MODJESKA : Foes React to Modjeska Home Plan

Allowing busloads of curiosity seekers to visit the historic home of the late actress Madame Helena Modjeska will destroy the very essence of its beauty--its serene and remote setting, Modjeska Canyon residents told the county’s Planning Commission on Monday.

Five years after the county purchased the home in remote Modjeska Canyon for $1 million, residents are still not happy with plans to convert it into a historical park and museum.

“If you took her home and plunked it down in the middle of downtown Santa Ana, it wouldn’t be the same,” said Renee Brown, a longtime canyon resident. “We really think it’s a beautiful home, and the remote setting and the trees surrounding it create an ambience of peace and serenity.

“It’s not like I don’t want to share it,” Brown said. “But we say, ‘Do it carefully.’ ”

The Planning Commission must approve an environmental impact report and a management plan on the proposed park before it goes before the Board of Supervisors for final approval. But because a staff report on the draft environmental document was not completed in time for Monday’s meeting, commission members decided to take up the matter again at their May 8 meeting.

While county staff members have met with residents and tried to respond to some of their concerns in the draft environmental report, representatives of the Olive Hill Property Owners Assn. and the Modjeska Residents Assn., as well as a handful of individual homeowners, said Monday that they were still concerned about several key issues.

For example, many residents are pleased that the county plans to limit the number of cars allowed to park at the home site by setting up a shuttle-bus service that will transport them from a parking lot some distance from the community.

But residents said that because narrow Modjeska Canyon Road is the only access in and out of the 180-home community, even the added bus traffic would present a safety problem.

The county has agreed to limit visits to the Modjeska house to a busload of 60 people at a time, five days a week.

That was still too much for some residents.

Brown said she would prefer limiting visits to three days a week, 30 visitors per day.

“My greatest concern is for the quality of life,” said Terry Jensen, who noted that he lives closest to the historic home. “The EIR does not address the impact this would have on the qualify of life in the canyon. . . . It doesn’t address the visual pollution that the signs to the park would bring, or the traffic or the air pollution caused by the buses.”

At one point, commission members appeared to grow impatient with some residents who wanted to set further limits on public visits to the home built in the late 1880s for the Shakespearean actress.

“Whether we like it as a park or don’t like it as a park is not our job,” Planning Commissioner A. Earl Wooden said. “We’re just here to approve the EIR and make sure it adequately addresses all the concerns.”

Don Dobmeier of the Orange County Historical Commission told the planners that the Modjeska house is of “great interest” to local historians and others.

“As a local historian, I’d like to see the property operating as a park and I’d like to see it available to as many people as possible,” he said.