Alliance Holds Creekside Rally in Building Battle : Preservation: Hundreds march as part of a drive to keep Santiago Creek open space. Group members will meet with developers to find a compromise on the former golf course.

Even though the rocks, litter and high weeds required a careful eye to navigate, the 250 people strolling Saturday morning along Santiago Creek devoted most of their vision to the barren area’s future.

The Santiago Creek Greenway Alliance organized the tour and rally to continue its year-old campaign to preserve the creek as an open space against encroaching residential development.

After a few speeches, group members with “Save the Creek” signs, T-shirts and buttons spent 30 minutes winding their way through the area that used to be the Santiago Golf Course.

“That’s where I used to play when I was a kid, catching polliwogs and crawdads,” said alliance President Howard DeCruyenaere, pointing to the dried-out creek bed while giving a bullhorn-powered tour of the area just north of the Garden Grove Freeway where it meets Tustin Street.

He said the land had been damaged by floods and herbicides and would fare even worse if developers had their way.

Construction “is truly not what the creek needs, what the wildlife needs or what the community needs,” he said. “This is truly the last untouched parcel of land in the area.”

The alliance and other community groups have already fought off at least three separate attempts by developers to build on and around the creek, including a large project bid made by a Burnett-Ehline/William Lyon Co. partnership that was unanimously voted down by the Orange City Council.

Now the conservation groups are in the midst of another confrontation with Lyon Co., which, like the city and county, owns part of the 37-acre parcel.

Alliance members expect to meet with the developer in the next 90 days to seek a compromise over the fate of the former golf course, which straddles the creek between Cambridge and Tustin streets. This time the William Lyon Co. has proposed channeling the creek and building 110 houses on the land--plans voluntarily put on hold because of the pending negotiations.

“I’m still a little skeptical, but we’ll listen to what they have to say and we’ll go from there,” DeCruyenaere said. “They want to talk, and we do too. We feel very strongly, though, that something can be worked out between the two sides.”

No spokesman for the William Lyon Co. could be reached Saturday.

Santiago Creek Homeowners Assn. President Ralph Masek, a proponent of protecting the creek from development, said one compromise would allow partial residential development on the land, along with a “greenway,” a strip of open space. Another would have the city and county, which also own portions of the property, create a new golf course, Masek said. A third, less likely, option would be for the group or city to buy the property outright to ensure its protection.

Masek said sitting down with developers and landowners has been a more productive approach than picketing them.

“Before, we were always fighting developers, but now the developers realize that this is a very concerned, determined community group, and that the best way to get things done is to work with us instead of counter to us,” said Masek, who first took up the creek’s cause 10 years ago.