Irvine Asking Court to Keep Housing Project Off Ballot : Development: City and Irvine Co. want citizen petition seeking vote on Northwood 5 declared invalid.

The city will go to court Monday to ask a judge whether it must let voters decide the fate of the Irvine Co.’s proposed 2,885-home Northwood 5 community.

Attorneys for the City Council and the Irvine Co. will argue in Orange County Superior Court that a petition collected last winter by a group challenging the project is invalid. The petition tries to force the City Council to overturn its approval last November of the project or let voters decide Northwood 5’s fate.

According to briefs filed with the court, the attorneys will argue mainly that the anti-development group made a key error by challenging only one of the council’s decisions to approve the 364-acre residential project.

The attorney for the residents’ group, Irvine Citizens Against Overdevelopment, will argue that the group was not required to challenge both decisions--one on zoning, the other on amending the city’s General Plan--for its referendum petition to be considered valid.

The judge’s decision will decide whether the residents’ petition will be thrown out because it failed to challenge both decisions. Judges threw out a similar petition in Norco in 1985.

At the heart of both arguments is the issue of whether Irvine’s zoning laws, which specify in exact detail what can be built and what types of businesses can operate on every piece of property in the city, may conflict with the city’s General Plan, another state-required document that outlines more generally how and where a city is expected to evolve over the years.

The council voted last August to alter both the zoning and General Plan documents to allow the Irvine Co. to build the community and a retail center on the Northwood 5 land.

The flaw in the petition circulated by Irvine Citizens Against Overdevelopment, according to Deputy City Atty. John L. Fellows III, is that it attempts to overturn only the council’s decision to change the zoning for the property. If the zoning decision were overturned by the council or voters, Fellows argues, the city’s General Plan and zoning documents would conflict.

Fellows and attorneys for the Irvine Co. argue in their legal briefs that state law and the city’s own laws prohibits the zoning and General Plan documents from disagreeing.

But James Toledano, an Irvine attorney for Irvine Citizens Against Overdevelopment, said this week that he will argue that the state law mandating that the two documents agree does not apply to the city. Irvine is a chartered city, one of two types of California cities, which allows it to ignore certain state planning guidelines, Toledano said.

In fact, he said, the section of the law that the city and Irvine Co. are using to buttress their argument specifically exempts chartered cities.

After the hearing Monday, the judge is unlikely to make a ruling on the matter for several days.