Zoning Change Strengthens Effort to Stop Garbage Dumps

The Los Angeles City Council has voted to change the zoning of 1,500 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains north of Mandeville Canyon, strengthening a state park agency’s efforts to buy the land and prevent conversion of adjacent canyons into garbage dumping grounds.

The council vote late last week sounded a “death knell to any expectations” of reviving a controversial permit to construct up to 500 homes on the Tucker Land site, said Cindy Miscikowski, chief deputy to Councilman Marvin Braude, who represents the area.

Joe Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, said the action bolsters the conservancy and Westside environmentalists in their campaign to prevent the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts from establishing landfills in nearby Rustic, Sullivan and Mission canyons.

If the conservancy, a state parkland buying agency, can carry out plans to purchase the land, the sanitation districts will be unable to get access to these canyons, Edmiston said. “They’ll be boxed in,” he said.

The council’s action was hailed by Nita Rosenfeld, a leader of the Mandeville Canyon Assn., the Brentwood-based homeowners group that has sought to block development on the site for more than two decades.

“I’ve been fighting this since 1968, and I’m sort of numb,” she said. “Finally, justice has been done.”

The council vote reduced the zoning of the property and removed a complementary community plan designation that authorized a 500-unit housing project there. The actions taken Friday would permit only about 70 units, Miscikowski estimated.

Even though a tract map permitting 500 homes on the site expired in 1989 and a new map would need to be approved before construction could begin, the zoning and plan designations kept alive a “perceived higher sense of the value” of the property, Miscikowski said.

This, in turn, posed a potential obstacle to the conservancy’s plan to buy the property, said Miscikowski and Edmiston. The conservancy wants to buy the land for $11.5 million from Getty Financial and Tucker Land Co., the creditors of the bankrupt Eastport Associates, which originally owned it.

Until the conservancy actually closes the deal, the possibility exists that a development interest could offer a larger price for it than the conservancy could, hoping that a major project still might be built on the site, Edmiston said.