Las Lomas developer files $100-million lawsuit against city of L.A.

The suit filed today by the Las Lomas Land Co. alleges that the City Council's decision in March to halt review of the 5,553-home project near the junction of Interstate 5 and the Antelope Valley Freeway was illegal.

Click on the link below to read a full story by The Times' Jennifer Oldham.

Photo: Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times

In a 25-page complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Las Lomas Land Co. argues the council violated state law and the developer's constitutional right to due process when it voted 10 to 5 in March to instruct the Planning Department to stop processing an application to build the project. The unusual decision reflected the council’s heightened anxiety over increased traffic and growth.

The company is asking the court to order the city to finish complex environmental studies for the 555-acre project and for more than $100 million in damages, which represents profits the company would have reaped had the project been completed, said Carlyle Hall, an attorney who represents Developer Dan Palmer.

A spokesperson for Los Angeles City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo said the office had yet to review the lawsuit.

The complaint cites an opinion by the city attorney that the council would be vulnerable to a lawsuit if it didn’t finish processing the project’s application. The developer also proposed that the city annex the property, which is in Los Angeles County, so he could access the city’s water supply and build more houses than the county allows.

For the last six years, processing of the project largely took place behind closed doors, as myriad Los Angeles city agencies tried to sort out how to provide services to the estimated 15,000 people who could live in Las Lomas, as well as businesses housed in commercial space that would be double the amount of the city of Carson.

Comments

[jill]

First of all, according to Daily News articles at the time, Palmer doesn't even own the whole land, just about half, and has an alleged option to buy the rest from an elderly couple who were afraid to give the paper an interview, under gag orders from Palmer. There were suspicions that Palmer was intimidating the couple in some way, and Delgadillo's lawyers should check all this out.

It sure didn't help that in Council, Richard Alarcon, who tried to force the city to continue processing the application despite the murky nature of the processing, warned Council that "the developer will sue, and will win." The lobbyist for Las Lomas is a former staffer for Alarcon, and has ties to current Alarcon staff. While insisting he wasn't in favor of Las Lomas, just trying to avoid a lawsuit, the facts are quite different.

Sounds very much like his claiming not to have heard of AB212/ Felipe Fuentes in advance, when Council Colleague Wendy Greuel led a successful motion to oppose it. But he, Cardenas (who admitted just having talked to Fuentes on the phone) and Nunez and Alex Padilla are all part of the Eastside Machine that put Fuentes in his / Alarcon's former, Assembly seat, and it's widely known that Fuentes answers to them in return. (Then this group gave Cindy Montanez two government jobs paying $280,000 for 5 days work, for sitting out the races against Alarcon's Council seat and this Fuentes Assembly seat.)

AB212 overriding current zoning would have allowed their friend to develop Verdugo Hills Golf Course to the tune of over 200 homes. vs. the 12 Greuel says it;s zoned for now; the same game, of overriding current zoning AND Counclmember input on zoning, would have been helpful with Las Lomas, too.

Relying on Rocky Delgadillo to get to the bottom of anything is like putting your bets on a victory over the Celtics with the local Middle School basketball team, but they must do what they can to stop this project.

The city should never have processed the application, and during hearings, Planner Gail Goldberg said the city had received only $50,000 from Palmer to date for doing so. That's absurd, to allow a developer to add the congestion of 5000 homes to an area zoned for 250, where water is short, and which would add thousands of car trips to an already congested freeway interchange.