Council Splits Over Ban on Building : Development: After a competing plan was advanced, the vote was 3 to 2 to redraft a law to extend the moratorium.

After four hours of bickering, the Malibu City Council failed to reach a consensus Tuesday night on how to extend the city’s controversial building moratorium, the linchpin of the new administration.

The council split 3 to 2 over how to reconcile two competing plans for extending the 45-day moratorium an additional 10 months and exempting some single-family homes. The extension would be an “urgency measure” and, under state law, needs four votes for passage.

Mayor Walt Keller and Councilwoman Carolyn Van Horn supported an ordinance written by city planners and opposed by developers that would have continued the moratorium for virtually all construction except single-family homes that already have building permits.

The other council members supported a plan submitted by Councilman Larry Wan, who took the unusual step of forming his own advisory group and hiring private consultants on the matter. The consultants prepared an 80-page study recommending that the city set up a rating system for single-family homes based on such considerations as location and stage of construction. Under Wan’s proposal, called the Managed Interim Development program, some single-family homes that do not yet have building permits would be allowed to proceed.

Nearly 30 critics of the city’s moratorium, including architects, developers, lawyers and homeowners, took the podium during Tuesday’s public hearing to press for Wan’s program.

The meeting was contentious throughout. Several times, to the boos of the audience, the mayor attempted to block discussion of Wan’s proposal altogether. He voiced frustration with the lengthy and confusing arguments, at one point snapping, “There’s no consensus, I can tell you that!”

When Councilman Mike Caggiano suggested that the staff rewrite the city’s ordinance to include Wan’s study, Keller exploded: “You’re making shambles of the ordinance!” The audience cheered derisively.

Shortly before midnight, the visibly exhausted council members voted 3 to 2 to redraft the city’s ordinance to incorporate Wan’s recommendations and to hold another meeting Friday at 7 p.m. The existing moratorium expires May 12, and if it is to be extended without interruption, the council would need to give preliminary approval Friday and take a final vote next week.

“Larry has a good plan,” said Councilwoman Missy Zeitsoff. “You cannot set criteria until you acknowledge there are sub-regions in an area.”

Van Horn disagreed. “The developers are having their way,” she said angrily.

The contentious meeting Tuesday was a far cry from the scene during the city’s independence celebration one month ago, when council members hugged each other for photos and unanimously passed the moratorium. Tuesday’s discord raised fears that once again, as in the informal early months of meetings before Malibu became a city March 28, feuding will shatter the council’s effectiveness.

Immediately after Tuesday’s meeting, in fact, key developers charged that the council’s impasse was proof of its incompetence. “It’s ridiculous that they had to waste so much time,” said Brady Westwater, a real estate broker who has organized a group to fight the ban. Homeowners, he said, “are suffering because of a political logjam that has paralyzed the council.”

The split vote confused some members of the city’s newly hired staff. Planner Steve Nystrom, who drafted the ordinance toppled by Wan’s program, several times pressed the council to give him specific direction about what it wanted in its new draft of the ordinance to be voted on Friday.

At the end of the meeting, when asked if he understood what he was supposed to put into that redraft, Nystrom flushed, shrugged, and stared at the ceiling. Finally, he said, “That’s going to be the tricky part.”

Keller and Van Horn contended that by conducting his own study of the moratorium, Wan circumvented the legislative process established by cityhood.

“Once you elect people to set policy and hire staff, then you’re no longer the renegade doing your own work,” Van Horn said in an interview. “The rules of the game have changed--Larry’s not dealing with that.”

In fact, Wan said, the day after cityhood he began talking with an ad hoc group of real estate dealers, developers, architects and a few environmentalists about conducting their own study. The group convened in architect Ron Goldman’s office, and Wan and several architects selected the Newport Beach consultants who did the study. Wan and other members of the group said they paid for the study themselves.

Wan said he initiated the study because he was frustrated by what he called the confusion and indecisiveness during the city’s first month, and because he thought the city had an obligation to listen to some of the constituents adversely affected by the moratorium.

Wan, who had sought the mayoralty but lost to Keller, criticized Keller’s leadership. “What is working with the city?” he asked rhetorically. “To sit in a rented city back room and give staff things off the top of your head? Or to get out there and see what’s going on?”

Several council members predicted that they will reach a consensus on extending the moratorium before the current one expires. “If we don’t, we won’t have any ordinance,” Caggiano said.

But by Tuesday midnight, it was clear that the dispute had soured the council members’ enthusiasm for their new job.

“It’s so difficult to work as a team,” Van Horn said. “We never know when the next shoe will drop. It sure takes the fun out of it.”