PORTER RANCH : Planners Approve 1st Phase of Project

The Los Angeles Planning Commission voted 3 to 1 Thursday to OK construction of the first installment of 725 single-family houses in the huge Porter Ranch project.

But it remains unclear when the homes in the once-controversial Porter Ranch project will be built.

Tom Stemnock, president of Engineering Technology Inc., which represents Porter Ranch, said later that due to the sluggish economy, construction is unlikely to begin for at least another three years.

By its action, the commission also declared that “existing economic conditions make it infeasible” to require Porter Ranch Development Co. to immediately mitigate the extra traffic congestion at a half-dozen intersections caused by the 725 homes.

The commission decision means that the “traffic problems may not be fixed for years,” Walter Prince, a leading critic of the project, later complained. “That sure as hell was not the intent of the specific plan--the intent was for them to mitigate as they built.

“We were told that we wouldn’t notice any traffic impacts,” he said.

But Stemnock denied his client was getting a break. The city’s traffic analysis exaggerates the effect of the proposed construction and would unfairly force the developer to finance measures to relieve traffic impacts that will not actually be felt until many more of the project’s 3,495 residential units are built, Stemnock said.

In effect, the commission tacitly acknowledged that the city’s traffic study was in error when it chose not to require the mitigation measures, Stemnock said.