La Vina Foes Must Pay $55,000 : Lawsuit: Judge orders opponents of the 272-home project to cover supporters’ attorney fees or drop the case.

Opponents of the hillside La Vina project were feverishly trying to raise $55,000 by Tuesday after a Superior Court judge ruled last week that the group must either pay that amount in attorney fees incurred by the project’s proponents or drop its case.

Judge Robert H. O’Brien said Friday that, in order to proceed, opponents of the 272-home project on the former site of a tuberculosis sanatorium must compensate Los Angeles County and the project developers for failing to meet a Nov. 16 court-imposed deadline to file documents needed for the case to go to trial.

This was not a “sanction,” O’Brien said in a strongly worded rebuke of attorneys for the opposition group, but an exercise of his “equitable power” to require payment for extra legal costs caused by the delays. The La Vina project was approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in October.

“To delay and delay and delay, you just lend argument to critics of the environmental groups who say they want to stop development and that’s their only purpose,” O’Brien said to representatives of Friends of La Vina, the group of Altadena residents who have spearheaded resistance to the project.

Lawyers for the group say O’Brien was mistaken when he said that the case’s administrative record--a compilation of documents related to the case, such as transcripts of hearings and copies of environmental impact reports--was not on file in the court. He said the documents had simply been misplaced in the Los Angeles courthouse.

“His comments came out of left field,” said attorney Abraham R. Brown, who added that the papers had been found in the file room of the Los Angeles Superior Court building.

He said the group will appeal O’Brien’s ruling.

Leaders of Friends of La Vina, some of whom have been fighting the project since 1986, scoffed at the notion that the judge’s requirement was not a sanction.

“It’s like telling us, ‘Walk on water by next week and then we’ll tell you if you’re right or wrong,’ ” said Adolfo Miralles, chairman of the group.

Nevertheless, the group this week initiated a life-or-death fund-raising drive that, as of midweek, had raised about $15,000 in pledges. “This community doesn’t have the multimillion-dollar residences, but we’re doing the best we can,” Miralles said. “We have a handful of people who have donated over $1,000 apiece.”

Attorneys for Friends of La Vina contend that O’Brien’s ruling was unprecedented. “I still haven’t found another case that did anything similar,” said Brown, of the San Francisco office of the New York firm Proskauer Rose Goetz & Mendelsohn.

The La Vina project has divided the community since 1986, when Pasadena developers Cantwell-Anderson Inc. bought the 220-acre site at the edge of the Angeles National Forest and proposed to build more than 300 housing units there.

The project has meandered through the courts and county land-use commissions ever since. Opponents say it would desecrate a tranquil rural neighborhood, once a Gabrieleno Indian campground, by moving 1.5 million cubic yards of earth and building a housing grid on what is largely undeveloped forest land.

Those who favor the project say it will provide much-needed jobs and contracts for the community.

Friends of La Vina sued in 1990, contending that the county had failed to properly review the project’s environmental impact statement and violated the terms of its own General Plan.

In the interim, the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission rejected the project and then approved a scaled-down version. The Board of Supervisors approval of the 272-home project appeared to lay the issue to rest.

The project’s opponents continue to claim that there were numerous procedural violations in the land-use process. But they failed to meet a November deadline--a “drop-dead date,” in legal parlance--to file court documents, according to county attorneys.

O’Brien could have dismissed the Friends of La Vina case because of technical violations, said Darlene Phillips, who has represented the county in the matter. “That was certainly within his power,” she said. “But rather than dismiss it, he let (Friends of La Vina) continue if they wanted to pay compensatory fees.”

Attorneys for the Friends of La Vina, however, say it has been the developers who have delayed a court resolution.

“They know we have a very good case,” said Brown, whose firm has represented the group on a pro bono basis. “That’s why they’ve been trying so strongly to basically inject any sort of delay to keep it from going to trial on its merits.”

Pike Oliver, senior vice president for Southwest Diversified, Cantwell Anderson’s partner in the project, said the project could be under construction by next summer should the Friends of La Vina suit be thrown out of court.

But Oliver said the company was prepared to continue fighting in the courts, should the opposition succeed in raising the $55,000.

“While this is all very expensive and we’d like to see the resources expended more productively,” he said, “we do have the resources to last through all of this.”