Historic Vote for Smart Planning

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors said no last week to a developer wanting to build condominiums, a shopping center and a theater complex on a steep hillside adjacent to Calabasas. To understand why this is news--and good news it is--you have to know the history of that oxymoron “county planning.”

In 1998, an exhaustive computer analysis by The Times of development in the western Santa Monica Mountains revealed that greed and incompetence allowed one of Southern California’s last wild areas to be effectively gutted. While developers funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into campaign coffers, the Board of Supervisors and its appointed commissioners routinely approved housing projects larger than permitted by plans, undermining efforts to preserve the area.

As politics, it was perfectly legal. But as public policy, it was a disaster--literally. The Times’ analysis found that residents of newer, denser developments--ones that often required more ground to be graded--filed more than twice as many claims for property tax disaster relief for mudslides, fires and earthquakes as other Santa Monica Mountain residents.

Other costs of ignoring growth blueprints include some of the highest sewer fees in the county to finance repeated upgrades and a Las Virgenes Unified School District crowded with portable classrooms.

And then there are traffic congestion and damage to wildlife habitat--concerns cited by opponents of the project next to Calabasas.

The supervisors turned down a proposal by Continental Communities Group of Woodland Hills to build 136 condominiums and a 281,000-square-foot shopping center on a 207-acre parcel of oak trees on the north side of the Ventura Freeway. As Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky pointed out, the unanimous vote marked the first time since development in the western Santa Monicas began 20 to 25 years ago that county officials rejected a zone change and plan amendment.

Continental Communities can curse its timing, but Yaroslavsky was absolutely right when he said the county doesn’t “owe” the developer a commercial green light on land that is zoned for agriculture and was when the group paid $10 million for it in 1990.

Yes, development plans are designed to be flexible. But not in the routine, unexamined way the county has done business in the past. Yaroslavsky called the vote a milestone. Let’s hope it’s the beginning of a new commitment to smart planning that directs growth to areas where it is appropriate--and restricts it where it is not.