Warner Center Growth Plan Delayed : Woodland Hills: Approval stalls over how much money builders should contribute to traffic improvements.

A plan to guide growth in Warner Center into the next century inched toward approval by the Los Angeles Planning Commission on Thursday, but was delayed by the issue that has plagued the plan since its introduction last year: how to pay for traffic improvements.

City planners say developers should foot the bill, but builders have balked, arguing that the proposed fees are so high that they make building in Warner Center unfeasible. So on Thursday, a consultant representing most of the center’s big developers proposed that the city cut the fees by nearly half and cover the shortfall with its share of state and federal transit funds.

City transportation officials immediately criticized the proposal as a scheme to use public money for private benefit.

But planning commissioners were sufficiently impressed by David Grannis’ idea to hold off on approving the massive Warner Center Specific Plan to give city planners and transportation officials time to study the proposal.

“It looks great on the surface,” said commission President Theodore Stein.

Stein and other commissioners have long agreed with developers that the fees proposed to finance improvements such as street widenings and new freeway ramps are too high, but there was no apparent way to reduce the fees without sacrificing certain projects.

Under Grannis’ proposal, developers who build in the center in Woodland Hills would pay only for those improvements made necessary by their new buildings. But the developers would work to help the city secure state and federal funds to complete street improvements and public transit projects outside the center.

“Those funds are available and the city has not done its job to get them,” Grannis said. “This is not a revolutionary or precedent-setting idea. All we’re asking for is a little rationality in the process.”

Currently, the city’s plan calls on developers to help pay for transportation improvements outside the center. When the plan was released last summer, developers were asked to pay $14,990 for each afternoon car trip caused by their buildings. That “trip fee” dropped to about $7,500 earlier this year after some proposed improvements, such as elevated streets, were deleted. And on Thursday, further adjustments reduced the fees to about $6,000 per car.

Grannis’ proposal would drive that figure down to about $3,000 per trip.

Developers would be encouraged to help secure money for the city because the Specific Plan breaks new development in the center into four phases and requires the financing for the resulting traffic improvements for each phase to be in place before work on the next level can begin.

“If the improvements aren’t guaranteed, then we are history,” Grannis said.

But city transportation engineer Allyn Rifkin said the developers’ share of the cost of local and regional traffic improvements makes up only about 27% of the total $628 million needed to offset traffic caused by the expected new building. The rest of that money--more than $500 million--must be secured by the city.

By taking money from the public pool, Rifkin said, Grannis’ proposal would ultimately end up costing the city money. The only beneficiaries, he said, would be the developers.

“That money should go to the unfunded projects,” Rifkin said.

Rifkin said he expected developers to help the city find extra state and federal transit money in any case, because if traffic improvements are not funded as the center grows, the requirements of the Specific Plan would bring new building in the center to a halt.

“I think that is incentive enough,” Rifkin said.

The commission will consider including the Grannis proposal in the Specific Plan next month.