Commission Urges More Development at Warner Center : Growth: Planners call for a new plan that would provide even more construction than the 70% increase envisioned.

In instructions to its staff, the Los Angeles Planning Commission on Thursday signaled its desire to see Warner Center developed as one of the city’s busiest urban cores, a vision that puts the panel at loggerheads with Councilwoman Joy Picus.

The commission action drew a sharp response from Picus.

“I think they’re hellbent to allow overdevelopment,” said the lawmaker, who represents the Woodland Hills area. “There’s no reasonable controls or consideration of the community.” The commission instructed its staff to rewrite the preliminary specific plan for Warner Center to provide even more development than the 70% increase already envisioned.

In doing so, it spurned an appeal from Picus to ensure that the 1,200-acre commercial area continue to “reflect those suburban values” that have governed the development to date, creating a spacious, low-rise commercial center.

Warner Center cannot be “another downtown, another Century City,” Picus told the commissioners in her testimony Thursday.

In a related matter, the commission also rejected a Picus plan to place strict new interim controls on the size of individual projects at Warner Center until the specific plan for the area is completed. Instead, the panel kept intact an existing temporary growth-control measure that Picus had sought to stiffen, saying it would fail to stop several major pending projects.

The five commissioners were united Thursday in urging that growth controls at Warner Center be loosened to allow more development than Picus or the city’s Planning Department had proposed in the first draft of a specific plan for the area that was released last July.

“You’re giving me firm direction that my numbers have to go up in the center,” Deputy Planning Director Robert Sutton told the commissioners at the end of a three-hour discussion.

In July, Sutton and his staff proposed a 26.8-million square-foot cap on commercial development for the Woodland Hills commercial core. That would be a 70% increase from the current 15.8 million square feet of development, which gives Warner Center slightly more developed space than Century City in a much larger area of land.

Commission President William Luddy told Sutton that the staff’s proposed cap would mean “grinding everything down so low” that developers would be left with “no practical incentive to be in the center.”

“This is not a suburban shopping center, but an urban center,” Luddy said in an interview later.

Even Suzette Neiman, the commissioner who has been most often sympathetic to homeowners’ concerns over commercial development, said she was “stunned” by the deep development cutbacks required by the preliminary specific plan.

No specific square footage figures were used by the commissioners. Sutton at one juncture, however, projected that the staff might be looking at a plan that would permit up to 35 million square feet of development--40% more than the ceiling cited in the preliminary plan and backed by a citizens group Picus appointed to assist in drafting the plan.

“I’m pretty upset by all this,” Picus said. She said a ceiling of 35 million square feet “has no rationale at all.”

“Where are they coming from on this?” she said. “Is God talking to them? They are certainly rejecting the advice of their own staff, the citizens committee and the councilwoman of the district.”

In fact, city planning staff members were already retreating from their earlier growth ceiling proposals before Thursday. In a recent report, the staff recommended against any “absolute caps” on growth and instead proposed a plan that would tie growth to the ability of the transportation system to handle the movement of commuters and local residents in and out of Warner Center.

The commission directions to its staff and the defeat of the Picus interim-control measure were welcomed by the dozens of Warner Center developers and their agents who crowded the commission meeting chambers in Van Nuys.

Luddy and Commissioner Ted Stein also instructed the planning staff to draft a plan with much lower traffic mitigation fees than those previously proposed. These fees, collected from developers, are to pay for the costs of transportation improvements to ease the impact of a growing work force on the city’s roadways.

Stein said fees in the range of $5,500 per trip--not the $15,000 called for in the city’s draft specific plan released last summer--would be reasonable. The previous trip fee numbers had horrified developers.

Several commissioners argued that more growth at Warner Center carries out the city’s “centers concept,” a planning philosophy that calls for commercial development to be concentrated in certain areas as an antidote to sprawl and to make it easier to connect them by mass transit.

Commissioner Fernando Torres-Gil also said he was concerned that placing a damper on growth in Warner Center would cause a business exodus from the west San Fernando Valley.

The loss of white-collar jobs in Warner Center would also trickle down to erode property values in Woodland Hills, Torres-Gil warned homeowners. The commissioner got a strong show of support from other commissioners for his request that the Planning Department staff prepare an economic profile of the West Valley that could be used to assess the effect of growth controls.