Prostitution Fight Divides Officials : Crime: Councilman’s effort targets 11 Sepulveda Boulevard motels. Police and others call reports of problems exaggerated.

A councilman’s office is calling it the city’s biggest effort to close businesses that fail to clean up prostitution, with nearly a dozen motels along notorious Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys targeted for investigation by city zoning officials.

But the Van Nuys police sergeant responsible for community-based policing in the area says the prostitution problem has been exaggerated. And a city zoning official involved with the inquiry has said it targets motels that do not have significant problems.

“We agree that there’s a problem out there, but somehow or other, it’s gotten blown out of proportion,” Sgt. Ed Brayton said. “Sepulveda Boulevard is doing much, much better than it was a year ago. What the city is doing is not our idea.”

The probe started last month at the behest of Councilman Marvin Braude, who said his office had received numerous complaints about prostitution in the area. In a letter to city zoning officials, Braude named the 11 motels and requested that they be investigated to see if the owners had permitted crimes and zoning violations to take place on the premises.

The city has found enough violations to warrant possible action against only six motels, city zoning administrator Jon Perica said.

Hearings on those six are scheduled in January, and any motels found to be a nuisance or whose owners regularly break the law risk being closed down. Short of closure, offending motels could find their operations restricted.

The other five motels have a “bare” crime record that does not substantiate their participation in a revocation hearing at this point, Perica said. Further investigation of these motels is under way.

City officials say the 11-motel investigation is unique because zoning administrators generally use the revocation process against just one business at a time. Since 1989, the zoning administration has held 125 such hearings citywide and revoked business licenses only seven times, Perica said.

“This is the first time that we are trying to target an entire area,” Perica said. “This is the first time we have formally gone after a big group. . . .”

But Van Nuys Division Capt. James McMurray, who praised the councilman’s efforts to clean up the community, said the motels are not the problem.

“There apparently is a perception in this community that these motels are involved in this prostitution activity,” McMurray said. But “the majority of prostitution activity seems to take place in cars in residential neighborhoods east and west of Sepulveda Boulevard.”

McMurray said that some prostitutes simply live at the motels. “I don’t know per se that that is a violation of the law.”

Sgt. Larry Mauldin, who heads vice operations at the Van Nuys Division, agreed.

One of the targeted motels, the Carriage Inn on Sepulveda Boulevard, is part of a nationwide chain and has not been the scene of repeated crimes, McMurray said.

Mauldin called the investigation of that motel “a waste of time.”

Harold Peskin, general manager of the Carriage Inn, said he had not been notified that his hotel was on the list before it was submitted.

Indeed, one of the lead zoning department investigators questioned the selection process.

“I think it’s probably unfair to do this blanket thing to every motel from block Y to block X,” said the official, who declined to be identified.

In an interview this week, Braude said he never saw the list of motels to be probed, even though his office submitted it to the city. Braude’s Valley field deputy, Rosalind Wayman, said she initiated the list on behalf of constituent complaints and after consulting with police in Van Nuys.

Wayman said the list was not based on the frequency of crimes reported at them. “There were specific complaints about some motels, but not all of them,” she said. “We wanted to look at all the motels in the councilman’s district.”

Wayman said the intention was not to make law-abiding motels worry about the security of their business licenses.