150 Meet to Seek Agreement on Neighborhood Issues : Community: The town hall gathering also sought to dissolve distrust among residents associations.

About 150 Beverly Hills residents turned out for a town hall meeting Wednesday that organizers say was the first in recent memory to bring all of the city’s civic groups together.

The meeting, which was called by the Municipal League of Beverly Hills, was attended by representatives of seven homeowner groups and a tenants association.

League President Tom White said the purpose of the meeting was to “try to overcome past polarization” and thaw out the distrust among residents.

In the past, residents have argued different sides of issues such as a school parcel tax, and to this day, they look at one another with distrust, he said.

The league, which is a citywide civic association, wants residents to understand they may be “at each other’s throat on one issue, but may agree on 20 others,” White said.

During the two-hour meeting, presidents from the homeowners groups cited a litany of concerns including crime, the encroachment of traffic in residential neighborhoods, the trend toward large houses on small lots, the lack of funding to maintain school facilities, and the impact of projects such as the 20th Century Fox expansion just outside of the city’s borders.

Actor/resident Jack Lemmon was on hand to urge residents to sign his group’s petitions against construction of a mansion on Tower Road. The group, Citizens for the Preservation of Beverly Hills, has appealed the Planning Commission’s approval of the large estate to the City Council.

One issue that sparked a lot of debate at the meeting was growth.

The city has “always been a residential area and not a shopping mall or a business district,” said Mary Levin Cutler, president of the Beverly Hills Estates Homeowners Assn.

Others disagreed, saying revenues from business taxes, sales tax and hotel occupancy taxes make up 70% of the city’s annual budget, and the city needs business to maintain residential services.

“We may have to increase our taxes if we don’t want the intrusion of big buildings and big business,” said Steve Dahlerbruch, president of the Beverly Roxbury Homeowners Assn.

White said he had been a Beverly Hills resident for 17 years, and during that time the city has gone from a village atmosphere to a metropolis. The argument for increased growth has always been that it would bring in new taxes to maintain the quality of residential life, yet the quality of life has gone down, he said.

White said a budget that has ranged from $71 million to $86 million annually in recent years should be enough to run a first-class city for a population of 31,000 residents.

George Konheim, president of the newly formed Beverly Hills North Homeowners Assn., said civic and homeowners groups need to “grasp the opportunity to join forces on various issues.”

In the past, “we’ve abdicated our concerns and not really presented them to the City Council,” Konheim said.