GRANADA HILLS : Rally Set Against Home Depot Project

Granada Hills residents will hold a rally today against plans to convert a bank building in their neighborhood to a shopping center anchored by a Home Depot store.

“We want to let everybody around here know that this big, giant project has been planned and approved, and nobody knows about this,” said Tom McArdle, one of the leaders of the effort to block the project.

The rally is scheduled from noon to 2 p.m. at Coast Federal Bank administrative headquarters in the 18000 block of Chatsworth Street, McArdle said.

Meanwhile, the group fighting the project, the Granada Hills Community Action Committee, has appealed the city Planning Department’s approval of the project, McArdle said. The group has gathered more than 600 signatures.

The Home Depot store would be situated at Zelzah Avenue and Chatsworth Street, next to Granada Hills High School. “A huge store like that is going to interfere with that high school,” McArdle said.

According to McArdle, Mayor Richard Riordan and City Councilman Hal Bernson operated in secrecy to move the project forward.

“It was accidentally found out by a few people,” he said. “For the city of Los Angeles to get a 14-page document (explaining the Planning Department’s decision) together overnight, you know it has to have been planned well in advance.”

But city officials deny that they tried to railroad the project through the approval process without comments from residents. The store will create 500 jobs, they say, and would fill a building that otherwise might remain vacant.

Marc Wane, assistant general counsel to Coast Federal, said the bank plans to relocate its administrative offices to a portion of the former Hughes Missile Division site in Canoga Park.

The 195,000-square-foot, single-story building was at one time a Treasury department store, which closed about 1978. The 16.5-acre site is zoned for more than 270,000 square feet of retail space, Wane said. The entire proposed project would occupy about 210,000 square feet of retail space.

Wane said the approval process was aboveboard. “We have complied with notice requirements,” he said. “We want to get public support. There is no reason to keep this a secret.”

The new building will be constructed in accordance with the Granada Hills Specific Plan, which mandates a Spanish Colonial design, significant upgrades in landscaping, as well as traffic improvements such as street widenings along part of Chatsworth Street from Lindley to Zelzah avenues.