Planners Heed Picus, Reject Warner Ridge

A City Council committee voted Tuesday to recommend that a controversial Warner Ridge office project be rejected and the land rezoned for houses.

The council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee voted 2 to 1 against the $150-million project in light of a recommendation against it by City Councilwoman Joy Picus, and a public hearing Tuesday at which some Woodland Hills residents sharply criticized it.

The issue next goes to the full council, which is expected to consider it next month.

Normally the council heeds the wishes of the council member in whose district a development is proposed.

Picus, whose district includes Warner Ridge at the northeast corner of De Soto Avenue and Oxnard Street, said developer Jack Spound’s project was ill-conceived and would be out of scale with the neighborhood.

She argued that De Soto should be maintained as the boundary between Warner Center’s commercial development on the west side and residences to the east.

In voting to reject the project, Councilmen Michael Woo and Hal Bernson said they were influenced by Picus’ position, especially regarding allowing commercial development east of De Soto.

Councilman Robert Farrell, the lone dissenter, said he was persuaded to vote for Spound’s project by the fact that it had been approved by both a city hearing examiner and the city Planning Commission.

Commissioners had praised the nine-building, 810,000-square-foot project as a “quality development” that would have generous amounts of open space and measures to reduce traffic congestion.

An angry Spound said that the council, if it rejects the development, will be sending the “dangerous message” that a project can be turned down “on the whim of a single council member whose motives are purely political.”

During the hearing, five residents of a condominium complex east of De Soto supported the office project.

They endorsed Spound’s proposal because it would create a landscaping buffer near their condominiums. They said they preferred the offices to the 100 or more houses that would be allowed under Picus’ rezoning proposal.

But more than a dozen opponents, including leaders of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization, said the project would intensify what one member called a “quagmire of traffic” in and around Warner Center.

Gordon Murley, representing the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns., sarcastically suggested that Spound be required to “double- or triple-deck” nearby streets to offset the traffic his development would generate.