Error Shrinks Size of Scouts’ Ex-Drug Ranch

When the Orange County Girl Scouts bought a onetime drug-smuggling ranch from the county last year for $2.38 million, the group thought it was getting 213 acres of rugged terrain for a year-round camp.

Not quite.

The Girl Scouts’ surveyors recently discovered that the county had overadvertised the Rancho del Rio property by 25 acres. Embarrassed county officials plan to refund more than $278,000 to the group.

County Scout leaders say they believe that the acreage exaggeration was an honest mistake, and they aren’t raising much of a fuss over it--other than requesting part of their money back.

But Roger R. Stanton, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, is furious. “I was very upset, and I had (county staff members) in the office to review it,” he said. “This is an error of great magnitude.”

The error apparently dates back nearly eight decades to 1914, when surveyors for the U.S. government measured the land at a little more than 213 acres, county officials say. The dimensions of the ranch at both its top and bottom appear to have been off by about 85 feet, inflating the size by 25 acres.

Whatever the reasons for the error, it persisted through years of different private and public owners.

In 1985, federal drug enforcement agents seized the land from owner Daniel James Fowlie, who ran it as a remote base for his international drug-smuggling operation, prosecutors said.

The county assumed control of the property from the federal government in 1987 and, after rejecting Sheriff Brad Gates’ idea of using it as a regional drug-enforcement training center, decided to auction the property.

The county expected to get perhaps $1.5 million for the property, which contains a ranch house, guest quarters, stables and varied other structures.

But after a fierce bidding war with an Irvine realty firm, the Girl Scout Council of Orange County won out in June, 1991, with a bid of $2.38 million.

At the time of the purchase, the land had no running water, electricity, sewer hookups or permits for its buildings. But the Scouts want to turn the rugged southeast county parcel into a year-round camp for the county’s nearly 23,000 Girl Scouts.

In the bid package sent out to prospective buyers, the property was described several times as 213 acres.

Then the Scouts sent out surveyors in their preparation to upgrade the property. To their surprise, the surveyors found just 188 acres. Scout leaders notified the county last month and asked for the money back on the missing 25 acres.

“We based our bid on the assumption we had a certain amount of acreage,” said Mona Ware, executive director of the Girl Scout Council of Orange County. “It’s still usable, but it affects us to some extent. . . . We just have less room. Maybe we can’t accommodate as many girls as we anticipated.”

County attorneys said they expect to bring the $278,000 refund to the Board of Supervisors on Feb. 25. That money will come out of a trust fund set up from the sale of the Fowlie ranch and used for county law enforcement.

Ware said she is not angry over the mistake. “I don’t have any reason to think it was intentional,” she said.

Bert Scott, director of the General Services Agency, which oversees county real estate, said: “As soon as we knew about the mistake, we checked with our surveyors, they checked it out, and they said (the 188-acre figure) was correct. . . . That’s the first I knew about it.”

The fault lies with the original surveyors back in 1914, Scott said, “and I don’t think any of us were around here at that time.”

But Supervisor Stanton said the error still should have been caught. He said that with more modern surveying equipment available, there is no reason why the county staff should not have had the land surveyed themselves.

He said he has directed staff members to make sure that surveys on county property are kept up to date to ensure that such a mistake does not happen again.

But it might not be that easy, suggested Assistant County Counsel Arthur C. Wahlstedt Jr., who has worked on the Rancho del Rio deal from its inception.

“You still get bad (surveying) data even now,” he said. “I don’t know how much trouble you want to go to to protect yourself from the recurrence of something with chances so small. . . . This is a one in a million.”