Rancho Palos Verdes’ Not-So-Happy Trails : Equestrians and Homeowners Are Locking Horns Over Plan to Add On to Network of Bridle Paths

Some Rancho Palos Verdes homeowners cherish the bucolic sight of horses cantering through the city’s neighborhoods and have felt for years that the local network of equestrian trails is an essential part of the city’s rural ambience.

In recent years, however, the proliferation of luxury subdivisions has closed off some of the traditional trails and created a constituency that does not ride or even want to see horseback riders posting by their back fence.

More and more, the two groups are in conflict.

The City Council in 1990 sought to resolve the differences by drafting a Conceptual Trails Plan that would preserve the city’s equestrian heritage, in part by designating which of the city’s hundreds of trails would be recognized and protected, but also by creating a few additional bridle paths to tie together the network.

The plan has angered trail opponents.

“We’ll sue ‘em, if they don’t take us out of their . . . trail plans,” said attorney Ron Beck, president of the homeowners group in the multimillion-dollar Island View subdivision, high atop Crest Road. The city has proposed carving an equestrian trail along the edge of the subdivision to join with trails to the south.

Until the council adopted the trails plan, Rancho Palos Verdes had no trail policies. What existed was a collection of long-established horse and footpaths that crisscross the peninsula.

The differences between the groups have become fodder in this year’s City Council race. Two of the six candidates for the three at-large seats being vacated on the five-member City Council have made it a key issue in their campaigns.

“I think it’s unfair to force horse trails in ‘non-equestrian’ neighborhoods against the will of the people,” said candidate Susan Brooks, who serves on the Planning Commission. She said the current council and candidate Barbara Dye are biased in favor of multiuse trails that allow horse travel, rather than designating some for the sole use of hikers or bicyclists.

Dye, who chairs the city’s Trails Advisory Committee, defends the plan her committee has created with the council, saying it sets guidelines needed to head off haphazard development that too often has blocked existing trails without providing alternative routes.

“We’re not forcing anything, this (plan) isn’t a blueprint, it’s only a guide,” Dye said.

There are hundreds of trails now, said Planning Director Robert Bernard, some are in use, but are not included in the trails plan. The plan’s purpose is to identify these hiking, horse and bike-riding routes, he said, and recommend to the council which should become part of the trails network.

Mayor Douglas Hinchliffe, who is giving up his council seat this year, rejected Brooks’ charge that the city has favored horseback riders. He said she is “making a mountain out of a molehill” for campaign purposes.

City officials who defend the plan say horses have been a part of peninsula life for generations and remain popular there. They say it would be unfair to chop up the old network of trails that can be ridden from one end of the peninsula to the other.

“When I was a girl, we could ride anywhere we wanted on the peninsula,” said Sunshine, who goes by the one name and lives on a horsy two acres in Portuguese Bend. A member of the council’s Trails Advisory Committee, she is part of the vocal group that favors the trail preservation.

No one knows for certain how many horses there are, but the city of Rolling Hills Estates alone has more than a thousand steeds, officials estimate. There may be two or three times that many munching hay in the horsy neighborhoods of the other three cities.

Rolling Hills Estates has 20 miles of city-maintained horse trails, Palos Verdes Estates has about three miles and Rolling Hills another 30 or so. Throughout the peninsula, there are miles and miles of other, unimproved trails.

Rancho Palos Verdes has just five miles of city-maintained trails, but another 25 or so have been included in the Conceptual Trails Plan.

Occasionally one of these old, established routes has been cut off when bulldozers and cement mixers carved out another canyon or hilltop subdivision.

That was the case in the early 1980s with Chaparral Lane, a private road into a cluster of homes in Georgette Canyon. The canyon is in Rancho Palos Verdes, bordering Rolling Hills Estates.

Today residents of Chaparral Lane want the trail that connects the two cities taken off Rancho Palos Verdes’ list of designated trail routes.

But horse owners say the trail, which was paved over and became Chaparral Lane, is a vital link in the equestrian network and must be kept in place. Homeowners in the area refuse to grant horses permission to use the private lane, city officials said.

After weeks of stormy meetings and public hearings this summer, the Rancho Palos Verdes trails committee acknowledged “this private street replaced an important access trail for area residents,” but the committee found no way to resolve the issue. The trail route remains in the plan, but is effectively blocked by the road.

“It’s an insoluble problem,” candidate Dye said. She contends that, if the city had had a trails plan in place at the time the Chaparral Lane development was proposed, a solution could have been worked out beforehand.

Brooks argues that, although planning is needed, the whole trails issue is being slanted in favor of horse owners. She said the plan developed by Dye’s committee and adopted by the current council is being used to force developers of new projects to include horse trails where none is needed or wanted.

Owners of the $2-million homes overlooking the Pacific and Santa Catalina Island in the Island View tract agree with Brooks. The plat maps of this neighborhood specifically list “pedestrian trails,” not equestrian or multipurpose routes. However, the council is trying to force the inclusion of cliff-side horse trails through the area, which is included in the Conceptual Trails Plan.

Earlier this month, the City Council made some revisions to the trails plan. It also attempted without success to come to a compromise with residents of the Island View and Chaparral Lane developments.

“No one wants horse trails around here, they would completely destroy the look of our development,” said Tom Coull, a resident of Island View.

The council returned the nettlesome problem to the Trails Advisory Committee, which has scheduled another workshop to see if compromise is possible. The meeting will be on Oct. 29, just a few days before the city election.