Mental Health Center May Close : Zoning: Los Angeles office’s report notes neighbors’ objections and recommends shutting down residential Mar Vista facility.

Citing ongoing disruptions to neighbors, Los Angeles zoning officials have recommended that the city shut down Meadowbrook Manor, a residential mental health center in Mar Vista.

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The center is a nuisance and its permit to operate should be revoked, according to a report written by Albert Landini, the zoning administrator handling the case for the city’s Office of Zoning Administration.

Meadowbrook Manor, on East Boulevard between Venice Boulevard and Washington Place, will appeal the decision to the Los Angeles City Council within a few weeks, said Mark Armbruster, attorney for Meadowbrook. The case had already been taken to the Board of Zoning Appeals but because the board deadlocked on the issue, Landini’s recommendation prevailed.

Mental health advocates call the city’s recommendation discriminatory. They say the city is singling out Meadowbrook because homeowners don’t want a mental health facility in their neighborhood.

“If you really look at this, you’ll find discrimination,” said Jim Preis, executive director of Mental Health Advocacy Services, a nonprofit legal services organization in Los Angeles.

Locked and gated, Meadowbrook is home to more than 70 patients, age 18 to 84, most of them schizophrenic, said Barbara O’Conner, executive director of the facility. If Meadowbrook closes, some of its patients will end up on the street, she said.

City zoning officials, however, say that neighbors have complained for more than 10 years that Meadowbrook often causes excessive noise and traffic in the neighborhood, and has sometimes allowed its patients to wander off the grounds.

The city granted the facility a conditional use permit in 1955 to operate a sanitarium for “mildly mental” patients in the residential area, according to a city report. It has imposed additional conditions on Meadowbrook several times over the years to address problems allegedly caused by the facility.

Although Meadowbrook has complied with all the conditions the city has imposed, Landini said, neighbors still complain that problems persist.

“[Meadowbrook] is still a nuisance, and I can’t envision any other conditions that will make the nuisance go away,” he said.

Though the question of whether to shut down Meadowbrook has come up several times in City Hall, the planning commission’s vote earlier this month marks the closest the city has come to closing the center, Landini said.

The planning commission’s recommendation comes amid a long-running, emotional battle between residents and Meadowbrook administrators.

Residents argue that Meadowbrook, at one time a nursing home, changed its clientele without permission from the city and without consulting residents. The patients now living there have serious mental disorders, they say.

“I’m scared to death,” said Lu Weiss, who lives next door to the facility.

Patients frequently wander into the neighborhood, said Helen Cowden, who also lives next door. Neighbors say that on at least four occasions they found Meadowbrook residents in their yards or on their porches.

“We used to see some of the patients running down the street and guys in white coats chasing after them,” Cowden said.

Several neighbors say they are bothered by screams and loud music from the facility--noise, they add, caused by the patients and the staff. Cowden says syringes, prophylactics and other trash from Meadowbrook has been thrown on her property.

Residents also complain of traffic problems. The cars of staff members and visitors line East Boulevard, forcing neighbors to park farther down the street, and large delivery trucks often clog the area, residents say.

“This is not an issue of discrimination,” said Jim O’Callahan, who has lived across the street from Meadowbrook Manor since 1991 with his wife and three young children. “What I’m concerned about is whether they’re good neighbors. If [Meadowbrook] behaved responsibly, I would have no problem with them at all.”

O’Conner, however, says the neighbors are exaggerating the situation. The patients are only mildly schizophrenic, she said, and they all are on medication to control their symptoms. Only one patient in the past five years has left the facility without permission, O’Conner said.

The facility has taken numerous steps to respond to neighbors’ complaints, O’Conner said.

For example, deliveries are only allowed from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., with trucks that are smaller than 2 1/2 tons. And music is no longer allowed in the gated area in back of the building where patients are allowed to socialize.

The families of Meadowbrook’s residents worry about a more immediate issue: what to do if Meadowbrook closes. No other facilities nearby offer the same level of care and protection, they say.

“Meadowbrook helps turn these people back into human beings,” said Jerome Berchin, a retired attorney and father of a 35-year-old man who has been at Meadowbrook for more than five years. “If [my son] has to go somewhere else, he’ll regress and then we’ll have to start all over again.”