Ahmanson Ranch Mired in Political Tug of War

In solemn presidential tones, actor Martin Sheen condemns a plan to build a small city overlooking the San Fernando Valley.

“Are you stuck in traffic right now?” the chief executive of television’s “West Wing” declares in a stream of radio ads. “If not, you’d better enjoy this rare moment. Because it’s only going to get worse, thanks to Washington Mutual Bank.”

The radio spots represent the latest broadside against a 3,050-home golf course community planned for the rugged Simi Hills near Calabasas.

Once the darling of urban planners and even some environmentalists, Washington Mutual’s Ahmanson Ranch project has been thrown on the defensive by a potent new alliance of politicians, environmentalists and Hollywood celebrities.

The $2-billion development by the nation’s largest savings and loan places on a collision course two powerful imperatives of California politics--the push for clustered “smart growth” that puts homes close to jobs while easing a growing housing crisis, and the pull of a newly emboldened grass-roots movement to preserve large tracts of dwindling open space.

Dozens of large housing projects statewide--including the giant Newhall Ranch and Playa Vista developments in Los Angeles County--are caught between the same determined forces.

The battle is crystallized on 2,800 acres of oak savanna and grassy plains. Ahmanson Ranch is the largest remaining chunk of undeveloped private land in the mountains ringing the San Fernando Valley.

“Ahmanson Ranch stands at the intersection of ‘smart growth’ and environmental activism in California,” said planning expert William Fulton.

“A generation ago this project would have been accepted as a good master-planned community,” said Fulton, who describes the project’s initial 1992 approval in his book, the “Reluctant Metropolis.” “But today it’s seen as a symbol of environmental destruction.”

Ahmanson Ranch remains in limbo as Ventura County officials consider a new environmental study. This one focuses on a prickly, dime-sized white flower and a springy, red-legged frog, discovered on the ranch in 1999.

A consultant’s analysis says both the plant and the amphibian can survive urbanization in preserves planned by developers. Whatever the Ventura County Board of Supervisors decides later this year, a new round of lawsuits is likely.

The lack of closure underscores a question that increasingly confounds California decision-makers: How do they accommodate the state’s constant growth and save the environment at the same time?

Pasadena architect Donald Brackenbush thought he had the answer when he designed the Ahmanson project in 1985.

The ranch plan would be a throwback to the balanced communities that were America’s small towns. Brackenbush argued that the community would be a logical extension of suburban Los Angeles.

Even in Ventura County, a national leader in open space preservation, the plan had support from some leading environmentalists. It was finally approved in 1992, primarily because the deal helped save 10,000 acres of nearby mountain land.

The Ahmanson Ranch “new town” won national awards for a design that stressed environmental sensitivity. It set aside 22% of homes for those with low or moderate incomes. And every resident would live within a 10-minute walk or bike ride of the village green and town center.

Developers faced multiple challenges, but they prevailed in a series of lawsuits that claimed the project skirted state planning and environmental laws.

By late 1998, after turning over the last of the promised parkland, project backers were ready to set a date for ground-breaking. But the golden shovels were stowed away after the discovery of a fragile flower, not seen since 1929, and a frog that has frequently fallen victim to human encroachment.

Critics seized the momentum.

What began as a guerrilla movement headed by homeowners in the upscale neighborhoods around Ahmanson Ranch, has now grown to include a legion of hostile politicians and Hollywood celebrities, led by actor-director Rob Reiner and aided by Sheen.

They contend the project is an environmental disaster that would dump 45,000 cars a day onto local streets and the Ventura Freeway, pollute mountain creeks and distant Malibu beaches, uproot nearly 1,200 oak trees and kill the rare San Fernando Valley spineflower and California red-legged frog.

The discovery of 1.6 million of the tiny flowers on a grassy hillside and 25 of the rare frogs, in deep pools near a planned golf course, particularly reinvigorated the opposition.

Developers pledged to preserve, and expand, the frog and spineflower populations. But critics used the new ecological issues to rally even more supporters for open space.

The recent passage of two state bond measures to enhance parks and open space only increased Ahmanson opponents’ sense that they are seizing the advantage. Some of the $4.7 million in bonds approved by voters in 2000 and last month could help buy and preserve the property.

The project’s political footing in Ventura County became more uncertain in the March election, when a second Ahmanson Ranch critic won a seat on the Board of Supervisors.

The seemingly inevitable “park deal of the century,” as a top aide to Gov. Pete Wilson called it in 1991, now finds itself mired in a battle of attrition.

On one side is Washington Mutual, a financial giant with $243 billion in assets. On the other is a coalition that vows to throw up roadblocks and tar the bank’s reputation until it agrees to sell.

Indeed, if Washington Mutual were a willing seller, state parks officials say opponents could find the money to buy the onetime sheep and cattle ranch. Analysts speculate the price could range from $100 million to $500 million.

A second alternative would be for the bank to polish its image by giving Ahmanson Ranch to a nonprofit agency in a “conservation easement” that could also create a huge tax write-off.

Washington Mutual insists, however, that the ranch is not for sale.

“The opposition’s best hope is to scare us off the project,” said Tim McGarry, spokesman for Washington Mutual. “But we’re not so brittle. We have the fortitude to see this through.”

Ground-breaking is expected by late 2003, McGarry said, including time to deal with the next round of lawsuits.

The Ahmanson Ranch stalemate reflects the intense scrutiny faced by large new developments in California, especially in rare natural environments or growth-sensitive areas, such as the coast.

In Los Angeles County, for example, the bulk of the planned 13,000-home Playa Vista project near Marina Del Rey has been halted for two decades, as various opponents have tried to expand the adjacent wetlands preserve.

The largest housing project in L.A. County history, 22,000-home Newhall Ranch near Santa Clarita, is also working its way through the county bureaucracy again after a judge found two years ago that it had not identified a reliable water supply.

Builders believe that the dire need for new housing is the strongest argument for Newhall, Playa Vista and Ahmanson Ranch: California’s population growth outstrips the supply of new housing by 50,000 to 70,000 dwellings a year.

“We have a disastrous housing situation in the state,” said Dowell Myers, a USC urban planning professor who specializes in housing issues. “And Ahmanson Ranch is a poster child for delay and nonproduction. This is the Nancy Reagan style of providing housing: ‘Just say no.’ ”

But opponents say that the housing shortage must not trump other, equally important, concerns. And they have learned that delay can often function as a veto.

It can also give time for politicians to find an issue. Today, few elected officials have anything good to say about Ahmanson Ranch.

“I don’t believe it should be built at all,” said state Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-Santa Monica), who represents neighborhoods near the ranch. “New housing doesn’t have to come thousands of houses at a time . . . all of which dump their cars at the same place onto the same freeway each morning.”

Two area congressmen, Democratic Reps. Brad Sherman and Henry Waxman, criticize the project. Opposition is also uniform among officials in neighboring cities and Los Angeles County.

Politically potent environmental groups, such as Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay, have joined the fray, too, pressuring Ventura County to further study pollution it says the project will dump into Malibu Creek, which flows into the ocean at landmark Surfrider Beach.

Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay, ridiculed a recent developer’s study that the project’s runoff would be cleaner than that already flowing from the ranch.

“That makes me sick to my stomach,” Gold said. “That doesn’t meet anybody’s laugh test.”

Sheen and a cadre of activist celebrities have thrust Ahmanson Ranch into the spotlight as never before.

“The politics lined up against this thing has become very impressive,” author Fulton said. “When the Wednesday-night president [Sheen] is against it, that’s a tough one to fight.”

Reiner first heard of the issue last summer from the environmentalist wife of “Seinfeld” creator Larry David. Reiner says a group he helped found last fall is determined to kill the project. It raised more than $100,000 in January at a single dinner at the Pacific Palisades home of Laurie and Larry David.

“We thought initially it would take between half a million and a million dollars,” Reiner said in an interview. “But this fight might drag on awhile.”

“This is supposedly about affordable housing,” he said. “But this is a luxury-home project. It’s dumb growth.”

It was Reiner who called his friend Sheen to ask him to do the voice-overs for radio ads on stations in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

“Rob swings a heavy hammer,” said state Sen. Kuehl. “That levels the playing field, and surprises them.”

Washington Mutual has responded with an expensive lobbying campaign, hiring a firm friendly to Gov. Gray Davis to smooth Ahmanson’s way with transportation and wildlife officials.

In an unusual tactic for a developer, Washington Mutual is also underwriting a costly campaign with full-page newspaper ads. They declare that the red-legged frog is “The Boss.”

From the start, developers have tried to sell Ahmanson Ranch as an old-fashioned village. Brackenbush says his original plan invented “smart growth” in Southern California by making Ahmanson a self-supporting town, one that mixes million-dollar country club estates with 774 affordable apartments, condos and “granny flats.”

But the project was always a lightning rod, because of its location.

Critics talk about the 37,500 cars a day Ahmanson Ranch would bring to Los Angeles County roadways, including 10,000 on the jammed Ventura Freeway. But developers maintain that is only about half of the 72,000 daily trips created by 84 new projects built along a nearby stretch of the Ventura Freeway during the last decade.

Critics talk about the 1,152 oak trees, many of them mature, that would be destroyed. But developers say they would plant 5,672 new oaks and 2,000 are already in the ground.

Critics talk about the leveling of hillsides and 45 million cubic yards of grading. But developers say that is less than grading done, cumulatively, by three new hilltop subdivisions nearby that provide far fewer homes.

The opposition to Ahmanson acknowledges that California needs to solve its housing problems, but favors replacing blighted urban neighborhoods with new high-density housing.

“It’s just urban sprawl,” said Mary Wiesbrock of Agoura Hills, a longtime critic. “This land was zoned open space so the area could stay livable and so we could preserve the Santa Monica Mountains as a national recreation area. They get away with murder.”

Joseph Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, endorsed the Ahmanson compromise a decade ago. But he wonders if the recent frog and spineflower discoveries aren’t the final confirmation that Washington Mutual would be better off selling the land for a park.

“I have no doubt that if there was truly a willing seller, the funding would be there at a fair price,” he said.

But Guy Gniadek, president of Ahmanson Land Co., said he has spent 16 years planning and pushing the Ahmanson project, and he is convinced Washington Mutual will finally build it.

The 45-year-old Woodland Hills resident said he will move his family there as soon as he can.

“I grew up in Indiana, and I can tell you the difference between being able to walk to the market, to school or to the park instead of taking a big car and driving to pick up a loaf of bread,” he said.

Gniadek likes to take visitors to a ridge at the edge of Ahmanson Ranch. At his back, the vast tracts of the San Fernando Valley begin. Before him, in an oak-studded valley, is a vision of his small town.

The two dozen shops and government buildings of the town center would be here, overlooking a golf course and 300-room resort hotel, he says with a sweep of his hand. The schools would be there. The equestrian trails over there, the parks there.

But what if another year passes, the Reiner campaign accelerates and the reconstituted Ventura County Board of Supervisors decides it should order another study? What would Washington Mutual do then?

Gniadek pauses, his buoyant presentation deflated.

“It is disappointing,” he said, “for it to be such a good project, and to have this type of opposition.”