City Denies Request on Specific Plan

The Westlake Village City Council denied a developer’s request to hear a new amendment proposal to the Westlake North Specific Plan that the council said was just too close to one rejected last year.

The developer, Richland Westlake Ltd., went to the council Wednesday to appeal a staff decision to reject it, after the Planning Department had arrived at the same conclusion in February.

Mayor Doug Yarrow said the plan was too similar to the last one, which went through months of often heated public hearings. Most of the council members say they could not see that the end result would be any different if they had heard this latest configuration of the project.

“In my opinion, the new application was substantially the same application that the city had rejected last [November],” he said. “I didn’t see it having elements that were substantially different.”

Betty De Santis, the sole council member to vote to hear the proposal, said she was in favor of it last year and therefore was interested to see it again, even if it was largely unchanged.

Upon the proposal’s rejection, the city’s planning director cited a municipal code that stipulates an applicant may not submit the same or similar amendment until one year after the council rejection. The code, however, allows the developer to appeal that decision to the governing body.

Richland Westlake officials could not be reached for comment Thursday.

On Nov. 13, the council rejected the developer’s proposal to increase housing units, decrease commercial property and create a shared park and school site.

Council members said then that the increased density would outweigh the benefits of a larger park and chose instead to keep that area as its commercial base.

The developer said the latest plan would have expanded the park/school by a few acres and that the new amendment would be less dense.