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LOS ANGELES – The mountain lions have won the day in Woodland Hills, as oppostion to building nearly 400 residences on a local golf course stalled a real estate developer’s plan to turn the private club into a residential community.
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Woodland Hills Country Club, a century-old golf course near the Santa Monica Mountains in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood, can keep letting cougars cruise the fairways at least for the near future, City Councilman Bob Blumenfield said, as he helped stymie efforts to fast-track approvals of the proposed housing complex.
The owners of the country club, Newport Beach developer Arrimus Capital, hoped to get the project underway quickly by using the provisions of a state housing bill intended to let builders bypass lengthy city review processes for mixed-income multifamily residential developments on commercial land, such as a golf course.
Not so fast, Blumenfield said in a recent statement. Mountain lions have the right of way, and city staff agrees.
“Due to a plethora of documentation from neighbors and a lot of biological and ecological research provided by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and other biological experts, the Planning Department just determined the Woodland Hills Country Club site is ‘wildlife habitat’ for the endangered Mountain Lion,” the councilman said in a newsletter to constituents.
The developer was on track to bypass the city’s normal discretionary review process by using AB 2011, a newly revised state law that forces the city to approve such projects outright, Blumenfield said. That would mean that community input, environmental impacts and fire safety could not be considered prior to approval.
Blumenfield had raised objections to that quick ministerial approval, citing the golf course’s location in a “very high” fire hazard zone and asserting that it is not in the kind of “commercial corridor” that the state law addresses. But those objections weren’t enough, and “we all feared that the Planning Department was on the verge of possibly approving the process ministerially.”
However, he said, “determining that the project is proposed on endangered species habitat was enough” to force the developer to go through the lengthy conventional approval process.
Arrimus Capital representative Aaron Green didn’t buy the argument.
The wildlife habitat determination by the city “is an affront to Angelenos who are in desperate need of real housing opportunities,” Green said. “I’ve heard some creative excuses for blocking housing in Los Angeles, but golfing mountain lions may take the prize.”
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The city’s determination stalling the project “is based on the false assertion that the active golf course, in the middle of a residential neighborhood, is habitat for mountain lions,” he said. Technical experts consulted by Arrimus “all came to the same conclusion, that the project site is not protected biological habitat.”
Green followed up with a legal threat.
“The city has left us with no choice but to file a lawsuit to enforce the law,” he said, and consequences for taxpayers may be grave. “When the city loses in court, it will be required to approve the project and pay millions of dollars in fines.”
Blumenfield said there is “a plethora of information including ecological and biological reports, insights from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, and years of evidence from neighbors” that the golf course is habitat for mountain lions.
“While it’s likely that the developer will sue the city to fight this determination, the decision from the Planning Department puts the city, and our community, in a good position,” the councilman said.
Last year the developer filed an application to redevelop part of the golf course with 398 homes. It would include 175 for-sale, three-story detached single-family homes; 189 rental apartments in a four-story building and 34 rent-restricted apartments in a four-story building. The proposed project would dedicate more than 55,900 square feet to open space.
The golf course was built in the mid-1920s by Woodland Hills developer Victor Giraud, who gave away free club memberships to people buying lots in his housing tract. The course was turned into a private country club in 1945.
Concerns about its potential turn to housing have been around for decades. In 1988, The Times reported that an unnamed developer hoped to buy the then member-owned club and convert the property to luxury single-family homes.
“We’ll go to the wall to keep it open space,” Gordon Murley, president of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization, said at the time. “We’ll fight that to the bitter end. It’s a greenbelt that’s sadly needed in the area.”
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