Warner Ridge Developer Paid Lobbyist $49,107 : Woodland Hills: Councilwoman Picus’ opposition to zoning changes is blamed for the high expenditures.

Warner Ridge Associates paid a Hollywood-based lobbying firm $49,107 between July and September to help the development firm win zoning approvals to build its controversial project in Woodland Hills, according to a city Ethics Commission report.

The payment, made to Afriat/Blackstone Consulting, made the Warner Ridge firm the second-largest purchaser of lobbying services during the third quarter of 1992, the report indicated. The third-quarter payments brought to $93,963 the total the development team has paid in lobbying fees this year.

The only City Hall lobbying client who paid more during the third quarter was Otto Industries, a trash-container manufacturer that paid $86,323 for lobbying services as part of its campaign to secure a lucrative city contract.

In August, the city’s Planning Commission narrowly approved the Warner Ridge project on a 3-2 vote, and the following month the City Council approved the project on a 10-3 vote.

Those votes brought to an end a three-year battle over the fate of the 21.5-acre Warner Ridge site. That battle led to a court-sanctioned settlement, agreed upon by all parties last spring, that the city either grant the development group the approvals it needed to build a nearly 700,000-square-foot commercial project or pay the group about $50 million in damages.

Jack Spound, a key Warner Ridge partner, said his group’s lobbying expenditures were primarily aimed at having the lobbyist explain to lawmakers what their options were under the court settlement. Asked whether the large amount of money amounted to influence peddling, he responded: “Absolutely not. . . . We were not offering any quid pro quo.”

Steve Afriat, a partner in the Afriat/Blackstone firm, said he and his colleagues would not have had to work so hard and charge so much if “Joy Picus had not continued to lobby against us and to ignore the handwriting on the wall.”

Picus, the councilwoman representing the Woodland Hills area affected by the Warner Ridge project, has been a vehement foe of the project, saying it was too large and inappropriate for the area. Picus voted against the project to the very end.

Afriat also said the $49,106 paid for work that was actually done between April and September, not just during the third quarter of 1992.

Afriat said Morgan Guaranty Trust of New York, Warner Ridge Associates’ lender and the ultimate source of the lobbying funds, was cautious about paying his firm’s fees until it saw results. Those results began to emerge in August with the Planning Commission vote, he said.

“They had seen us get burned before,” Afriat said.

In 1990, the council voted to reject Warner Ridge’s commercial project, even though it had been supported by the recommendations of the city’s professional planners.

Also among the top 25 lobbying clients during the third quarter of 1992 was Browning-Ferris Industries, owner of the Sunshine Canyon Landfill north of Granada Hills. The giant waste-disposal firm paid $27,500 in lobbying fees during the quarter, bringing its 1992 City Hall lobbying expenditures to $120,166.

Arnie Berghoff, government affairs chief for Browning-Ferris, said the payments in the third quarter were largely to compensate the lobbyists for keeping the firm abreast of general city waste disposal issues. He said, however, that some of the payments were made to lobby council members on a council vote.

That Nov. 19 vote concerned whether the city should pay an additional $80,000 in legal fees to a private law firm it has hired to challenge the adequacy of an environmental impact report filed with the county by Browning-Ferris.

On a 10-1 vote, the council approved the payment, which had been opposed by Browning-Ferris and its lobbyists as a waste of taxpayers’ money. The environmental report weighs the consequences of Browning-Ferris’ plan to build a new landfill in that portion of Sunshine Canyon north of the city of Los Angeles in unincorporated county territory.

Most of the Browning-Ferris lobbying fees were paid to Rose & Kindel and Handelman Katherman Inc.