Paved With Good Intentions? : Development: Residents brace for battle as the City Council weighs plan for 37 homes and the transformation of a hallowed stretch of Mulholland Drive.

A bitter dispute over the building of 37 homes just east of Topanga Canyon will reach the City Council Wednesday, the last stop for a project that would pave a dirt section of Mulholland Drive and level an oak-topped ridge now home to rabbits and deer.

Dubbed Woodland Hills Estates, the project would scrape away 340,000 cubic yards of dirt from rolling hills in the western Santa Monica Mountains. Developer Maj Rayes would then carve one-third-acre lots out of about 30% of his 62 acres and leave the rest as parkland.

Neighbors and conservationists have fiercely opposed his designs on the land, calling the project too big, too dense, inconsistent with the city’s General Plan and inconsiderate of the natural contours of the land.

“It just doesn’t make sense for that site,” said Paul Edelman, staff ecologist for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the state’s parkland acquisition agency.

Still, the Los Angeles Planning Commission approved Rayes’ subdivision tract map in November and rejected an appeal by conservationists and neighbors in March.

Now comes the end game, as opponents marshal their forces through newsletters and hot lines for a mass appearance before the council Wednesday and Rayes tries to blunt their criticism with 11th-hour changes to the scope of the project.

Late last week, Gary L. Morris, Rayes’ land-use consultant, hiked out to the site to meet with conservancy officials and attorneys for Mulholland Tomorrow, a mountains advocacy group. Morris brandished a new map illustrating a scaled-down project of 30 lots instead of 37 and a new grading plan that would require the removal of only 200,000 cubic yards of dirt.

“It’s definitely more environmentally sensitive than the last plan, but he’s still destroying the ridge,” said Fredric Woocher, a Mulholland Tomorrow lawyer.

Perhaps the most controversial part of Rayes’ new proposal, though, is the means by which it would create new public parkland.

While his previous plans included the outright donation of 45 acres of open space to the state, sources familiar with the negotiations say his current offer is to sell the land to the city for $600,000 in so-called Quimby funds. That money comes from fees paid by developers for community recreation facilities in the vicinity of their projects.

On the surface, his proposal seems reasonable.

The project backs up to the northern edge of the “Big Wild,” 18,000 acres of state-owned terrain including Topanga State Park between the ocean and the San Diego Freeway. The conservancy has long coveted Rayes’ parcel as a gateway for trails to the Big Wild; intense negotiations a year ago hung up on a disagreement over the land’s value, which Rayes said was about $4.75 million.

Rayes has even proposed spending a small portion of the Quimby money to create two trails in the donated open space as well as a picnic area and a small parking lot.

But Rayes would devote much of the city money to a use that critics say is exactly opposite to the purpose of Quimby funds: He would spend about $300,000 to pave a 450-foot stretch of bumpy, serpentine road known as “dirt Mulholland.”

That unpaved portion is popular with hikers, mountain bikers, sightseers and lovers. It runs from just past Canoga Boulevard in Woodland Hills on the west to Encino on the east. There, a paved Mulholland continues to the east as the address for million-dollar homes and the site of dramatic overviews of the Los Angeles Basin and the San Fernando Valley.

Mountain advocates consider the dirt portion sacred ground--a dusty symbol of the Southland’s rugged past. For the past three years, mountain ridgelines half a mile to the north and south of the road have been protected from construction by a group of city ordinances bundled up as the Mulholland Scenic Parkway Specific Plan.

“Paving is an inappropriate use of Quimby money. It’s weird, it’s like a farce,” Edelman said. The ecologist complained that building a 24-foot-wide road with curbs to city standards would require the destruction of “an exquisite vegetation community” of native grass, walnut woodland and coastal shrubs.

Morris, acting as Rayes’ spokesman, declined to elaborate on the new plans, saying only that he was “cautiously optimistic” that he’d reach a “win-win compromise” that would satisfy all parties.

Yet neighbors say it is hard to imagine such a rosy outcome, as they and their predecessors have fretted over development in the sunny cove--today carpeted with wildflowers--for nearly half a century.

Rosemary Woodlock, an attorney who lives off dirt Mulholland a mile east of the property, summed up the property’s history in a legal brief for the citizens’ panel that oversees Mulholland Drive development.

Chief among her concerns was the area’s unusual, somewhat unnatural geology. A large, bowl-shaped portion of the land, she noted, is actually made of compacted dirt dumped there after the construction of housing tracts to the west.

Woodlock said her parents have lived near the property since 1948 and have watched powerhouse financial institutions like Gibraltar Insurance and Lazard Freres fruitlessly contemplate construction on the surrounding hillsides.

“It is still vacant for a very good reason,” Woodlock wrote. “A tract probably cannot be built on it with any degree of certainty as to costs because of the extremely unreliable geology.”

Woodlock fears Rayes would abandon the property after grading if the cost of buttressing, or geologic-support measures, were to soar.

On the other hand, most conservationists and the area’s councilman, Marvin Braude, have said they would not object to a project scaled down to fit 20 to 24 homes within the confines of the dirt-filled bowl, since it is already disturbed.

The complaints have created an avalanche of paperwork. The Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization and Mulholland Tomorrow have joined Woodlock in complaining that the Planning Commission misapplied zoning and slope-density rules when it approved the project. Commission staff members have dismissed their arguments.

In the past month, water has emerged as a divisive issue.

Woodlock said that Rayes recently acknowledged he cannot afford to pipe water to his property from the Department of Water and Power’s Corbin Tank three miles east. Instead, he has made plans to get water from a county water district less than a mile south, now serving residences in a development called Summit Pointe.

But the effects of pumping water over open space was not addressed in the project’s environmental impact report, Woodlock said.

Residents of Summit Pointe have announced their opposition to the project for similar reasons.

Barry Glaser, an attorney who lives there, said his neighbors are “very concerned” about the loss of water pressure if new homes in a Rayes development are allowed to draw down their supply. He acknowledged the project would also wipe out their north-facing view of rolling, wooded hills.

The neighboring homeowner groups in Woodland Hills and Summit Pointe have a spiritual ally in the president of the Planning Commission.

The commissioner, George Lefcoe, a real estate law professor, said in an interview that he approved the Rayes project because he believed it complied with laws in place at the time of application and deserved “absolute entitlement.” Rayes’ initial bid for a tract map predated the Mulholland Corridor’s specific plan.

Yet Lefcoe said he generally shares environmentalists’ belief that the Santa Monica Mountains should not be indiscriminately flattened for homes.

“You can make all hills around Los Angeles look alike, but soon you wouldn’t know where you were--you might as well be in Wichita,” he said. “We should not take away the distinctive look of our mountain ranges.”