Manager Gains Ally in Fight to Live at Equestrian Center

To end a months-long squabble, the top park official of the city of Los Angeles will soon urge that the operator of the Hansen Dam Equestrian Center and his daughter be allowed to continue living in two mobile homes on dam property he sublets from the city.

Jackie Tatum, city Recreation and Parks Department general manager, will ask the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to allow Eddie J. Milligan to live at the equestrian center, said Ann Kerman, who administers the department’s concessions in the San Fernando Valley, in an interview Tuesday.

The city leases the facility from the Army Corps, which owns the Hansen Dam flood-control basin.

Milligan has run the center, which he has developed with 11 riding arenas and 250 horse stalls, for the city’s parks department since 1989.

In January, the parks department ordered Milligan to remove his two double-wide mobile homes from the property on the grounds that they violated an Army Corps policy forbidding “human habitation” in a flood basin.

When Milligan refused to comply, the parks department canceled his concession permit. The city position was that it was simply doing the bidding of its landlord--the Army Corps--Kerman said. In fact, city officials have effusively praised Milligan for upgrading the once run-down equestrian center.

Kerman said the city now wants the Army Corps’ local chief, Col. Charles Thomas, to grant an exception allowing Milligan’s trailers to remain.

Milligan predicted that the city’s support will prove decisive and end a controversy that has disrupted his operations for months, which he says has cost him contracts with horse shows.

“I couldn’t make commitments because I didn’t know if I’d be here or not,” he said.

Meanwhile, Milligan filed a defamation lawsuit on Friday against the Valley Horse Owners Assn., claiming that the group sent a libelous letter to the city about his operations that prolonged the dispute over the trailers.

The lawsuit seeks $175,000 for lost business and $100,000 for damage to his reputation.

The lawsuit cites as libelous an April 29 unsigned document, sent to Tatum of the city parks department by the association’s secretary, Sheila Mears, with a cover letter.

The document, titled “An Open Letter From Equestrians in the Hansen Dam Area,” said Milligan “acts like a little Caesar” who operates the equestrian center for the “monied few” and that he had “taken away a reasonably priced boarding facility where local youth may keep their horses and replaced it with a beautiful, but unaffordable, equestrian center at which the community is not welcome.”

Milligan said because he was in negotiations over termination of his concession permit with the city, the letter from the equestrian group was “like gasoline dumped on an open fire.”

Mears, secretary to the nonprofit group of 250 horse owners, declined to comment on the lawsuit. “We don’t know much about it, and we’re responding through our lawyer,” she said.

In her April 29 letter to Tatum, transmitting the unsigned three-page document critical of Milligan’s operation, Mears stated that the document had not been seen by her association’s board but that “it reflects the gist of the many other complaints I have received.”

Mears said she knows the authors of the document but declined to name them.