Hillside Guardians’ Eyes on Glendale

Ambitious plans to chisel 572 lots out of the verdant Verdugo Mountains for luxury homes has turned the word “Glendale” into a verb.

Conservationists in hillside communities throughout the county now like to say: “We don’t want to ‘Glendale’ Duarte.” Or “We don’t want to ‘Glendale’ Sierra Madre.”

It’s this new verb usage, said Marc Stirdivant, who leads a group opposed to the Glendale housing development, that succinctly explains the crux of the long battle to stop the plan.

“By that, they mean they don’t want to overbuild, mansionize, destroy the environment and grow for the sake of growth,” he said.

The fight over the fifth and final phase of the Oakmont project--as it approaches its last, albeit prolonged, stages of review--is being closely watched by environmentalists and developers alike, who are increasingly sparring over hillside building from Duarte to Glendale.

For almost 10 years, a coalition of environmentalists, neighbors and politicians have joined to stall the project.

Local members of Congress are pushing legislation that would dramatically expand a national recreation area and envelop the Oakmont development site, potentially making federal dollars available to buy it and preserve it as open space.

State lawmakers have independently approved spending $8 million toward purchase of the tract.

The owner asserts that the land is worth $46 million. And while legislators debate, Lee Gregg, vice president of Gregg Artistic Homes, continues to pursue city permits to break ground on the project. A public hearing on the plan is scheduled for 5 p.m. Wednesday at Glendale Civic Auditorium.

“These battles are being fought, and will be fought, as development pushes up into the foothills, and we’re going to see them fought with increasing frequency and intensity,” said Paul Hubler, spokesman for Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), the author of the proposed federal legislation.

The bill calls for a study of expansion of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area to include, among other areas, the Verdugos. House members whose districts include parts of the so-called Rim of the Valley Corridor support the bill. The corridor of protected land would ring the San Fernando Valley from Simi Valley to the Verdugos and Angeles National Forest.

The study by the Interior Department could require up to three years, and resulting legislation could take years more.

Schiff has opposed the development of the 238 acres of pristine woodlands for the Oakmont project. Instead, he championed acquisition of the property by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy as recreational open space.

When he announced his bill earlier this month, he said Oakmont is a good example of how conservationists and federal land-acquisition funding could combine to protect environmental assets.

“The Oakmont fight has been going on for 10 years now. The way it’s going, this bill could be a reality before Oakmont is [built],” Schiff said.

His bill, if passed, would combine the efforts of state and local agencies with federal help “to protect and link up the best of our remaining urban wild lands,” said Rorie Skei, deputy director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

Gregg, the builder, said that if the conservancy wants the property, it will have to acquire it through condemnation. He said the company would not fight such a process. “The issue is fair market value,” he said.

Gregg said demand for high-end housing is great in Glendale and that hundreds of people have contacted the company about buying new homes in Oakmont.

“Our family’s been in the business since the 1930s. We’ve built about 3,000 homes in Glendale,” Gregg said. “All the people who think we’re big, bad developers live in homes. Don’t you think there was a squirrel living on their property before they put their house on it?”

Four earlier phases of building next to the site in question produced 311 lots, a few of which remain vacant. Opponents save their harshest criticism for the third and fourth phases.

From a distance, the green panorama of the Verdugos ends abruptly with massive three-story mansions jamming the hillside, often just 10 feet apart. Gregg Homes did not build the more than $600,000 homes in those phases but sold the lots for individual development.

Gregg said what is now planned bears no resemblance to what was built earlier, contending that there will be “much more space and much less house.”

Still, critics find small comfort in the distinction.

Stirdivant’s group, Volunteers Organized in Conserving the Environment, has swelled to about 3,800 supporters who have either donated money, signed petitions or volunteered their time to fight the project.

The group receives strong support in Glendale and adjacent communities, he said. But it has also sparked interest from as far away as Riverside, San Diego and Bend, Ore.

“People are saying, ‘Enough is enough.’ They’re just tired of seeing their hillsides disappear,” Stirdivant said. “This is not a new city with unlimited space. Once we lose it, we’ll never get it back.”

Gregg proposed the project in 1992. In April 1993, Glendale adopted a hillside ordinance that would have limited the number of homes to about 50. The developer sued the city, ultimately agreeing to drop the lawsuit if the city allowed the proposal to proceed under the earlier, less restrictive ordinance.

Since then, planning has slowed. Early this year, a judge ordered the city to stop stalling and to complete certification of the environmental impact report by March 2002.

The Glendale City Council ordered the revised environmental report after it deemed the first version, released in November 1999, incomplete. The revised report concluded that the 572-home project would have a negative impact on the environment.

The report, prepared by Jones & Stokes of Irvine, concluded that the project would harm the air, wildlife and vistas but would not significantly increase the population or require building community facilities to accommodate growth.

Once the review is completed, the city planning staff has three options: to recommend that the project be approved, approved with conditions or denied. Votes on the project will probably be held by the Planning Commission in December and the City Council early next year.

If the project is approved, the developer could break ground as early as April 2003.