Building Permits

A former president of the Los Angeles Board of Building and Safety Commissioners has been charged with three criminal conflict-of-interest counts for voting to approve permits for an engineering firm that had hired his company, a prosecutor said Friday. The Los Angeles County district attorney filed the misdemeanor charges against Efren R. Abratique, who is scheduled to be arraigned Wednesday.

Hundreds of construction permits in Los Angeles and Ventura counties have been halted after a judge struck down landmark water quality standards designed to protect the region's beaches from storm water pollution, the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board announced Thursday.

Ageda Camargo was sitting in her shady frontyard, wondering aloud if jail is as bad as it sounds. "I'm thinking of writing Martha Stewart to ask what it's like," said the soft-spoken 83-year-old. "Do they put you in a cell? I wouldn't want to be in a cell." These weren't idle worries. Camargo, a grandmother of six, has run afoul of La Quinta's code enforcement in a big way, big enough to put her behind bars.

New-home construction rebounded in February after a steep January slide. But analysts pointed to a further decline in building permits as a worrisome signal of future problems for the troubled housing industry. Construction of new homes and apartments rose 9% in February to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.53 million units, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. Construction had fallen by 14.3% in January to the slowest pace in more than nine years.

In a stinging rebuke, a state appeals court has ordered Orange County to forfeit $4.5 million it collected by overcharging for building permits, and to pay nearly $1.4 million to the lawyer who brought the case to court. The unanimous decision by California's 4th Appellate District upholds a trial court ruling that found the county overcharged developers and people seeking home-improvement permits during most of the 1990s. "It's a big victory, I think, for fee-payers," said Walter P.

The Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission has approved the Union Rescue Mission's plan to open a 71-acre facility for homeless women, children and seniors outside Sylmar. With a 4-0 vote Wednesday to grant the conditional-use permit, the commission ended a long-running dispute over the facility, known as Hope Gardens, intended as a way to move at-risk people away from skid row.

Housing starts were practically nonexistent last month in Orange County, where the number of permits obtained by builders plunged 85% from a year earlier, data released Friday showed. Plans for new housing construction declined across the state in June, according to data collected by the Burbank-based Construction Industry Research Board. Half as many permits -- 9,536 -- were issued in June for new single- and multifamily homes, compared with 19,637 a year earlier.

If good fences make good neighbors, what do bad fences make? Inmates -- at least in Rolling Hills Estates. That's what Francisco Linares found out this week, when an L.A. County Superior Court judge sentenced him to six months in jail. His crime? Erecting a 180-foot-long fence while building his dream home in the horsy hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Never mind Paris Hilton and her 45-day sentence for serial probation busting.

Cellphone towers may be ugly, but that's not reason enough for cities to block their construction, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday. In the nation's first appellate ruling on an increasingly contentious local issue, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down parts of a La Canada Flintridge law that had allowed the city to withhold building permits on public rights of way for purely aesthetic reasons.

Despite an increase in housing production in much of Southern California, builders statewide obtained 20.6% fewer permits in April compared with a year earlier. In April, permits were pulled for 11,119 single-family homes, a number about even with the previous month but down 25% from the year before. Meanwhile, permits for condominiums and apartments totaled 3,476, down 37.6% from the previous month and off 3.4% from 2005.