Woo’s Proposed Law at Odds With Own Project : Planning: Work on the councilman’s home does not comply with restrictions he has urged on hillside development. He says there’s no conflict because the ordinance would not be retroactive.

Los Angeles City Councilman Michael Woo’s remodeling project at his Silver Lake home fails to include public safety features of a proposed law he has championed for three years.

That proposal, being considered by the City Council, calls for tough, costly new construction rules for houses like Woo’s that are being remodeled or built in the hills.

The proposed rules are meant to make hillside living safer and to address aesthetic concerns, recommending standards to prevent the building of big homes on small hillside lots, a trend critics have labeled “mansionization.”

The rules are not yet law and even if adopted soon they would not apply to Woo’s house, located west of Silver Lake Reservoir. But if guided by the proposed rules, Woo would have had to install at least a third parking space and interior automatic fire sprinklers.

Woo denies that there is anything hypocritical about not incorporating provisions of the proposed law in the design of his house.

“I don’t see any contradiction here,” Woo said. “The spirit of the law was never meant to be retroactive. . . . I think there’d be a serious problem if the ordinance was in effect and I was asking for a variance or special treatment. But I’m not.”

Hillside property owners and members of the building industry, who call the proposed rules too restrictive, say Woo’s public and private actions are not so easily reconciled.

“If Woo believes so strongly in them, then how come he isn’t building his own house by these standards?” said Steven Hill, a Silver Lake building contractor, upon hearing of Woo’s building plans. “I want him to answer that one.”

“Hypocrisy is a mild way of putting it,” said Chris Griffiths, a leader of a property owners group from the hilly Sunland-Tujunga neighborhood that opposes Woo’s measure.

“It’s interesting how it’s never the council member’s toes that get stepped on,” said Tony Eldridge of Hollywood Hills, an officer in the Hillside Property Owners Assn., an organization that has been vocal in its efforts to block the hillside plan.

Woo, an urban planner by training, has ardently backed the hillside legislation, which the council is set to vote on Tuesday.

In an interview, Woo agreed that--except for the timing--the provisions for off-street parking and sprinklers would have applied to his remodeling project.

The $129,000 remodeling will more than double the size of the house to 2,757 square feet. Woo representatives said they could not immediately provide estimates of how much more it would cost to provide the sprinklers or a third parking space. “This is a complicated calculation,” said Kerry Abelson, Woo’s press secretary.

The proposed ordinance has been in the works since 1989, and Woo has championed it since then. He obtained building permits for his project March 26.

Many of the measure’s provisions aim to improve safety in hilly neighborhoods. Extra parking spaces, for example, are meant to end on-street parking that makes already narrow hillside streets virtually impassable, especially for firetrucks, city officials say.

If subjected to the proposal, Woo’s project would need one additional off-street parking space, making a total of three, while larger homes might be required to have as many as five.

Under the ordinance, extra spaces are to be carved out of the homeowner’s property. Such requirements are onerous, said Harvey Steinberg, a Silver Lake housing developer and former city planner. “In Woo’s case, he would have to excavate a sizable portion of his front yard” to comply, Steinberg said.

In addition, the proposed rules would require homeowners who live along streets of substandard width--less than 28 feet--to dedicate enough of their front yard to accommodate the possible widening of their street. Woo has not taken such action.

Woo’s home is on a 20-foot-wide street with a cozy, almost European feel, and many structures, including the councilman’s two-car garage and front-yard retaining wall, are built within a few feet of the curb.

During debate on the proposal at City Hall, Woo has repeatedly said that an elderly Laurel Canyon woman died of a heart attack because an ambulance was delayed trying to navigate narrow streets to reach her home.

At an Aug. 27, 1991, hearing, Woo called the proposed legislation an “urgent public necessity.” As recently as Wednesday, when the City Council debated the measure, Woo made a moving speech on the need for the law, invoking again the example of the “old lady.”

“It’s too late for her, but it’s not too late for the City Council to take bold action . . . to prevent a recurrence of tragedies like this,” Woo said.

The hillside ordinance addresses aesthetics chiefly by controlling the size or location of structures.

The proposal sets up a series of complicated rules for limiting the height of new construction and for limiting the “footprint” of new houses--the amount of the lot that they cover.

Woo’s house does not appear to violate either of those provisions.