Picus Made Mark in 16-Year Tenure : Politics: Community activist-turned-politician fought big development and championed women’s causes during her time on the City Council.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus, the community activist-turned-politician from the West San Fernando Valley suburbs defeated in Tuesday’s election, carved out a niche for herself as a wasp-tongued foe of big development and champion of women’s causes in 16 years at City Hall.

Picus, 62, entered the council in 1977 by defeating mortician Donald Lorenzen for the 3rd District seat in her second attempt; she had fallen only several hundred votes short of winning in 1973.

In a 1986 article for Ms. Magazine, Picus called herself a “recycled woman” who “didn’t know there was life after forty” until she was bitten by the political bug.

Perhaps the pinnacle of Picus’ legislative career came in 1985.

That was the year the City Council, with Picus playing the lead role, adopted a so-called pay-equity plan to pay female city government employees the same as men working in jobs requiring similar skills.

The plan to raise the pay of women’s jobs at City Hall resulted in Ms. Magazine naming her one of its women of the year.

Picus also was instrumental in efforts to get a city child-care coordinator appointed to help working women, and she supported a plan to grant special building privileges to developers who provided child-care facilities.

Before running for office, Picus had been a leader in the PTA and League of Women Voters and an activist in the Valley’s Jewish community services network, a background that helped typecast her as the council’s do-gooder Mary Poppins figure.

But it gradually became obvious that Picus could be a fierce combatant for causes she believed in.

In fact, Picus’ latter years in office were defined by her bitter fights over development projects and her often futile attempts to champion San Fernando Valley causes.

For example, one of her overriding themes was that Mayor Tom Bradley was depriving the Valley of power at City Hall by refusing to appoint a fair share of Valley residents to the influential citizen commissions.

But it was last year, during the battle to redraw the political boundaries of the Los Angeles Unified School District, that Picus waged her most dramatic fight ever on a Valley issue.

The new boundaries eliminated one of the two all-Valley school board seats and Picus allied herself with Valley parents in an unsuccessful fight to reverse the change.

Undoubtedly Picus’ most explosive development battle involved her efforts to block construction of an office complex at the 21.5-acre Warner Ridge site in Woodland Hills.

This controversy, which dominated Picus’ fourth term in office, began in the late 1980s. By 1988, as she prepared to run for reelection the following year, Picus joined with the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization to oppose the project.

In 1990, Picus won council support for a move that appeared to doom the project, restricting construction on the ridge to single-family homes. But the victory brought on a disastrous backlash.

The developers filed a $100-million lawsuit against the city, charging that Picus had violated their rights by trying to kill the project to curry favor with her Woodland Hills constituents at election time.

In a deposition, Picus provided testimony that made it sound as if her maneuverings to kill the Warner Ridge project were motivated primarily by her quest for political gain. In 1992, a series of judges agreed with the developer that the city’s handling of the Warner Ridge case had been illegal, and the developers won a crushing victory, a settlement that allowed them to build the project virtually on their own terms, at a cost of more than $10 million to the city.

Some of her former homeowner allies blamed Picus for their defeat, a resentment that probably helped end her council career Tuesday.