Landowners at Malibou Lake Split on Fire Rules : Safety: County OKs building restrictions to curb blazes. Absentee landlords voice support, residents blast plan.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Thursday approved a controversial set of building restrictions intended to ease the danger of wildfires around Malibou Lake--but only after making last-minute changes that residents fear will do little to protect their mountain hamlet.

Over the course of an hourlong hearing in the board’s cavernous downtown meeting room, residents who showed up intending to support the restrictions did an abrupt about-face and vowed to fight the new rules in court.

But owners of vacant property who originally threatened to mount legal challenges against the building restrictions walked away satisfied with the board’s unanimous vote.

“It has come back to where it is reasonable,” said Phyllis Daugherty, an owner of vacant property who represents a group of other landowners in the area. “You can’t just take away people’s property rights completely.”

The rules approved Thursday, technically known as the Malibou Lake Community Standards District, change slightly and make permanent a set of temporary restrictions in effect since January, 1993. County officials hope the guidelines developed for Malibou Lake can be applied in other mountain communities prone to fast-moving brush fires, such as Topanga Canyon.

But residents who have supported tougher restrictions for more than two years complained that the new rules--proposed as a compromise by retiring Supervisor Edmund D. Edelman--came as a surprise and will do little to protect them from fire.

“The people who live there deserve to be protected,” Malibou Lake resident Joel Schulman said. “Fire knows no compromise. . . . With these changes you’re proposing, it’s over. This is so completely toothless that it’s useless.”

Addressing his critics, Edelman said: “We don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a world we try to make more perfect, as we can.”

Schulman and others specifically took issue with a loosening of rules governing how much of a lot could be covered by a new house. Under earlier proposals attacked by vacant landowners, new homes would be allowed to cover just 15% of the lot.

The new rules allow 25% lot coverage.

Lot coverage is significant because if buildings occupy too much of the hilly terrain, it becomes difficult for firefighters and other rescue crews to maneuver around them.

Jim Bailey, the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s head of fire safety, agreed to the increased lot coverage as long as other elements of the community standards district remained intact.

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Those elements include requirements for fire sprinklers in new homes and a virtual ban on street parking to allow large emergency vehicles room to negotiate the narrow, winding roads that surround the lake.

The need for stricter guidelines emerged three years ago when residents complained about new construction projects proposed for their community, which is served by a network of narrow, winding roads.

Residents protested that more houses and more cars would make it nearly impossible to escape during a brush fire. Vacant landowners agreed that fire danger in the community was high, but they complained that residents, too, had added to the threat by making illegal--and possibly substandard--additions to their homes.