Storm Rises Over Church Golf Course : Neighbors Angered by Plan to Build Homes Around Links Owned by Religious Group

In the western Santa Monica Mountains near the Ventura County border, looking like an emerald-green carpet lining the bottom of a remote, fire-blackened valley between Westlake Village and the Malibu beaches, is a small golf course with an exotic past and a controversial future.

PL Malibu Golf Course, founded by a Japanese church that involves golf and other activities in its worship, is the subject of a debate between its owners, who want to build 420 single-family houses around the golf course, and neighbors who oppose such a development in the lightly populated area.

Neighbors--protesting that such a development would triple the area’s population and overwhelm their narrow roads and treasured solitude--have begun mobilizing mountain residents to fight the development by pressuring county authorities and the state Coastal Commission to block it.

The struggle for permission to develop the land--involving many pounds of paper work and at least three public hearings--will take several years, participants predict.

California Fuji International, which owns the golf course, appears to be connected to the Church of Perfect Liberty, a Japan-based church that maintains its North American headquarters in Glendale. The church purchased the land in 1972, and the title went to California Fuji International in March, 1975, according to county tax records.

But both the corporation and the church are secretive, refusing to discuss their activities or relationship.

(California Fuji has no relationship to Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd., the giant international manufacturer, a spokesman for the U.S. subsidiary of the firm said.)

Church leaders, the golf course manager and Shinya Uehara, the sole California Fuji executive listed with the California secretary of state’s office, declined to be interviewed.

The golf course maintains the PL--for Perfect Liberty--in its name. The church’s founder and former patriarch was Tokuchika Miki. His brother, Michumasa Miki, was president of California Fuji International, according to the Rev. Tatsumi Yano, secretary to the pastor of the Perfect Liberty church in Glendale. Both men are now dead, Yano said.

Uehara, the current president of California Fuji, who lives in Downey, is a member of the church in Glendale, said the church’s pastor, the Rev. Jack Koshimune. He would not say whether Uehara is related to Keiko Uehara, identified in the church magazine, Perfect Liberty, as its publisher and identified by the church’s headquarters in Japan as “director for North America.”

California Fuji and the church also share telephone numbers and a mailing address at a rear entrance to the golf course property.

California Fuji exists only as a corporate owner of the land and has no other business or function, said Jim Johnson, who described himself as an unpaid consultant to the corporation for the construction project.

“We were told that California Fuji and the church are the same thing, that their religion involved building golf courses around the world,” said Pam Emerson, a planner for the state Coastal Commission, which will have to rule on the acceptability of the construction project if it is approved by county authorities.

California Fuji owns not only the 128-acre golf course but also most of the valley around it, a total of 592 acres bounded by Mulholland Highway, Encinal Canyon Road and Clarke Ranch Road.

The assessed value of the land was about $3 million in 1975, said Mark Ryavec, chief deputy to the county assessor, “so it would be worth considerably more today.”

The corporation pays about $33,000 a year in property taxes and has not declared the tract a church site to exempt it, he said.

In fact, he said, the corporation has not even taken advantage of a legal provision that lowers taxes on golf courses. Owners of golf courses are entitled to be taxed only the land’s value as a golf course, not its real estate potential, Ryavec said, and it is probable their taxes would be far less if California Fuji were to use that provision.

The corporation wants to build 420 large three- or four-bedroom houses on winding private streets around the golf course, consultant Johnson said of McCoy Investment Co. of Woodland Hills and McCoy Construction Co., which has done grading work on the site.

The golf course would remain, Johnson said.

Johnson, as a vice president of American Hawaiian Steamship Co., helped build Westlake Village. American Hawaiian Steamship was the area’s master developer.

‘Low-Density Project’

“We don’t think it will be obtrusive,” Johnson said. “More than 400 units sounds like a large number, but with that amount of land, this will be a low-density project. The part of Westlake Village where I live averages 3.2 houses to the acre, and this would be about .75 houses to the acre.”

The plans do not call for the houses to be spread out, but to be built in rows on winding streets following the contours of the hillsides around the fairways.

Although the land falls within the boundaries of Santa Monica Mountains National Recreational Area, the U. S. Park Service, which oversees the recreational area, has no plans to buy the site, said Dan Kuehn, superintendent of the area for the park service.

Of the 150,000 acres in the recreation area, reaching from Will Rogers State Historical Park to Point Mugu, the park service owns about 12,000 acres; some of the other land is owned by state, county or city park agencies. Eventually, Kuehn said, the federal and local governments intend to own about 90,000 acres in the zone.

Park Service Concerns

The park service opposes development only if it is on land that the service plans to buy, he said. However, in other cases, such as this, the service “comments and expresses its concerns to the local authorities just as any other neighbor can do” and will push for conditions and limits on development, he said.

“We’re very interested in what goes on there,” Kuehn said, adding that the park service is especially “concerned about impacts on the Trancas watershed, sewage and erosion runoff, because we already own quite a bit of property downstream, and eventually we hope to have maybe 8,000 acres in Zuma and Trancas canyons.”

The park service has an agreement with California Fuji that any development will include a hiking and horse path through the site, to form part of the recreation area’s planned 55-mile backbone trail, he said.

A request to subdivide the property and amend the county general plan to allow construction was filed June 2, said Jeff Taylor, administrator for subdivisions of the county Regional Planning Department. Although the project conforms to current zoning regulations on the site--which require an acre for each residential unit--the county plan requires a minimum of five acres per residence on the level portion of the property and 20 acres on hilly segments.

Representatives of the proposed builders, Lind & Hillerud of San Marino, met with the planning department’s subdivision committee July 11. Another meeting is scheduled Oct. 10, he said. The proposal is being reviewed by the department’s environmental and subdivision committees, Taylor said.

Many Problems to Clear

“There are a lot of problems, and they can’t act until these are cleared--traffic, hillside development, where the water comes from, where the sewage goes, the whole gamut,” he said.

Eventually, the committee recommendations will go to the Regional Planning Commission, and the project will be the subject of a public hearing, he said. A favorable recommendation by the commission would go to the county Board of Supervisors, which would have to hold another public hearing.

Whatever development the supervisors approve would then have to be reviewed by the Coastal Commission, “and now I’m confident we’re talking about a matter of years,” Taylor said.

Designated for Recreation

Emerson, of the Coastal Commission, said the site was classified by her agency in December, 1985, for recreational use only, “so they would have some problems” getting approval for homes.

Neighbors hope the lengthy approval process will give them time to block the development. Groups have been meeting in living rooms of isolated mountain houses, planning a campaign against the development.

“It’s been very quiet up here for the last few years, and the homeowners groups have been like sleeping bears, but the Church of Perfect Liberty has awakened the bear,” said Bill Fox, the informal leader of an ad hoc coalition of groups that includes West Mulholland and Decker Canyon homeowners associations and Malibu Highlands Assn.

Homeowners’ Support

The three groups represent about 200 households living in the immediate area, he said, and they have received promises of support from other groups, including Malibu Township Council and Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation, which represents 17 associations from Calabasas to Lake Malibu.

A joint meeting is tentatively scheduled for Sept. 15 at the community center in Point Dume, he said.

“A development of this size is in total opposition to all the political decisions of the last 10 years” aimed at creating a national park in the Santa Monica Mountains, Fox said.

“A development of this size would set a precedent that would open the doors for the whole Santa Monica Mountains.”

There are now about 200 residences within six miles of the PL golf course, he said. The planned development “would at least double or maybe triple the population,” Fox said.

Residents worry about traffic and sewage, he said. Many of them are particularly concerned that the development will have street lights, which they say will ruin their view of the stars, a sight many of them regard as their reward for tolerating the inconveniences of living in the remote, rural hills.

Traffic Projections

Fox said an estimate by county traffic authorities showed that the development, as planned, would generate about 5,200 vehicle trips a day.

“There have been two fires here in the last eight years that required the evacuation of residents, in 1978 and in 1985,” he said. “What if there were 420 more households to evacuate with only these narrow roads to get out on?”

The project’s plans call for construction of a sewage treatment plant that would recycle waste water and use it to irrigate the golf greens. Fox said some similar plants elsewhere have had technical problems that caused sewage overflows.

Johnson said the planners are aware of the neighbors’ concerns and are working on remedies, including an attempt to get county planners to agree on the dimmest street lighting possible. He said the corporation assumes that it will take at least two or three years to begin construction.

“We’ll get together with the neighbors eventually,” he said, “but first we need some answers ourselves. We’re also concerned about traffic, but I’d hate to go to a meeting with them and have only half the answers. Then they really would get concerned. We want to give them the facts. We’re not trying to hide anything.”

The development, concentrated on the lower slopes of the property, will not be visible to many of the neighbors, he said.

“The Santa Monica Mountains plan is to have recreational facilities available, not to prohibit people from living there,” he said.