Horse Owners Riled Up Over ‘Bill of Rights’

It is the latest in a long line of battles between urban and agrarian values. And this one, some say, could cost Los Angeles agrarians their most treasured icon--the horse.

The “Horse-Keeping Bill of Rights,” as the proposed ordinance is informally called, “will have the effect of making almost every horse owner in the city nonconforming,” said West Valley community activist Walter Prince, who filed suit Tuesday in Superior Court in an attempt to halt a Thursday Planning Commission hearing on the measure.

Horse owners say the 40-page list of regulations--which, in the words of one equestrian, reads as though it had been drafted by people “who wouldn’t know one end of a horse from the other”--is a failed attempt to pen a comprehensive plan that would perpetuate horse-keeping in the area and also allow for development.

If the measure passes, they say, the urbanites will have won a big one. City Planner Steve Ciccarelli, who headed up the study and wrote much of the proposal, said the document was intended to make life a little easier for horse keepers in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. And in many ways, he said, it succeeds.

“We think that in the long run, it will actually help preserve horse-keeping lots and horse-keeping privileges,” Ciccarelli said.

But there are several aspects of the “bill of rights” that worry equine owners, including the clause that says existing horse lots that don’t meet the new standards--some claim more than 90% of horse-keepers’ properties will fall into that category--will become nonconforming.

Those lots would not be subject to the new regulations--with a couple of exceptions.

But if there is not a horse on the property for a period of three years, the corral or barn must be altered--at a potential cost of thousands of dollars--to meet the new regulations before horses can again be kept. And if a horse has not been kept on the land for a full year, the property owner may also be forced to comply with the new rules if an adjoining landowner is granted a permit to build a residence.

The equine community is also concerned about a clause that mandates a 10-foot buffer zone between a corral and the property line. Horse owners say corrals are very typically put in the corner of a lot and setting them back would waste a considerable amount of space.

Ciccarelli said many of the disputes between horse owners and their neighbors result from horses urinating, defecating and damaging fences at the property line.

Creation of an all-encompassing horse-keeping ordinance came at the behest of Councilman Hal Bernson in 1991, when he oversaw creation of the Equine Task Force.

According to Kent Lovelady, a task force member, the group spent a year studying the issues of horse-keeping and development, then submitted a proposal aimed almost entirely at regulating new development, not existing lots, to planners in March, 1992.

Two years later, the Planning Department’s version “bears no resemblance to the document we turned in,” Lovelady said. “For the city to even represent that that document (the ‘bill of rights’) had any relationship to the document of the equine committee is almost libelous.”

Cora Smith, a planner who also worked on the project, said the bill is a sizable step in the direction of compromise.

“I think it will make it so the horse owners could possibly coexist with the developers,” she said. “That was the mission. If we don’t have something, we may lose horse-keeping all together.”

Horse owners say the measure seems almost to have been written to force them out.

“It’s got the horse community up in arms,” Lovelady said.

Unless a judge grants an injunction, the Planning Commission will meet for a hearing on the measure and to discuss other issues at 8:30 a.m. Thursday at the Sherman Oaks Woman’s Club, 4808 Kester Ave.

Regardless of the Planning Commission’s decision, the full City Council would have to approve the measure for it to become law.