Court Rules Against Zoning Change for Shopping Center : Cook’s Corner Bar Gets to Party Alone

The landmark Cook’s Corner bar and grill, a magnet for bikers and yuppies, is going to have the intersection at the entrance to Trabuco Canyon all to itself for at least a while longer, thanks to a court ruling announced Friday.

Orange County Superior Court Judge Tully H. Seymour agreed with a residents’ group in the canyon that the county wrongly approved a zoning change that would allow a shopping center at another corner of the intersection.

Ray Chandos, a leader of the Rural Canyons Conservation Fund and the layman who successfully argued the case against the county, said the decision means that “as of right now, the project is dead.”

Mark Dillon, attorney for the developer of the shopping center project, Live Oak Ltd., said it was “too early to tell what we are going to do” now.

Chandos and Dillon said the developer could appeal the decision, which was made earlier this week, or could return to county planners and seek new approval for the project.

Chandos, an instructor at Irvine Valley College, said, “I think we could live with something there in addition to the Cook’s Corner bar” at the junction of Live Oak Canyon, Santiago Canyon and El Toro roads in the north El Toro area.

But his group had objected to including a gasoline station in the 54,000-square-foot development on the 8.5-acre site. They also were concerned about increased traffic at an intersection that some residents have said is already dangerous.

The group’s complaint, though, “was with the process rather than with the project itself,” Chandos said.

The Conservation Fund argued that the county wrongly relied on a 10-year-old environmental impact report in approving the shopping center, rather than ordering a new report and allowing residents to review it. The judge agreed.

The judge also agreed with the fund’s objection that the county’s general plan specifies only one commercial development at the intersection. That limit was set by the Board of Supervisors in 1980 but changed last March. The northeast corner, on which the tavern sits, has been zoned for commercial use since 1981 but has not been developed. The land on the southeast corner, where the shopping center would go, had been zoned agricultural but was rezoned commercial.

Cook’s Corner bar, a one-time World War II mess hall that was moved decades ago to the intersection at the entrance of O’Neill Regional Park, was not directly affected by the decision.

But bar customers, who arrive on everything from Harley-Davidson motorcycles to BMW convertibles, had complained earlier this year about having a shopping center across the street. Also, increased traffic could have forced the county to realign the intersection, possibly running the street through the bar’s site, county planners said.

Bruce Conn, another leader of the Conservation Fund, said Seymour’s decision was “enormously encouraging to anyone who is concerned about the area. (The decision shows) that there are systems available to us above and beyond the Board of Supervisors.”

The fund and a companion organization, the Rural Canyons Residents Assn., have battled the county in recent years over approvals for thousands of new homes in a sparsely populated area that still recalls Orange County’s agricultural and rural past.

Chandos lost a court battle earlier this year against the Portola Hills housing development, but Conn said Friday that this time “Ray single-handedly learned the law, went to court, took on the lawyers in their blue suits and . . . knocked out the shopping center, the gas station, the whole thing.”