Tougher standards infuriate residents

. Tempers flared occasionally when homeowners disagreed with property owners over the size and height of new homes in the Highlands area of Calabasas during a community meeting at Creekside Park last week. The meeting was set up by the city’s planning department in response to an urgency moratorium on construction in the Old Topanga/Highlands Overlay area, which was approved by the Calabasas City Council in May and extended through Jan. 31, 2001 at the council’s last meeting. "The residents want a fine tuning of the building standards," said Mark Persico, the city’s planning and building services director.

"The biggest issues the city has heard in the Highlands neighborhood is the size of and height of homes—the belief that the homes have gotten too large … some of the homes are out of scale with the neighborhood … they are too bulky, too large. "It is not our intention to deprive people of their rights," Persico said.

"We just want to make sure that whatever is built makes sense for the neighborhood …The city passed the moratorium to try to

protect everybody’s rights."

The city’s action was prompted by community concerns in both neighborhoods, he added. Although a public hearing took place at the last city council meeting, landowner Robin Brown angrily complained that the moratorium was passed too quickly. He thought that there should have been some phase-in time before the moratorium began. "I’ve never seen the city move that fast," he said sarcastically. The issues facing the Highlands area are different of those in the Old Topanga region whose residents met with the city’s staff at a similar gathering three weeks ago.

Lots in the Highlands are wider and shallower than those in Old Topanga, which are narrow and deep, according to Persico. The city hears complaints, said Joyce Parker, an independent consultant who often works for Calabasas, that the footprints of homes are too big for the lots on which they’re built, which overwhelms the neighborhood. She said planners are considering changing the current standards—which limit Highlands’ home sizes to 25 percent of the lot size—to a flat 2,500 square feet per lot. Combined lots will receive more space based on a percentage of land, but none of the details have been completed, Persico said. City councilmembers hope that committees comprised of city planners and area homeowners will help establish new standards, he added. Parker also wants to change the way the height of dwellings are measured.

The current measuring system often permits larger houses because landowners build into a hillside, creating three-story dwellings, which are larger than they should be, she said. "If you drive through the neighborhood, you can see houses that don’t fit," said Persico. But prospective builders disagreed. "The bigger houses look better," said Bob Churchen, who’s angry because he’s invested in plans for building a home since 1983, but none of those blueprints meet the city’s current codes, let alone proposed new ones. Jeff Ficks said that 2,500 square feet would be too small a home for his large lot. The division between property owners and current residents of the area became apparent when most existing residents supported size restrictions. "We’re not opposing new developments, new houses, per se, but I do recognize that many of the landowners do not live up here," said Sonia Maasik, secretary of the Highlands Homeowners Association. In describing the "sense of community," Maasik said that "if you expand the size of the houses so that the there is no longer room for the children to play and ride bicycles on the street, it would decrease the property value and the quality of life."

"We want to be able to keep the quaintness of the neighborhood,’’ said resident Debbie Shook. Maasik also brought up the issue that the neighborhood is in a brushy area with fire hazards.

The fire department prohibits parking on the streets, which Maasik called "sub-standard."

"The fire department determined that the houses are too big and too close together to safely protect," she said. Parker agreed with the need to take fire danger seriously. She said that a fire in such a woodland area "can wipe out a whole community."

A secondary access route into the area for emergencies is necessary in the Highlands and will be discussed at a future meeting when traffic and fire officials are present, Persico said. That issue probably will take longer to resolve, he said. Although the issue of septic tank failures, which was a key point for the urgency moratorium in Old Topanga, wasn’t supposed to be an issue at the Highlands meeting, the smelly subject did arise.

Although Los Angeles County installed a sewer system in 1988, not every home is connected to it. "Everybody should hook up to the sewers. We all pay the assessment fees, but the whole neighborhood stinks (because some houses are not hooked up)," said Shook, acknowledging the high costs of connecting.

She later told Calabasas chief building official Robert Harvey that septic matter runs down her street because a nearby system hasn’t been pumped recently. New resident Diane Barker suggested that the city use some of its reserve funds to help defray the hook-up costs for residents who can’t afford them. See related story on page 6.