Judge May Be Asked to Block Picus Testimony in Land-Use Suit : Development: The city, contending the documents are private, wants to discipline the Warner Ridge attorneys who released them to reporters.

Los Angeles city attorneys may ask a judge to block use of controversial testimony by City Councilwoman Joy Picus in a land-use suit against the city because transcripts of her statements were released to reporters.

In the transcripts, Picus detailed her efforts to prevent Warner Ridge Associates from building offices on land overlooking Pierce College in Woodland Hills and admitted that she threatened to try to keep the developer from ever doing business in the city again.

The deposition also showed that Picus had political motives, rather than land-use concerns in seeking to block the project.

Warner Ridge Associates sued for $100 million in damages, arguing her actions and those of the City Council were illegal.

The deposition also cast a bright light on the often acknowledged but rarely seen hardball politics that drive development decisions in Los Angeles.

At Picus’ request, the City Council hurriedly changed the zoning of the tract to allow only single-family houses to be built on the site.

The 1,750-page deposition contains answers to questions by Warner Ridge attorneys.

The city, contending that the documents are private because they have not yet been introduced in court, wants the material blocked from the suit to discipline the Warner Ridge attorneys who released them.

Tuesday, the city alerted Warner Ridge attorneys that it will ask Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Kathryn Doi Todd for an interim order temporarily preventing any further release of depositions or other documents in the case, which is scheduled to go to trial in January.

A hearing on the request is set for today.

If the interim order is granted, city attorneys will then argue that the ban on further releases of documents in the case should be made permanent.

Also, the city will attempt to persuade Todd to bar the developers from using Picus’ potentially damaging deposition to prove their contentions in the civil suit.

That “would be a tremendously serious order for the court to issue,” Robert I. McMurry, a lawyer for Warner Ridge Associates, said. “It would greatly hobble our case.”

In her deposition, “Picus is testifying as a public official about public acts and the conduct of public policy . . . and that’s the essence of what people are supposed to know about their government,” McMurry said. Efforts to suppress that information “seem to run contrary to the essence of a free and democratic society.”

After the documents were released last week, Asst. City Atty. Anthony Alperin said the move was improper and was designed to lure Picus into making additional statements that the developers “hope they would be able to use to the detriment of the city.”

Asked about the move to prevent the Picus deposition from being used as evidence in court, Alperin said it was only one of several requests for sanctions against the Warner Ridge attorneys that the city was considering.