TWO SIDES OF BEN REZNIK :...

It was war in City Hall. And, once again, attorney Ben Reznik maneuvered for the kill.

His client wanted to build 172 apartments in Encino, not far from Reznik’s own home. The neighbors were aghast. And they had Councilman Marvin Braude on their side.

Reznik decided to go nuclear. He advised his client to throw in some subsidized housing, gauging correctly that it would make the plan more attractive to the city Planning Commission and even more frightful to the neighbors.

Facing defeat, “they cut a deal with us,” he said: 150 units with no subsidized housing. The client took it and ran.

So why was the victorious attorney disappointed?

“Because we lost the affordable housing,” he said.

Unlike his developer client, Reznik actually wanted low-income apartment dwellers moving into his neighborhood. Even Encino should do its fair share, and those who fight it are, in his opinion, concealing their racism under a thin veneer of environmentalism.

Such are the contradictions of Benjamin Menachem Reznik--take-no-prisoners lawyer who has a conscience and a heart.

After a decade of building a base of political, legal and commercial ties, the 42-year-old Israeli immigrant has positioned himself as a new kind of Valley leader, able to marshal diverse influences to fight for better treatment from downtown power brokers while nudging the Valley toward increasing interdependence with the city over the hill.

Depending on the perspective, his initiatives can seem admirable or infuriating.

Here he is--the property rights advocate--squeezing the city and a parks agency for $10.4 million, the price a client wanted for a prized Studio City canyon. There he is--the civic volunteer--schlepping to months of night meetings to hash out the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan. And then the property rights advocate again, taking the city to court to challenge the plan he helped frame.

One moment he’s the emissary of San Fernando Valley interests, leading a delegation of business representatives to Sacramento or Washington. Then he’s the committed social liberal, worrying about the effects on others of Valley causes such as the proposed breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which he favors in theory but can’t yet bring himself to back.

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For years Democratic candidates have come to his Encino home to be feted: among them Richard Katz, Dianne Feinstein and Leo McCarthy. But this year he became the Valley’s most public backer of conservative Richard Riordan.

Reznik’s critics--mainly homeowner leaders who stand alert to battle more development along Ventura Boulevard--interpret the mixed message as merely cynical opportunism.

“He supports liberal issues until you hire him,” one irked homeowner said. “Then he becomes a paid conservative. . . . I don’t call that a sellout. He’s just trying to earn a living. The man’s got a million-dollar house and three kids.”

Such attacks have proved no more than a trifle to the lobbyist and land-use attorney who gobbles up conflict as nonchalantly as he absorbs turgid municipal code.

Reznik says he sees no contradiction, only unstinting effort on behalf of causes he believes in. It comes under the all-encompassing tenet and a Jewish tradition of repairing the world.

“In Hebrew it’s called tikun olam, “ he said. “The sages said that the highest form of charity is repairing of the world. You do your part in helping to repair what’s wrong with the world.”

It is this imperative that drives him, he says, to make cold calls each year for the United Jewish Fund campaign, as it drives him to open his home to gatherings for causes such as Eleanor Smeal’s Feminist Majority Foundation, to promote Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey’s presidential campaign, or to toil long nights on an obscure committee of the blue-ribbon group L.A. 2000 Partnership, trying to solve L.A.’s housing crisis.

And--the broadest of imperatives--it’s what drove him to play hardball for a $10.4-million settlement when a gaggle of neighbors in Studio City’s Fryman Canyon agitated to block a housing development his client had struggled 13 years to nurse through City Hall.

In that case, it was the Fifth Amendment that needed repair, the part called the “takings clause,” that says government must pay for the private property it seizes.

And even winning has not soothed his indignation.

“I think public policy-wise, the taxpayers got ripped off, terribly,” he said. “Who benefited but the people around there who wanted a park, wanted the wild and didn’t want to see any more homes go in there and didn’t care if every last bit of money available for park acquisition went to buy those 46 acres? It was a failure of leadership.”

Fidgety and at times awkward in bearing, unremarkable in physical presence with graying, thinning hair and spectacles, Reznik asserts himself through speech. With a rich voice, a quick mind and a cool head he can work calmly in the eye of the storm.

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He wins praise from friend and foe alike for his negotiating skill. Frequently, he meets with neighborhood groups to smooth over an unpopular development plan.

“It’s diplomacy at some level,” said Alan Kishbaugh, president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns. “Ben’s an old hand at this. He’s trying to help his client, but he also knows what kinds of problems his client might run into. I think that’s good business. I think he’s smart to do that.”

Early in his land-use practice, Reznik represented homeowners as often as he did developers. Once, for example, he worked without fee for the Homeowners of Encino to defeat the city and the powerful billboard industry in a court case to stop the practice of allowing Ventura Boulevard signs to exceed the building-height limit.

Lately, though, his business has gravitated to the better-paying commercial clients, leaving homeowners increasingly troubled by the array of tools he has assembled to oppose them.

“He carries an unfair advantage over the community because he’s both a very competent land-use attorney and he’s also a lobbyist,” said Tom Grant of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.

A feeling of betrayal still lingers over Reznik’s two-year participation on the citizens advisory committee that advised the Planning Department on the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan. Appointed by Councilman Marvin Braude to represent business, he lobbied vigorously for higher building-height limits and more liberal procedures for developers to appeal assessments for road improvements.

Ultimately, he voted in favor of a compromise plan. But, soon after its 1990 adoption, he began an assault on it, filing a $10-million lawsuit contending that the city illegally delayed his client’s project to bring it under the plan’s new restrictions.

“The homeowners groups that were represented made compromises with him to get the plan adopted,” said an angry Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. “Once we had compromises, now we have the situation of him trying to get exemptions.”

Reznik deepened the wound by putting on a seminar to teach developers how to appeal the transportation assessments. He represents clients in 12 of the 42 appeals filed.

“He’s positioned himself strategically to advise those who would file appeals on how to wend their way through the city process on this issue,” said Ken Bernstein, chairman of the committee overseeing implementation of the plan.

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Reznik sees no conflict. The committee meetings were public, he points out, and any inside knowledge he gained was equally available to his opponents who sat on the committee.

Though Ventura Boulevard land-use battles cemented Reznik’s status as a Valley player, has only belatedly even begun to think of himself as a Valleyite, largely through the gradual narrowing of his personal life into a small orbit encircling his law practice in an office tower near the San Diego Freeway, his house 1.7 miles away, with his temple in between.

“The fact is we never go to movies on the Westside anymore,” he said, almost astonished by the realization. “We never go to restaurants on the Westside.”

Such a life was unthinkable for the immigrant youth who found the Valley “a really strange place,” when his Fairfax High School basketball team ventured over the hill to play Grant. Reznik was born of Polish Jews who fled to Russia to escape the Nazi occupation, then made their way to Israel at the war’s end.

At the age of 10, he arrived at New York Harbor “on a cold December morning in 1960.” Growing up in L.A.’s Fairfax district, he studied political science and foreign language at UCLA, aiming for a career in international relations, but later settled on law as a more practical pursuit.

When romance bloomed with Janice Kamenir after a meeting at a UCLA Hillel House dance, economics guided the young couple to Studio City to buy the starter house they couldn’t afford on the cool side of the mountains. Five years later, a Beverly Hills law practice followed.

By then they had the first of three children--Yoni, now 11, Devi, 10, and Sami, 6--and Janice, who had inherited Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky’s former job as Soviet Jewry advocate for the Jewish Federation Council, was soon to pass the bar exam.

Reznik & Reznik was born to spare the new lawyer/mother a long commute to a large, impersonal firm.

The proximity has allowed the Rezniks to share the duties of transporting children to school and sports competitions and to mix an active social calendar with a law practice and family.

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The marriage, more than a stepping stone for Reznik’s emergence in public life, has been its essence, as Janice not only tolerated the wearying philanthropic and political agenda but matched it step for step. She serves on the board of the Los Angeles Hebrew High School, is a rising figure in the San Fernando Valley Bar Assn. and helped found the California Women Lawyers Assn.

They hold social and fund-raising events almost monthly in their home--which the assessor values at $663,000--filling their living room with folding chairs in lieu of the furniture they have yet to buy after living there six years.

In 19 years of marriage, the Rezniks never split in their political allegiance until this year, when Ben, who was aggressively courted by both mayoral candidates, endorsed Riordan after Janice had endorsed Mike Woo. The split was greeted by a certain skepticism.

“My sense is that Ben is a strategic thinker and keeping one in each camp can’t hurt,” said Bernstein.

And, strategically, the Riordan endorsement proved to be a plum, adding the ear of a new mayor to Reznik’s already ample resume as a leading voice for the Valley.

Reznik says he has no plans for public office and acknowledges that the candidates he backs more often lose than win. But Reznik has found his own outlet for leadership through business associations. Like a crafty politician who raises an obscure office into a bully pulpit, he has wielded his chairmanship of the once-sleepy Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. into a formidable political voice.

He persuaded the VICA board to endorse Charter Amendment F, the police reform initiative, last year. He also led VICA in a storm-troop attack on Sacramento, threatening to publish full-page newspaper ads listing the names of legislators who were not supporting workers’ compensation reform.

His two-year VICA term reached its zenith in this spring’s trip to Washington by a VICA delegation that opened key doors in the Clinton Administration and California congressional delegation.

The team of Reznik and past VICA chairman David Fleming impressed Fernando Torres-Gil, the former Los Angeles planning commissioner appointed by Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala as assistant secretary for aging.

“They invited me to their reception with (Sens.) Feinstein, Kerrey and (Barbara) Boxer,” Torres-Gil said. “Any time you pull three senators together on a busy afternoon--and, I might add, Feinstein and Boxer pointed out that was the first time since elected the two had been together--(that’s) an indication of the clout Ben Reznik and David Fleming have.”

Characteristically, the issues on Reznik’s agenda were bigger than the Valley--mainly ensuring that Los Angeles and California were not brushed aside in Clinton’s economic-recovery plans.

“He’s practically a one-man ambassador for Los Angeles,” Torres-Gil said.

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But which Valley does Reznik speak for? The insular, envious place that complains it gives too much and gets too little, or a new, more progressive Valley that wields influence and expects to endure its share of the city’s pain?

The answer is both.

After all, it was Reznik who sounded the alarm, in an article for The Times, when Rebuild L.A. initially formed a board without any Valley representation.

“I have come to realize there is a Valley point of view and there is a Valley neglect--a different manner than one might think of neglecting South-Central L.A.--but nevertheless, neglect,” he said. “If that makes me a Valleyite . . . I don’t know. It looks like it. But the thing is, do I feel like one? . . . If I think about it, I think I am probably at this point a Valleyite.”

Then he qualifies himself: “I think a cosmopolitan Valleyite.”

A contradiction? He doesn’t see it.