Santa Clarita Loses a Round to Developer

A court ruling Tuesday dealt a setback to Santa Clarita’s fight against a 5,800-home development near the city’s southern border that could become one of the next major battlegrounds over suburban growth in north Los Angeles County.

Set in a largely undeveloped swath of mountains between the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, the Las Lomas project is envisioned as a self-contained community of 15,000 people, retail stores and more than 2 million square feet of office space.

For the developer, Santa Monica-based Las Lomas Land Co., the project is part of a solution for a housing market that has experienced soaring prices and low inventory while absorbing an estimated 1 million new residents in the last three years.

But in a sign of the challenges facing developers across Southern California, the project’s alleged effects on the environment, traffic and a cherished hillside view has earned it opponents in one of the most pro-growth cities in the county.

The high-stakes dispute between the developer and the city centers on control of the 555-acre building site in unincorporated county territory between Interstate 5 and Highway 14.

Las Lomas Land wants the area to be incorporated into the city of Los Angeles, and has formally applied for annexation with the Local Agency Formation Commission, which decides annexation questions. As a result, Los Angeles is now heading up an environmental review of the subdivision, Las Lomas President Dan S. Palmer Jr. said.

Santa Clarita officials, meanwhile, fear the project will mean traffic jams, air pollution and the spoiling of Santa Clarita’s mountainous southern gateway. In an attempt to gain a greater say over the project, the city filed its own request to annex the land in December 2002.

Las Lomas Land sued the city three months later, arguing that Santa Clarita needed to conduct a full environmental review to support its annexation proposal. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs agreed with the developer. Santa Clarita officials must now decide if they are serious about their strategy, since preparing an environmental study would be “extremely expensive,” Mayor Bob Kellar said.

“We’ll have to look at this closely and sit down with legal folks to see how we proceed,” Kellar said Tuesday.

To date, the City Council’s pugnacious stand on the Las Lomas project has surprised local environmentalists, who usually consider the council too development friendly.

Lynne Plambeck, president of Santa Clarita Organization for Planning the Environment, said she and other activists have been too busy combating projects further along in the planning process -- including the recently approved 20,885-home Newhall Ranch subdivision -- to mount an organized opposition to Las Lomas.

But she said her group would come out strongly against the project once an initial environmental review was completed. Among other things, Plambeck said that earthquakes have twice caused freeways to collapse near the proposed site.

“It’s not safe for people to build there,” she said. “And the traffic would just be atrocious -- we already have problems in the Newhall Pass.”

Palmer, the Las Lomas president, defended his project as safe and a responsible example of urban “infill,” pointing out that would have its own Metrolink stop. Palmer also applauded the judge’s decision, saying he wanted to find “a win-win solution for everybody as this project moves forward.”

That kind of solution may not come easily. On Tuesday, Mayor Kellar said he believed the land would be better off as part of an undeveloped greenbelt. But Vince Bertoni, Santa Clarita’s interim planning director, said the city might entertain “reasonable development proposals” -- though only after the city annexed the land.

Larry Calemine, LAFCO’s executive officer, said the ruling left his agency with two incomplete annexation applications, since neither is backed up with an environmental report. At this point, he said, it was hard to say what would happen next.

“We’ll consider the circumstances at the time we receive a complete application,” he said.