Supervisors Create Coastal Review Board : Environment: The panel will evaluate plans along the seaward slopes of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Los Angeles County supervisors on Thursday created an environmental review board to evaluate proposed development in the coastal zone of the Santa Monica Mountains, acting under court order six years after establishment of such a board was called for in a county land-use plan.

The board, to consist of experts ranging from biologists to ecologists, will make recommendations to the county Planning Commission about any projects proposed in or near areas designated as environmentally sensitive on the seaward slopes of the mountains.

Those areas cover much of the territory between the Ventura County line and the Los Angeles city boundary, particularly the canyons, streams, wildlife corridors and oak forests, along with offshore kelp beds.

The city of Malibu, which has its own environmental review board, is exempt from the county board’s jurisdiction.

Environmentalists greeted approval of the board, and the stipulation that only three of its nine members can be county employees, as a significant step forward.

“We felt that if it was all county employees, they could be influenced by certain supervisors and developers,” said Frank Angel, an attorney who represented the Sierra Club in the lawsuit that led to establishment of the review board.

“I hope that this board can really make a change . . . inject a measure of social responsibility into the decision-making process,” Angel said.

County Planning Director James Hartl will appoint the review board members in about a month, County Planner Ron Hoffman said. Already, 22 applications have been received from people with expertise in areas from anthropology to botany, Hoffman said.

Although most of the projects the board will consider are expected to be individual single-family residences, two of its first cases will probably be large, controversial developments: expansion of Soka University near Calabasas and a housing development just west of Malibu called VMS/Anden, Hoffman said.

Creation of the environmental board was required by the Malibu Land Use Plan, adopted by the County Board of Supervisors in 1986. But the supervisors did not follow through, which became the central issue in a contentious lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club against Sun Pacific, a housing and golf course development in Corral Canyon.

Superior Court Judge Ronald Sohigian overturned the supervisors’ approval of construction of Sun Pacific, saying it was illegal because no environmental review board had been consulted. Sohigian also ruled last fall that the county had to establish the board by May 5.

Hoffman said the board was never formed because of county budget cutbacks. County planners also decided that another environmental board, the seven-member Significant Ecological Area Technical Advisory Committee, could perform the duties.

But Sohigian ruled that the Malibu Coastal Zone had to be handled by a separate board, Hoffman said, because the environmental review board was to have greater powers to analyze such issues as the effects of erosion and runoff on watersheds.

The costs of setting up and running the board will be paid by development applicants through new fees ranging from $910 for a single house to more than $3,000 for larger developments.

Any projects that are both in a county-designated significant ecological area and in the Malibu Coastal Zone--such as Soka University--will be reviewed only by the new board, Hoffman said.

Opponents of Soka’s proposal, which calls for expansion of a 100-student language program into a 4,400-student university and high school, said the new board might give them a better chance of preventing the expansion.

“They can’t recommend denial, but . . . they will have to acknowledge that Soka is way out of conformity with the Malibu Coastal Zone,” said Dave Brown, who lives near Soka and is chairman of the Sierra Club’s Santa Monica Mountains Task Force.

Soka University spokeswoman Bernetta Reade commented: “Environmentally, we can defend our project. The university will comply with any rules and regulations and appear before any board we need to.”

A significantly scaled-back version of the VMS/Anden project was approved by county supervisors in 1990 and by the California Coastal Commission in July, 1991. Current plans call for building 55 luxury houses, which will require grading 2 million cubic feet of earth.

Despite the previous approvals given the VMS project, Hoffman said it still must be evaluated by the environmental review board because the developers have not received their building permits.