Planners Say Opponents of Malibou Lakes Project Share Blame for Fire Risk

An effort by residents of the Malibou Lakes area to block a proposed housing development has backfired: County planners, urged by the residents to check on the development’s potential fire danger, turned their attention to the residents’ own building practices and found many violations.

In a lengthy study being reviewed this week by aides to Los Angeles County supervisors, county planners agreed with the protesters that the secluded mountain area between Agoura Hills and Malibu is vulnerable to fire. But the study blamed some of the danger on illegally constructed dwellings and residents’ cars parked on narrow streets, restricting firetrucks’ access.

Among its short-term solutions, the study suggests aggressively enforcing building and zoning codes and severely restricting street parking. Additional remedies--such as building a second road into the secluded area--could cost current homeowners as much as $12.4 million, or about $70,000 apiece, although that cost would be shared by future developers, planners said.

Many of the study’s recommendations have angered property owners in the area, who first raised the specter of fire danger as part of their battle against a 15-house subdivision and equestrian center proposed in 1986. But one of the project’s developers, Donald F. Haskin, said the residents should have considered their positions before complaining.

“They were the wrong people to stick their head in the fishbowl,” Haskin said. “They’ve been building illegally up there for years . . . getting away with murder up there in those canyons.”

Supervisor Ed Edelman, who represents the area, said he probably will ask the board to adopt some of the study’s recommendations in the next few weeks, although he said he has not decided whether retroactive action against zoning and building code violations would be among those recommendations. It was Edelman who early this year froze most development in the 176-house area for 12 months to allow completion of the study.

Representatives of the Malibou Lakeside Homeowners Assn. acknowledge that many of their dwellings, some of which began as vacation cabins for film stars in the 1920s, violate county codes. But they criticized the county planners’ recommendations as unfair punishment for the association’s outspokenness.

“The county has . . . looked the other way about illegal building for longer than I’ve been on the planet,” said attorney Randy Bendel, past president of the homeowners association. “Now are they going to decide to slap all these people to accommodate others who want to build? That’s ridiculous.”

Bendel said he has an illegal guest cottage that he is trying to bring up to code.

The report did not tally the number of violations found, but said illegal structures discovered included garages converted into apartments and houses split into duplexes without permits. Such illegal modifications add cars to the already vehicle-clogged streets, increasing the problems of firetrucks in an emergency, the report said.

Several homeowners, including Bendel, said they suspect developers and other owners of vacant lots were responsible for reporting the illegal structures to the county. The landowners and county planners denied the charge.

Lee Stark, the county regional planner in charge of the study, said it was the homeowners’ objections to Haskin’s development that alerted his department to the existing fire hazards, although he said the Fire Department “has for years been concerned about the access into the area.”

Phyllis Daugherty, who represents the owners of 94 vacant lots in the area, said her group knew about the violations but never brought them to the county’s attention. Haskin said he was not aware of most of them until recently.

“I don’t peer over people’s fences,” he said. “I never turned anybody in.”

There is only one objection shared by current homeowners, prospective developers and owners of vacant property: that the county is singling out their area over dozens of similar communities in the county, such as Topanga Canyon. Stark, however, said this may be just the first of many similar studies, largely because of Edelman’s interest in the subject. Edelman inherited the Santa Monica Mountains region during a court-ordered redistricting early this year.