State Takeover Could Mean Changes for Park : Recreation: Officials plan to consolidate Tapia with Malibu Creek State Park and charge a day-use fee--probably $5.

Tapia Park, one of the oldest and most popular of the county’s 18 wilderness areas, is expected to be transferred to the state this spring and undergo major operating changes.

The state plans to consolidate the 94-acre park with adjacent Malibu Creek State Park and eliminate free access by charging a day-use fee, probably $5. There is also a preliminary proposal to close sections of Tapia, located on the west side of Las Virgenes Road about a mile south of Mulholland Highway, to give the most heavily used areas an opportunity to repair themselves.

“I don’t anticipate the whole park being closed,” said Ken Leigh, chief ranger for the state’s Santa Monica Mountains District. “But we want to stop erosion damage to trees and stop some of the other degradation going on there.”

Even more changes are possible, Leigh said, “but any radical changes would probably be done under a general development plan as an amendment to Malibu Creek’s,” meaning that public hearings would be necessary.

The state’s acquisition of Tapia has been in the works for about five years. Originally, the state and the county were planning a swap: Tapia for Placerita Canyon Nature Center, a 331-acre Newhall state-owned facility that has been run by the county since it opened in 1971.

The idea for the swap originated in 1986 with the Monte Nido Valley Property Owners Assn., whose members live at the north end of Malibu Canyon near Tapia. The association felt the county had let Tapia deteriorate badly from lack of attention. Roads were pitted with potholes, restrooms were padlocked shut and drug dealers reportedly slept overnight in the park.

“The trade is off,” Leigh said, citing several reasons, including an inability by county and state officials to agree on appraisal values and mineral rights.

“To make the exchange on the basis of land value--which was the original concept--couldn’t work,” Leigh said. A county appraisal last year assessed the value of Tapia at $8.7 million and Placerita at $2.5 million.

But the county and the state reached an agreement recently in which the county would simply give Tapia away. “The county felt administratively that it would just as soon not have Tapia because of operational problems, and the state felt that Tapia would be an appropriate addition to the state park system,” Leigh said.

Earlier this year, the county sent Santa Monica District rangers a letter that “for the first time gave us a concrete date for the transfer--the end of March,” Leigh said.

The county, however, is still waiting for an official response from the state and doubts that the transfer will actually take place that soon. “Things may drag out,” said James Barber, a facilities planner for the county Department of Parks and Recreation.

When should they wrap it up? “Let’s say April,” Barber said.

By charging a fee, the state expects to decrease usage at Tapia. On a busy weekend, as many as 2,000 people use the Agoura park, most of them concentrated in a relatively small area. Next door, Malibu Creek gets about the same number of visitors on a weekend, but they’re dispersed over 6,000 acres.

Ironically, “usage has increased at Tapia since the state has increased its charge for entrance fees” at its own facilities, said Game Warden Matt Kouba, the county official in charge of operations at Tapia.

In Tapia, the state will be getting prime picnic grounds with stone barbecue pits, groves of old oaks and sycamores, and a softball field. Surrounded on three sides by mountains, the park is “mostly used by picnickers and the picnic area gets a lot of use from big groups,” Kouba said.

Tapia is also a key embarkation site for hikers and equestrians, with trails from the park leading into Malibu Creek from the backside and also connecting into the Boney Ridge Trail. But trails are not well-marked--a situation the state will probably correct--and Kouba advises hikers to carry a map.

Another natural asset in Tapia is a riparian area, “which is very, very rare,” Kouba said. Part of Malibu Creek’s stream system, the riparian area is a state-protected habitat for birds and other wildlife. “There are very few places in the Santa Monicas that you find ducks except in Malibu Lagoon and along this creek,” Kouba said.

Water is now running through the creek, but the riparian area dried up last summer because of the drought, killing what fish were still left.

The drought is also having an impact on vegetation at Tapia, drying leaves and making plants susceptible to insects.

Recently, Kouba broke a twig off an oak and didn’t like what he found--a larva the size of a pinhead was found in the pulp. It was the nefarious twig girdler, a tiny beetle that is one of the mighty oak’s biggest enemies.

“The twig girdler lays its eggs inside the cambium (layer between the bark and the wood) and the larva circles the cambium and kills it out,” Kouba says. Not yet done, “it crawls into the center of the branch and eats all the way through and comes out as an adult.”

The drought is the twig girdler’s ally. “In a normal year,” Kouba says, “the water pressure inside the tree is able to keep the beetle from laying eggs.”

Although “there’s no way to get rid of them,” he added, “the infestation may not be significant.”