Porter Ranch Development Gets Preliminary OK : Growth: The Board of Referred Powers voted after two hours of debate that featured testy exchanges between a city councilman and a Los Angeles school board member.

A Los Angeles City Council committee gave preliminary approval Wednesday to a plan for transforming the barren 1,300-acre Porter Ranch area of Chatsworth into offices and shops for more than 20,000 people and homes for 11,000 others amid criticism that the influential developer is not setting aside enough land for future schools.

The 5-0 vote by the Board of Referred Powers came after two hours of debate that often featured testy exchanges between Councilman Hal Bernson and Los Angeles school board member Julie Korenstein, a critic of the plan’s school provisions.

Both elected officials represent the Porter Ranch area. Bernson has supported the plan--which has been in the making since 1987--and Korenstein has emerged as its most prominent official foe.

The plan given preliminary approval Wednesday regulates construction of a project on one of the largest undeveloped parcels remaining in the city of Los Angeles. Although school site questions dominated Wednesday’s debate, traffic impacts have been the major objection of the project’s critics in the past.

The project--totaling 6 million square feet of commercial-retail construction and 3,395 residential units--could be expected to generate 150,602 daily vehicular trips, according to the project’s environmental impact report.

Under the plan, the Porter Ranch developer is now required to set aside, until the year 2000, a 7-acre site for an elementary school. The plan says an additional 15-acre site “could be reserved” for the Los Angeles Unified School District to build a junior high school at some later date.

The developer must be required to reserve the junior high school site, Korenstein said. And she urged that the district be given more time to decide whether to buy the reserved sites. By the year 2000, there may not be enough housing in the project to warrant opening a school, she said.

At least one slow-growth advocate, Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who sits on the Board of Referred Powers, saw a silver lining of sorts in developing the huge property. The proposed Porter Ranch commercial core will act as a welcome “job magnet” for the growing population of the north San Fernando Valley and the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys, said Yaroslavsky, who represents crowded Westwood and Century City.

“There needs to be somewhere between Westwood and Lancaster where these people can go” to work and shop, Yaroslavsky said. “Otherwise they’re coming to my district.”

After the meeting, a vexed Bernson said that although “it’s not the developer who’s not doing enough about the schools,” he intended to do something before the plan goes to the full council to mollify school site concerns.

He refused to elaborate. “I want to assure that we’ll get a school site . . . and not just political rhetoric,” Bernson added in a jab at Korenstein.

Korenstein, who expressed interest in running for Bernson’s council seat in 1991, later said the Porter Ranch project may prove to be Bernson’s political Achilles’ heel. “He’s in serious trouble on this and many other things in his district,” she said.

Korenstein said she has been urged by “a lot of people” to run for Bernson’s seat “and I guess I need to think about it.”

The plan’s next stop is before the entire council July 3. After that, it needs Mayor Tom Bradley’s approval. Bradley threatened in December to veto the plan, saying it did not contain sufficient traffic improvements or lower-cost housing. A compromise with Bernson, reserving 600 units for lower-cost housing and providing for a privately funded internal transit system, put the plan back on track.

The proposal, the subject of bitter disputes in the past, drew only about a dozen protesters to City Hall on Wednesday.

Roger Strull, a leader of PRIDE, a homeowners group created to fight the project, testified for more than 30 minutes before the committee. At one point, Strull urged Bernson, who is chairman of the Board of Referred Powers, to voluntarily remove himself from making decisions on the issue.

Bernson’s support of the plan and his key position on the board stacked the deck unfairly, Strull said. “This is like Russia--not the new Russia, the old Russia,” he said.

Strull accused Bernson of “trying to railroad this through when your constituents are out of town on holiday . . . . It’s the ultimate of bad faith.”

Bernson made no reply.

“To me it looks good,” said Nathan Shapell, president of a Beverly Hills-based construction company, Shapell Industries Inc., the major partner in Porter Ranch Development Co., which owns 1,089 acres within the area where the project would be built.

“We did everything the mayor wanted, the schools wanted. We’ve got 47 intersections we’re improving. We did it all,” Shapell said.

Shapell’s partner in Porter Ranch Development is Liberty Buildings Inc., headed by Irving and Norman Feintech. Larry Calemine, a commercial developer who worked with the Warner family to build Warner Center, and developer Joe Kornwasser will be involved in joint ventures with Porter Ranch Development on the project, Shapell said.

The unanimous vote of the board Wednesday belied the concerns of several of Bernson’s colleagues on the board. Council members Joan Milke Flores, Ruth Galanter and Yaroslavsky said they had doubts that enough was being done for the schools.

Yaroslavsky called the school issue “critical to this project.” Now is “the time to get that taken care of,” he said.

Flores, just before casting her vote, told Bernson that she wanted the school controversy settled before the project comes before the full council for a vote.

City planning executive Frank Fielding and Tom Stemnock, a lobbyist-engineer for the developer, also assured Yaroslavsky that the plan contained growth checkpoints that will allow the city to alter the plan if unanticipated growth-related problems arise.

Construction would not begin for two years.

According to the developer, the off-site traffic improvements for the project will cost about $50 million. These include installing a system of computer-synchronized traffic signals at 47 intersections.

The Board of Referred Powers took jurisdiction over the matter after the city attorney’s office ruled that a member of the city Planning Commission had a possible conflict of interest. The board Wednesday acted in lieu of the commission.