County Advised to Pay for Failure to Maintain Building

County officials have recommended that the owners of a Van Nuys building be paid $250,000 for maintenance the county failed to keep up during the 13 years it leased the structure.

The county Department of Mental Health used the 25,000-square-foot building at 8101 Sepulveda Blvd. as an inpatient and outpatient clinic from 1981 to 1994. Under the lease agreement, the county was expected to maintain the property’s landscaping as well as its interior carpets, cleaning and painting, said Frank Scott, deputy county counsel.

Property owners Eli and Deborah Landman and Zoltan and Anna Schwartz filed a lawsuit in August 1995, seeking $372,000 in maintenance damages and another $900,000 in lost rent, alleging their building was vacated in poor condition, Scott said. Department of Health officials argued that they had returned the property in the same condition it was in when the lease began.

The county Claims Board met in closed session Tuesday afternoon to discuss the lawsuit. It recommended that the Board of Supervisors pay the landlords $250,000 to settle the matter.

But even if the Board of Supervisors approves the settlement, which it is tentatively scheduled to consider on Sept. 2, it’s not known if the property owners will accept it.

The landlords could not be reached for comment.

Scott called the settlement a “compromise,” admitting that the county owed the landlords some maintenance fees. But he said the property owners didn’t live up to their obligations to ensure that the basic structure of the building be maintained.

“This is a good settlement for the county,” Scott said. “We think the county’s exposure is substantially higher than that.”

The county closed the clinic in 1994 to help pay for a new clinic it opened in Canoga Park the same year.

The Van Nuys property has since been refurbished and leased again, according to Nancy Singer, chairwoman of the Claims Board.