La Vina Project Gets Final OK After 5 Years : Development: Supervisors approve gated community of 272 homes. Opponents pledge to continue their fight in court.

Five years after its unveiling, a controversial proposal to build a gated 272-home development and private school in the foothills of Altadena has won what amounts to final approval from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.

By a 3-1 vote, supervisors reaffirmed their 1989 support of the project and overturned the county Regional Planning Commission’s recent decision to scale back the La Vina housing development by 43 homes.

A final, formality vote by supervisors is expected in the coming weeks. And barring a court order, their decision Thursday clears the way for groundbreaking on the project next spring.

“I am very happy,” said Andrew Oliver, project manager for La Vina’s developers, Southwest Diversified and Cantwell-Anderson. “This decision represents a lot of hard work.”

But the excitement of Oliver and La Vina’s supporters was more than matched Thursday by the disappointment of project opponents, who argued that the development is too large for their community and pledged to fight it in court.

“It (the decision) makes me very sad,” said Crist Henderson, one of many Altadena residents who claimed that opposition to the project’s size and scope has been ignored by county officials.

For years, project opponents including the Altadena Town Council and Sierra Club have argued that the proposed 220-acre development at the north end of Lincoln Boulevard would be too large and environmentally disruptive to justify approval.

Noting that the project site is almost entirely within the Angeles National Forest, opponents have said the proposed housing should, at a minimum, be significantly scaled back to preserve the parklands for recreation, not a gated community of homes ranging in price from $350,000 to $650,000.

“We are not against development. We just want people to be considerate neighbors and work something out,” resident Henderson told supervisors Thursday, echoing the comments of project opponents at a rancorous hearing a few weeks ago.

Joining critics of the project, Supervisor Gloria Molina raised a number of questions about its effect on parkland and the adequacy of its study by county staff, including planners and recreation officials.

Moreover, Molina sparred briefly with the project’s manager, who repeatedly sought to prove that developers had done all they could to reach a compromise with opponents. At one point, in fact, Molina challenged Oliver’s assertion that developers had never envisioned taking any private property for the development.

“My staff says that’s a big fib,” Molina told Oliver to the cheers of project opponents.

Ultimately, Molina opposed the 272-home development, preferring a smaller-scale project recommended by the Regional Planning Commission. The commission in August voted to approve a 229-home development that was reduced in size to avoid building on a portion of the property that runs near an earthquake fault.

Despite the objections of Molina and community activists, the majority of the board sided with Supervisor Mike Antonovich in approving the project as they had in 1989 before legal and administrative challenges forced its review.

In urging approval, Antonovich noted that the county’s planning staff had found no evidence of activity along the earthquake fault. And, he insisted, supervisors had an obligation to stand by their 1989 approval of the project unless there was compelling new information to change their minds.

“Quite simply,” Antonovich told his colleagues, “no new information exists to cause us to change” the earlier decision.

Noting that the project has divided the community, inflaming many, Antonovich said he hopes that the board’s approval will end the debate and allow residents to move on.

Oliver echoed that sentiment, arguing that the project will prove both environmentally sensitive and economically beneficial to the community.

“I know that people who opposed this project probably feel the way I would had we not gotten what we want,” he said. “But when it’s all over, I think the balance of this project will be real evident.”

La Vina’s opponents, however, were clearly unwilling to embrace it after the vote.

“It’s not the project with me. It’s that these developers can come in and do anything they want,” Henderson said.