critics.

“This plan troubles me greatly,” Commissioner Fernando Torres-Gil said after the Planning Commission held a two-hour public hearing on the proposed agreement between the city and the project’s developer.

Three of the five commissioners expressed a variety of misgivings and questions about the proposed agreement sought by the developer. They asked the Planning Department staff to produce a tougher and clearer version of the accord for the commission to review at its Sept. 12 hearing.

But because no vote was taken on the overall package or on any amendments to it, the precise direction the commission may eventually take on the agreement remained unclear.

The proposal reviewed Thursday basically seeks to provide the development group headed by Nathan Shapell with a 20-year guarantee against changes in the Porter Ranch Specific Plan adopted a year ago by the Los Angeles City Council.

That plan allows construction of up to 3,395 dwelling units and 6 million square feet of commercial development on the 1,300-acre Porter Ranch site in the northwest San Fernando Valley.

In return for a virtual grant of immunity from future efforts by slow-growth advocates to rewrite the Specific Plan, the pact requires the Porter Ranch Development Co. to provide public improvements--most of them designed to ease traffic--beyond those required of it by the Specific Plan.

The commission skepticism heartened the anti-Porter Ranch forces. “I’m pleased they didn’t rubber-stamp the agreement,” said Walter Prince, a leader of PRIDE, the homeowners group that emerged to fight the Porter Ranch project.

Voicing a frequent argument by the agreement’s critics, Sylvia Gross, head of the San Fernando Valley Federation, a homeowner coalition, said that “20 years is a long time” to be locked into an agreement.

“We know how fast the city has changed in 20 years,” she said.

Larry Calemine, a partner with Shapell in the Porter Ranch project, said it was too early to predict how the commission might reshape the agreement. “We’re still in the dark,” Calemine said. “We need to sit down and analyze what’s being proposed.”

After hearing from nearly three dozen speakers, most of them critics, the commission balked at approving either the agreement recommended by the developer or the slightly tougher language recommended by the Planning Department’s chief hearing examiner.

Torres-Gil wondered if the city was getting enough money from the developer to pay for a bridge across Aliso Canyon at Sesnon Boulevard that would connect Porter Ranch to points east, including Granada Hills and the Santa Clarita Valley. Under the development agreement, the developer proposed to spend $2 million on the bridge, which, it is estimated, will cost about $10 million.

Torres-Gil also indicated that the agreement should require the developer to reserve a plot of land beyond the year 2000 for purchase by the school district as a junior high school site. School officials, seeking greater flexibility, have asked that the developer set aside the parcel until after it is clear how many children will reside in the new subdivisions.

Commissioner Ted Stein said the proposed agreement was troubling because it contained no assurance that the developer would pay his “fair share” of the Aliso Canyon bridge. He also complained the agreement was too loose and might exempt the developer from city efforts to restrain development projects citywide for health and safety reasons, such as the need to curtail growth because of water shortages.

Commission President Bill Luddy also had reservations about the 20-year term.

The reception that the proposed agreement was given heartened its critics. “There were too many people with the same criticisms of the agreement for the commission to be able to approve it,” said Gloria Rothenberg, head of the North Valley Homeowners Federation.