City Begins Building Wall to Catch Boulders From Construction Site

Stepping into the middle of a dispute between a hillside developer and Pacific Palisades residents, Los Angeles officials have begun erecting a $150,000 safety fence between a cliff and nearby homes.

Officials said Tuesday that they took the unusual step of hiring a private contractor to build the wall after developer Nasser Ahdoot failed to meet a deadline last week to construct it himself.

The 8-foot-high, 130-foot-long “impact wall” is designed to catch any boulders that may fall from the Castellammare Drive construction site where Ahdoot hopes to build three luxury homes. The city will bill him for the fence construction.

In the meantime, City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski has demanded “a full investigation” by the city attorney and the Department of Building and Safety into grading permits that have been issued to Ahdoot for the site.

In letters to Building and Safety chief Andrew Adelman and City Atty. James K. Hahn, Miscikowski described Ahdoot’s work as “illegal grading.”

She said that because “he has not had proper supervision” by the city, Ahdoot “has created a dangerous, unstable and precarious hillside problem.”

In those letters, the councilwoman wrote that Ahdoot is now threatening “to abandon this job site and leave the hillside even more damaged than before if he is not allowed to proceed. He also boasts that he has paid off employees of Building and Safety in order to have gotten as far as he has in the process.”

Ahdoot, an Encino resident, denies the allegations. In a letter to Adelman and Hahn, he promised to “fully cooperate” with a city review of his project.

His son, attorney Robert Ahdoot, said Ahdoot was not given enough time by the city to draw up plans for the safety wall and then apply for a permit to build it.

Robert Ahdoot also disputed that illegal grading has occurred at the construction site, on an ocean-facing hillside west of the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway beneath the rambling estate of the late actor Joseph Cotten. And he said his father has not bribed city officials.

“That’s totally not true. For the past year and a half we’ve been trying to get permits and we finally got them. And the second we started working, the neighbors hit the roof,” Robert Ahdoot said Tuesday.

“Why would he tell the neighbors he bribed anybody? He didn’t do that.”

Residents near the construction site expressed relief Tuesday that the city has taken action with the safety wall and is investigating the issuance of permits to Ahdoot.

“This whole thing is obscene,” said homeowner Joyce Aldrich as she watched workers hired by the city sink steel I-beams 14 feet into the ground. Railroad tie-like timbers are being installed between the steel beams to form the wall along Castellammare Drive.

Aldrich said residents are most concerned about a fault line that crosses the cliff beneath the former Cotten estate’s tennis court.

Neighbor Marianne Boxberger said city officials should have required that the wall be constructed in the early 1990s, when Ahdoot started his project and then quickly stopped because of financing problems.

In her letter to city officials, Miscikowski requested that all of Ahdoot’s future projects be “red-flagged.” That also drew fire from Robert Ahdoot.

“It’s just horrible,” he said. “My father’s whole livelihood is red-flagged.”