Landowners Divided : Safety: County approves building restrictions to curb blazes at Malibou Lake. Absentee landlords support the plan, but residents assail it.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has approved a controversial set of building restrictions intended to ease the danger of wildfires around Malibou Lake.

But last-minute changes to the plan, which officials hope can be applied to other areas prone to brush fires such as Topanga Canyon, provoked fear among residents that it will do little to protect their mountain hamlet.

During an hourlong board hearing last week, residents who showed up intending to support the restrictions did an abrupt about-face and vowed to fight the new rules in court.

Likewise, 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, a vacant property owner who represents a group of other landowners in the area. “You can’t just take away people’s property rights completely.”

The rules, technically known as the Malibou Lake Community Standards District, slightly change and make permanent a set of temporary restrictions in effect since January, 1993.

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.

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

Another contentious issue--road widening--was also diluted by Edelman. In earlier proposals, new builders were required to widen the road fronting their lot, often at substantial cost. Any builder seeking an exception would be required to go through the county’s costly conditional use permit process, which can cost as much as $4,000.

Instead, Edelman’s compromise allows a fire department review board to determine whether road widening would be required. Only if that failed would the builder have to seek a conditional use permit.

A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the earlier guidelines was thrown out by a judge last July because the woman who filed it did not pursue all of the administrative options at her disposal.

But residents who once supported the restrictions now say they will try to challenge them in court. “This is putting our whole community in jeopardy,” said resident Mary Altmann.

Residents started a push for stricter guidelines three years ago, complaining that proposed construction projects would make it nearly impossible to escape during a brush fire.