Developer Who Beat City Hall Now Faces Fight With the PTA : Real estate: An appeals panel will decide whether two citizens groups can intervene to block the opening of Paul Amir’s office building on Wilshire Boulevard.

Developer Paul Amir fought City Hall and won, but that may not be the end of it. Before the office building he constructed on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills can open, he may have to fight an elementary school PTA and a homeowners group as well.

Three appeals judges will decide whether the Horace Mann PTA and the 90211 Homeowner’s Organization should be allowed to intervene in a suit that has already been settled against the city.

The PTA and the homeowners group, which takes its name from the local ZIP code, were not involved in the original suit. But last week they appealed a judge’s decision that lets Amir lease his three-story building at 8750 Wilshire Blvd. for medical offices. The first floor is occupied by Bank of America, but the upper floors are unfinished and vacant.

When he started work on the building in 1989, Amir intended it for general commercial office space, his attorney, Ron Silverman, said.

Then the commercial real estate market in Beverly Hills collapsed. First, financial scandal and the savings and loan debacle brought down the city’s two biggest office tenants, Drexel Burnham Lambert and Columbia Savings; next, the onset of the recession ensured that there were no replacements.

Silverman said Amir concluded that the only way to make a profit on the property would be to convert it to a medical office building. The city refused to allow the switch, however, citing a new ordinance requiring medical offices to provide more parking spaces than conventional office buildings.

Amir sued, and Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien ruled in July that the building permit issued by the city gave him a vested right to use the building for general commercial or medical offices, because either use was allowed by the city ordinance in effect when the permit was issued.

Amir received his building permit in March, 1989, and the ordinance governing parking for medical offices did not take effect until the following December. By then, Silverman said, the building was about 75% complete, and it was not feasible to add additional parking spaces in the underground garage.

“Obviously the Amirs could not comply, since the building was virtually done,” he said.

In a settlement early this month, the city waived its right to appeal O’Brien’s ruling in exchange for an agreement by Amir not to try to recover his legal costs.

Enter the intervenors. Laura Adler, former president of the Horace Mann PTA and now president of the districtwide Beverly Hills PTA Council, said the PTA and the homeowners group are appealing the decision because they were never notified of the suit nor did they have an opportunity to present arguments about the traffic impacts a medical use would entail.

In their appeal of O’Brien’s ruling, the two groups contend there is already a shortage of parking in the Robertson-Wilshire area, and the influx of medical patients will further increase congestion.

“It’s already difficult to park and pick children up at the school,” Adler said, referring to Horace Mann Elementary School, on nearby Charleville Boulevard.

Attorney Silverman said he believes the residents are misguided in their effort to block the change to medical uses.

“Residents are lamenting the commercialization and increase in traffic in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles in general,” Silverman said. “This is an inappropriate outlet for that frustration because Mr. Amir is not contributing to that problem.”

Alan Robert Block, lawyer for the two groups, said he will have to go to court and present the case that the city itself should have made. The city, for example, failed to make the argument that the developer’s noncompliance with the 1989 ordinance would adversely affect local residents, Block said.