How Golf Courses Hurt Coastlines

It is kind of fun to sit and dream and fantasize along with the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council as they ponder the construction of their fancy new golf course on the coastline (Times, July 20).

As usual when shining and polishing up one of their pet projects, the council will not hear a discouraging word. Even the jolting news that this new course will cost about $19 million or $20 million (versus about $2 million for a shabby public course) and a round of golf may cost around $60 did not seem to faze our dreamy council persons.

The Rancho Palos Verdes City Council will continue to spin their multimillion-dollar scenarios. They are much too far along now to slow their drive for a glitzy PV Riviera Ritz-Carlton coastline. But citizens of Rancho Palos Verdes and surrounding communities should take a hard look at some of the negatives involved.

First off, with two championship golf courses (one for the Hon development and one for the Long Point Monaghan project) plus two giant hotels, untold convention centers and clubhouses and hundreds of units of tract housing stretching from Palos Verdes Estates to San Pedro--all this ballooning traffic will push the peninsula into certain gridlock.

We have very restricted entrance and exit corridors. Further, the caravans of thousands of dump trucks going and coming and clotting highways during construction will not make for easy living or happy motoring.

Why should our splendid coastline be sacrificed for golf courses? If someone suggested putting hundreds of tennis courts or baseball or football or soccer fields along the coast, no one would listen. But for some reason, a golf course is acceptable to some people. But I believe that the Rancho Palos Verdes coastline is destined for better things.

The prime consideration that makes it totally unfeasible to build a golf course along Subregions 1 and 2 is that both the Rancho Palos Verdes General Plan and the Coastal Specific Plan call for a bluff road and Class I hiking and biking trails running along the bluffs from Point Vicente to the Lunada Point Project near the Palos Verdes Estates border (see Coastal Specific Plan, Path & Trail Networks, Page S1-9). The plans do not say put in a golf course, if you like. They call for a bluff road and trail networks.

Rancho Palos Verdes citizens and all peninsula residents should hold the council members’ feet to the fire and insist that they stick to the original EIR plans developed for the city and for the coastline.

Of equal importance is the certain and standard use of toxic herbicides, pesticides and fungicides on the golf course greens and fairways. These toxic chemicals will inevitably drain down into the ocean, which is already heavily laden with DDT, PCBs and other outfall poisons. We do not need more toxic chemicals polluting our bays and beaches. Also there is the problem of heavy watering required by a championship golf course. This heavy watering could destabilize bluff and cliff sides and hillsides and (who knows) possibly even precipitate another landslide--which we surely do not need.

The bluffs and terrain in Subregion 2 are geologically unstable. The Rancho Palos Verdes public works, redevelopment agency and City Council are pleading and begging and forcing some residents near the Abalone Cove and Portuguese Bend landslides to expedite dewatering, install drainpipes on homes, eliminate septic tanks--anything and everything to prevent water from hitting the ground. Yet right nearby at Point Vicente, on unstable terrain, the City Council wants to install a golf course requiring massive amounts of water on a daily basis. Does this make any sense?

But let’s face it, millions and millions of dollars are at stake here, and this overdevelopment locomotive will not be easy to stop. All interested citizens in Rancho Palos Verdes, around the peninsula and surrounding communities must write, wire or phone your city hall and the Rancho Palos Verdes City Hall and make your views known.

Contact your mayor and council persons and tell them to bring force to bear. It is vital that the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council should stick to the basic General Plan and Coastal Specific Plan, and not rewrite it to aid overdevelopment. Remember, the tranquility you obtain and the gridlock you avoid can make for better living, a decent environment and an accessible coastline through the year 2000 and beyond.

GAR GOODSON

Palos Verdes Estates