Churches Given Preservation Law Exemption

Religious groups can declare their churches and a wide array of other properties exempt from local historic preservation laws, the California Supreme Court decided Thursday.

The 4-3 decision leaves religious groups free to demolish buildings that preservationists want to save.

“Hundreds, if not thousands, of buildings in California are vulnerable,” said Elizabeth Merritt of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Paul Gaspari, who represented more than two dozen religious institutions in the case, said he has no idea how many buildings eventually might be destroyed because of the law, but that he doesn’t expect to see a rush of demolitions.

Thursday’s ruling will affect buildings that have not yet been protected by landmark status. About 300 religious buildings in California already have been declared landmarks.

Battles over the preservation of churches in Los Angeles have raged for years, most notably over St. Vibiana’s Cathedral downtown. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese wanted to tear it down and build a new cathedral on its site. After losing protracted court battles with preservationists, the archdiocese found another downtown location for a new church.

Under Thursday’s ruling, churches can avoid such fights by escaping landmark designations altogether. Preservationists could not immediately identify which Los Angeles buildings might be affected.

The state high court upheld a state law that permits religious organizations to declare their noncommercial buildings exempt from city and county preservation laws. Such buildings would include not only churches but also housing, schools, hospitals, gymnasiums and other structures used for religious or charitable purposes.

“By providing the exemption, the state simply stepped out of the way of the religious property owner,” wrote Justice Marvin Baxter for the court majority.

Baxter, joined by Justices Janice Rogers Brown, Ming Chin and Joyce Kennard, said the inability to demolish or change a building that no longer met a religious owner’s needs “could affect the ability of many owners to carry out their religious missions.”

The Legislature passed the religious exemption in 1994 when Catholic Church leaders were attempting to close or demolish several churches in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Community activists strongly protested and went to preservation boards to protect the buildings.

To exempt a building, a religious organization will have to declare that it would suffer a substantial hardship if the property were to become a historic landmark. Such a declaration would automatically create the exemption, lawyers in the case said.

Thirty California cities urged the Supreme Court to reject the law. Siding with them were Chief Justice Ronald M. George and Justices Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Stanley Mosk. In two separate dissents, they said the church exemption violates constitutional requirements of religious neutrality.

“A church or other sectarian entity can, if it chooses, destroy a historic building for the purpose of erecting an office building simply for financial advantage,” Mosk wrote.

Werdegar, whose dissent George signed, said that the law was too broad, violated the 1st Amendment and threatened an important public interest.

“Particularly in California, with its relative paucity of historic buildings and its population perpetually rich in newcomers, preserving what landmarks we have is all the more vital to creating and continuing a sense of community,” Werdegar wrote.

Landmark protection conserves “aesthetically pleasing features of the urban landscape” and bolsters tourism, she added.

San Francisco Deputy City Atty. Kate Stacy said she and other lawyers are considering asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision. “It is a fairly significant blow not only to preservation but to local land use authority generally,” she said.

In San Francisco, 28 buildings have been identified as potentially worthy of preservation, but because they are owned by religious organizations, they could be declared exempt under Thursday’s ruling.

“Such favoritism toward religious [properties] is prohibited under the California Constitution and fails to display the neutrality toward religion required by the U.S. Constitution,” Stacy said.

Senior Assistant Atty. Gen. Louis Verdugo, whose office defended the state law, said the decision recognizes the right of the Legislature to exempt religious groups from laws that might “potentially and substantially interfere with” their rights.

“It is premature to jump to the conclusion that we’re all of a sudden going to see an explosion in the demolitions of religious buildings,” Verdugo said.

Preservationists will have no legal standing under the law to challenge a church’s declaration of an exemption, Gaspari said. But they can still go to court and try to show that a building’s owner is not a religious institution or that the building is not truly used in a religious way, he said.

Carolyn Douthat, president of the board of the California Preservation Foundation, said the ruling creates a bad precedent “by exempting one class of property owners from general zoning regulations.”

In Los Angeles, developer Tom Gilmore acquired the St. Vibiana’s building last year and plans to rehabilitate the abandoned church into a complex called Cathedral Place. The project would include a school, a boutique hotel and restaurant and 150 apartments.

A spokesman for the archdiocese said Thursday he was unaware of any church buildings that the archdiocese wants to close or demolish over preservationists’ objections.

Earlier this year, pastors of the historic Angelus Temple in Los Angeles entered a bitter legal battle with preservationists over a plan to remodel the landmark church, headquarters for the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel. The church was declared a national historic landmark in 1992.

A coalition of preservationists and longtime church members brought a civil case against the pastors and won a temporary reprieve from the City Council because proper procedures were not followed in obtaining a work permit. The pastors struck back by closing the historic church sanctuary and moving services to another location.

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Times staff writer Margaret Ramirez contributed to this story.