Developer’s Gift Saves Fossils on Site of Posh Housing Project

Nothing has come easy for the newest luxury subdivision atop the Santa Monica Mountains in Sherman Oaks.

Nearby homeowners fought its design. City officials opposed its density. Environmentalists attacked its grading plan. A lawsuit and a special state Assembly bill helped shape its final scope.

And, when construction finally got under way this month, a huge earthmover rolled down a hill and flattened three cars and trucks belonging to project workers.

The development of a 188-acre site northeast of the intersection of Beverly Glen Boulevard and Mulholland Drive has been that kind of project.

Ninety-three estate-sized homes, which will sell in the $1.5-million range, will be erected when workers create building pads by bulldozing 2 1/2 million cubic yards of earth from a steep hillside into a deep canyon.

But the most striking feature of the project involves a second 100-acre ridge that will not be touched by the workmen.

It is called Fossil Ridge, and environmentalists claim it is loaded with 10-million-year-old fish fossils. When the housing project is completed, the developer will build a $600,000 paleontological field station on the ridge and turn it over to scientists.

“That development is the only one in the Santa Monica Mountains that I was pleased to see bulldozers start working on,” said Joe Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state agency that will oversee operation of the field station.

“The way that project has turned out is an excellent example of what can happen when people cooperate,” Edmiston said Monday of the project, called Mulholland Estates.

Arnold Newman, a Sherman Oaks naturalist who is an international forestry consultant, said scientists are pleased with the results of the eight-year development fight.

“We started with a large virgin area that we wanted to protect, but we had no funds to do it with. A compromise had to be worked out, and we arrived at a really generous settlement,” Newman said.

The subdivision’s developer, Kenneth Kai Chang, said he also is happy.

“My buyers will be pleased to have a permanently preserved green space next to them that they know will never have houses built on it,” Chang said Monday. “The end result in the community is there are a number of people who are pleased. I feel quite fortunate.”

There were times when Chang and project investors, based primarily in Hong Kong, did not feel that way.

Fossil Ridge’s ancient buried treasure trove was discovered by accident in 1962 by workers building Los Angeles City Fire Station 99 at the top of the ridge, near the intersection of Mulholland and Beverly Glen.

Scientists from the George C. Page Museum and the county Museum of Natural History were quick to identify the area as a rich paleontological site. Later, when conservationists began mapping plans to create state and federal parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains, Fossil Ridge was included on the potential land acquisition list.

After the Santa Monica National Recreation Area was established, however, state and federal officials ran out of money before they could buy Fossil Ridge.

Preservation of the ridge became an issue when Chang’s group sought to develop the site. He decided to donate the ridge as a nature preserve as a way of ending a deadlock over use of the property. As part of the compromise, then-Assemblyman Howard Berman introduced a special Assembly bill that removed the property from the state’s parkland acquisition list.

That wasn’t the end of the controversy, however.

The developers stirred local opposition when they proposed construction of an exclusive restaurant on one of the ridge tops, along with 100 condominiums and 29 single-family homes. The restaurant plan was quickly dropped when the city’s Mulholland Scenic Parkway Citizens Advisory Committee blasted it as unnecessary commercialism for the mountains.

The condominium concept came under fire next. Nearby homeowners went to court to argue that single-family homes should be built instead.

Lawsuit Settled

The lawsuit, filed by a environmental watchdog group called Mulholland Tomorrow and homeowners from nearby Benedict Canyon and Beverly Glen, was settled when the developers dropped the town-house plan, according to Mulholland Tomorrow lawyer Barbara S. Blinderman.

The last compromise involved separation of Chang’s single-family project from existing Sherman Oaks homes north of the construction site. Access to the new subdivision will come only from the south, off Mulholland Drive.

“We were concerned that the development’s streets might become another busy cross-mountain road,” said Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. “We felt it was a fair compromise.”

Floyd Orde, construction manager of the project, said the homes will have backyard tennis courts that function as emergency runoff catch basins to prevent winter erosion damage from ungraded Fossil Ridge.