L.A. Transportation Engineer Joins Critics of Chatsworth Court : Buildings: The official says access to the site is too limited. His department proposes consideration of alternative areas.

In a three-pound document, opponents of the proposed Chatsworth Courthouse have meticulously cited a litany of perceived errors and horrors in the project’s environmental impact report, ranging from miscalculations to migrating rodents.

While some of its criticisms are seen as mere stalling tactics, the Chatsworth Homeowners Committee has found an ally in a city Transportation Department official who has joined the homeowners in harshly criticizing the traffic effects of locating a courthouse at Plummer Street and Winnetka Avenue.

In a letter to the county, Transportation Engineer Vahan Pezeshkian says the plan to provide access to the court from Penfield Avenue, a small cul-de-sac, is so inappropriate that the city department “strongly recommends the consideration of alternative sites with better access for the project.”

“Normally, a project of this size would require more than one access point, and off a major or secondary highway,” Pezeshkian said Friday.

Pezeshkian said the project’s traffic study was so poorly done that it is difficult for him to tell exactly how great the effects would be, and “we don’t have the time to do it for them.” But regardless, he said, the mitigation measures proposed are clearly inadequate.

“They are cosmetic and academic,” he said. “Mostly they talk about re-striping, adding a right-turn-only lane. Most of the places they talk about doing that are functional right-turn lanes already--just by putting a line separating the wide curb lane is not going to help a whole lot. In some cases, they are recommending taking street parking out . . . they cannot take it out without providing additional parking.”

For Harry Godley, chairman of the 1,000-member homeowner committee, Pezeshkian’s statements validated his group’s position.

“You see, you talk to everybody except the people in the court and they all seem to be against it,” Godley said. “Traffic is going to be horrendous.”

County Project Manager John Gray, with the Internal Services Department, said the private consultants who developed the draft environmental impact report have been asked to review Pezeshkian’s concerns. Based on questions from the homeowners and city, the county and the private consultants are preparing another draft of the environmental document, which is expected to be completed within a month or so, Gray said.

The consultant assigned to the case at Michael Brandman Associates did not return telephone calls from The Times last week.

In other areas of their critique, the homeowners took a novel approach at times, even hiring a blueprint maker to show that the court building proposed for a vacant lot flanked on one side by houses, could fit on an alternate industrial site four blocks away.

County officials and planners continue to maintain that that is not possible. Gray said the drawing does not take into account various necessary setbacks and does not include enough parking.

“It would force the developer to go to a parking structure and that would add additional costs,” Gray said. “It hasn’t taken into consideration that the city Fire Department wants a 28-foot fire access lane around the building.”

Godley countered that an “ingenious architect” could design a building that would work, even with the setbacks and parking.

The homeowners even raised questions about rodents migrating from the site toward their houses during grading and about “dangerous criminals” escaping from court holding cells, although as a Municipal Court the vast majority of cases are expected to be traffic-related.

“We do understand their concern is heartfelt; it’s sincere,” said Ken Nishi, capital projects manager for the Los Angeles Judicial District. “But . . . many of their concerns are not environmental.”

Godley disagreed with Nishi’s assessment, saying every concern his committee has raised is “an essential part of whether a building of that nature should be there or not . . . it’s a part of the environment and of our immediate tranquillity of mind, which is part of the environment.”

Another fault the homeowners found with the environmental document was that it relied heavily on comparisons with county courthouses in Van Nuys and San Fernando, both of which include more than just a Municipal Court.

“Without studying a stand-alone facility being interjected into an already established neighborhood, there is no basis to draw conclusions from,” they wrote.

The revised draft report will include analyses of two other courthouses that Nishi said are similar, those in Alhambra and Downey.

They also found an apparent glitch in a study of pedestrian traffic at the Van Nuys Courthouse by subtracting the people leaving from those coming in. Their calculations turned up an apparent negative number of people inside the courthouse at several times of the day and up to 450 people left stranded in the building at the end of the day.

Gray said the consultants had been asked to review their figures.

But county and court officials said some of the critique’s questions are less likely to be answered in the revised environmental impact report because they require specificity that he said is impossible to attain or is not available this early in the project’s planning stages.

For instance, the homeowners challenged the county’s assertion that the 14-courtroom facility will satisfy the area’s needs for the next 10 years. They used historical data showing that the court caseload has increased by 66.6% in the Valley during the past 10 years to illustrate their contention that expansion requests are inevitable.

But Nishi said history does not take into account financial realities.

“There is a finite dollar amount out there to build courthouses,” he said. “The reality is that there is a priority system on the way the money goes out and before we could get more money for this facility, the rest of that program would have to be satisfied. Right now, we only have enough money to finish 10 courtrooms in Chatsworth, for instance.”

Gray said the homeowners have created a Catch-22: They want specifics, yet are angry that the project has proceeded to the construction design phase before environmental reviews are complete. The critique cited a December, 1990, letter to the County Board of Supervisors that promised environmental assessment would “be performed during the initial stages of the design process.”

“If you were trying to answer half of the questions these people are asking, you’d have to have a complete set of working drawings,” Gray said. “On the one hand, they’re almost asking about doorknobs, and on the other they don’t want planning to proceed.”

Godley said his concern was that “they’ve already gone ahead, when they shouldn’t have . . . so they can answer the questions. They don’t think they work for the County Board of Supervisors and they’re pretty arrogant about it.”

Finally, the insistence of the homeowners that the courthouse will bleed value from their properties was bolstered in the critique by a letter from Earl Richards, a real estate associate with Fred Sands Realtors who lives in the neighborhood. Richards said he has attempted to show houses in the neighborhood nearest the proposed court site with little luck.

“After disclosing that a courthouse might be built adjacent to these homes, most of the clients said they would rather not live next to a courthouse,” he wrote. “Build a courthouse on the site and watch what happens!”

But Nishi insisted that the surveys of neighborhoods near other courthouses contained in the draft report, showing no discernible decline in values, were more applicable.

“There’s been recent articles in newspapers to show that property is not moving in a lot of neighborhoods,” he said. “To attribute it to a courthouse coming into this neighborhood is ludicrous.”