Bulldozers May Have Destroyed Indian Site

WOODLAND HILLS — A 7,000-year-old Indian village in the Santa Monica Mountains that survived time, natural disasters and the construction of a Department of Water and Power water tank atop it may have been destroyed by a developer’s bulldozers.

The city’s Department of Building and Safety issued a stop-work order Tuesday against a grading permit it had issued to developer Tom Steers of West Hills. The action was taken in an effort to put a tighter rein on the location of the work, described in the permit as construction of a driveway.

City officials also want an investigation into the impact the grading--done nearly two weeks ago--had on an ancient archeological site, one that city representatives said they did not know was there.

The site is situated east of Greenbriar Drive and south of an unpaved section of Mulholland Drive.

Richard Holguin, chief of engineering in the city’s Building and Safety Department, said the stop-work order was issued because a discrepancy was found between the site map that the developer provided and a site map created in 1985 when the DWP built the Corbin tank on the land.

Sheldon Sloan, the developer’s attorney, said Steers’ maps may have been wrong but only slightly, and the attorney shrugged off the importance of the discrepancy.

“Anything can happen in this kind of hillside,” Sloan said. “This stuff is almost always resolved by a boundary agreement. Maybe [the DWP] maps are wrong.”

Steers’ attorney said the developer has stopped grading within the city limits, but will continue work in the portion of his land situated in unincorporated Los Angeles County, the primary site of Steers’ Rancho Estates development where he plans to build four houses.

“It doesn’t really matter anyway,” Sloan said of the order. “We’ve already completed the work in the city.”

As a condition of the temporary order, before Steers could resume grading, he would need to conduct a survey and mark the territory to determine whether the work he is doing ties into Mulholland Drive and is subject to review in the Mulholland Specific Plan; according to his original maps, it does not.

He also was asked to have an archeological study conducted on the site to determine the impact the work may have had. The DWP site map submitted for its Corbin tank shows that a portion of the archeological site is out of the DWP property boundaries.

Although Sloan said the developer will most likely conduct the archeological study in the next few weeks “to make the city comfortable,” he said the developer does not plan to grade the site further. The grading, Sloan said, was done to use the dirt as fill for another area of the project.

Residents and environmentalists said that based on the site maps created when the Corbin tank was being built, the developer should have been required to go through a public hearing with the city’s design review board before being issued a permit.

“We’re just enraged,” said Rosemary Woodlock, who lives west of the site. “Here, of all places, why did he do that?”

Malibu-based archeologist Chester King said he inspected the site and found and identified several tools and grinding implements dating back thousands of years. He said the developer should have been sensitive to the site and was wrong to do the work and destroy all but a small portion of it.

King said the site was invaluable to understanding the land and the history of the people living in the mountains between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago.

“These are important areas to archeologists,” King said. “There is still a very small portion left. We’re hoping that part will be kept for a long time.”

Sloan disputed King’s claim that artifacts were found after the grading.

Woodlock said there is little that can be done for the site since the damage has already been done, but that conservationists will continue to watch the development to ensure it is not disturbed further.

“How can you mitigate something that’s totally destroyed? You can’t,” she said. “But we’re thinking of ways.”

Sloan said Steers disclosed his intent to grade the site in a negative declaration environmental report that the developer filed with Los Angeles County.

A 1989 survey of archeological reconnaissance conducted for the developer by the Center for Public Archaeology at Cal State Northridge was included as part of that report. And in 1991, after a Los Angeles County public hearing for the four-home Rancho Estates development, the county approved a permit.

Sea Fan, chief of the city’s grading section in its Building and Safety Department in Van Nuys, said the environmental report was not submitted to the city for review.

Because the work to be done within city limits was so small, Fan said, it required only staff approval of the application, and the city granted the permit in 1995.

In the survey, CSUN professor Mark Raab stated the archeological site, registered as LAn-218, was adequately preserved in 1981 when UCLA archeologists excavated it for the DWP.

“The original site was recorded . . . in 1949 as a village with human cremations, choppers, [and hand tools] similar to other ‘Topanga Culture’ sites in the area,” the report states. “Impact on [the site] is negligible because the LAn-218 site has been mitigated.”

Although Raab would not comment on the report when reached Friday, saying he had not studied the document in years and was not familiar with the current grading issue, he said he would “never tell anyone to develop on an archeological site.”

He said mitigation often can mean different things, including that the amount gathered in the excavation is enough scientific data to represent the whole.