County Offers New Vision for Santa Monicas

The county unveiled a growth plan for the Santa Monica Mountains this week that is unprecedented in its environmental sensitivity, tightening controls on suburban sprawl and discouraging new road construction in the ecologically fragile area.

The proposal also explicitly rejects any effort by developers to boost the number of homes they build by counting land under public streets as their own, a practice disclosed in a Times analysis of the region’s growth problems.

The new blueprint would guide development well into the 21st century, serving as the primary battleground between environmentalists and developers fighting over Los Angeles’ last wild space. The proposed plan is scheduled for public hearings in April.

“The county has a different vision out there now,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, whose district includes the mountain area. “Our vision is to protect and preserve the environment rather than exploit and destroy it. Every decision we make will be consistent with that vision.”

The new plan promises to be at the center of a major battle in coming months. Several developers have already complained that the county’s version of the plan reduces the number of homes they can build on their property. Some said the changes are motivated more by politics than any serious concern for the suitability of the land for development.

“It’s all a political thing brought up because a lot of our political leaders want to enhance their environmental platform,” said Brian Boudreau, a local developer and horse farm owner. Under the plan, the density level allowed on some of his land would be cut in half.

Yaroslavsky, however, said private property rights would be protected.

“Nobody’s proposing we deny people the right to develop their property,” Yaroslavsky said. “We’re saying, if you want to develop it, it has to be within a framework that reflects protection and preservation of the environment.”

The county estimates that, overall, the new plan would allow little or no increase in the number of homes allowed under the current 20-year-old growth plan.

In any case, new construction would be approved only after review under the plan’s strict new policies designed to help limit suburban sprawl. The plan covers the northern half of the Santa Monica Mountains. A new growth plan covering the southern half is still being developed.

The new plan makes preservation the highest priority for undeveloped land, then recreation. Those criteria represent a potential boon to state and federal park planners seeking to add land to current holdings.

The previous plan also stressed the need to “preserve” the environment, but the Board of Supervisors later added language to emphasize private property rights.

Another new feature is a goal to avoid changing the plan to approve more homes, once a common practice that allowed an additional 1,100 units beyond the current plan’s growth limits. The Times analysis found that supervisors, especially Mike Antonovich, whose district once included the region, routinely approved such increases, often to developers who made political contributions.

The plan would prohibit developers from including land under public streets and drainage ditches when calculating how many homes they are allowed to build. The Times series showed that the department had repeatedly allowed developers such latitude.

“This sets a better framework for planning while protecting the environment,” said James Hartl, head of the Planning Department. “It’s a major effort.”

Observers said the plan is only as good as the county officials who enforce it. The Times reported that the previous version of the Santa Monica Mountains plan was routinely ignored, leading some subdivisions to be approved although seven times larger than indicated in the plan.

In Ventura County, such frustrations led residents to take control of development from county supervisors, approving measures last fall that require voters to OK any changes to local growth plans.

Los Angeles County officials, however, said such worries are unfounded. To date, they said, 30 property owners have sought increases in the density allowed on their property under the proposed plan. Of those, only seven have succeeded in persuading bureaucrats to change their property’s designation, leading to a net increase of about 30 homes.

“There was no wholesale” increase in the number of homes allowed, said Lee Stark, the county planner in charge of shepherding the new blueprint through the approval process.

Developers, however, say such tight control on new housing actually could exacerbate environmental problems by forcing new growth even farther from Los Angeles.

That, in turn, could harm environmentally sensitive areas in other regions such as Ventura County, as well as worsen the traffic congestion that already exists in the area.

“For every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction,” said Rad Sutnar, a development consultant who helped design the original growth plan. “If you reduce growth [in the mountains], you just create another place for it to go.”

The new plan makes clear that additional road construction in the area would be discouraged.

That’s bad news for the thousands of commuters who use Las Virgenes or Kanan roads as shortcuts between Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley or Ventura County.

Intersections in those areas are already rated at the worst level by traffic planners, and future growth promises longer waits and more gridlock.

But local officials say widening the roads would only encourage more growth. And if the clogged intersections scare away more development, all the better, they say.

In another change from past practice, the county’s plan was developed in close conjunction with the four cities that dot the area: Westlake Village, Hidden Hills, Agoura Hills and Calabasas.

The cooperation was ironic since many of those cities broke away from the county partly because the county had many times failed to stick to growth limits called for in the plan.

“I’m very pleased with what’s been accomplished,” said Hal Helsley, a former Las Virgenes water board member who headed a citizens group that reviewed the plan. “I think it gives a much better feel of what we’ll live with for the next five to 10 years.”

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New Growth Plan

The county Department of Regional Planning has proposed a new plan for the northern Santa Monica Mountains that will guide growth in the region into the next decade. The new plan, developed in cooperation with incorporated cities in the area, emphasizes environmental concerns and aims to slow suburban sprawl.

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NEW PLAN

* Instructions forbidding use of public streets in calculating project density.

* Goals encouraging stability in land use and cooperation among individual cities in the Santa Monica Mountains.

* Eight residential zones with different densities laid out according to property lines. The layout is easier to interpret than the old plan.

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OLD PLAN

* No instructions on how to calculate density, allowing some developers to include land beneath public streets as their own to gain permission for additional homes.

* No goals relating to density increases in the growth plan.

* Twelve residential zones with different densities laid out according to topographical boundaries. The layout caused complaints among planners, developers and residents because it was difficult to interpret.

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DENSITY REFORM

The new plan would forbid developers from boosting the number of homes in their projects by counting land under public streets as their own. The effect of this practice is to increase the apparent area of the property, and thus, the number of homes allowed. The practice is most common with condominium projects on small one- to five-acre building sites.

Source: Department of Regional Planning

Researched by T. CHRISTIAN MILLER / Los Angeles Times