Racquet Club May Become Hog Heaven : Zoning: Nearby residents’ complaints closed the tennis ranch. The owner now plans to raise pigs and attract motorcycle riders with an offer of free beer.

Joe Teresi’s neighbors think they live next to a pigsty, and he is determined to prove them right.

Teresi had originally planned to expand his Malibu Mountains Racquet Club, but Los Angeles County planning commissioners revoked the club’s operating permit in April after neighbors complained that the onetime tennis ranch had degenerated into a rowdy motorcycle hangout.

Neighbors noted that the land was zoned for light agriculture--for hogs with tails, not tailpipes. Now Teresi says he is giving them their wish.

Teresi is preparing to reopen the club July 3 with a new name: the Malibu Mountains Hog Ranch, in honor of the “attack pigs” he plans to raise there and of his members’ fondness for riding large motorcycles known as “hogs.”

Teresi, publisher of hot rod and motorcycle magazines, has appealed the Regional Planning Commission’s revocation of his conditional-use permit, thereby staying the action until a September hearing. He plans to ask for a new permit to run a recreational facility for bikers--who, he notes, also play tennis--and may continue farming at the rural Malibu property along Latigo Canyon Road.

In addition to the “attack pigs” (actually tamed, tusked boars), Teresi also intends to raise turkeys, chickens, rabbits and beefalo (a cross between buffalo and cattle). One of the tennis courts is being transformed into a chicken coop and he envisions one of the club’s swimming pools as a trout pond.

The pigpen will be dubbed “Le Corral Gee Wulliger’s,” Teresi said, in honor of one of the county planning commissioners, Richard Wulliger. At the Regional Planning Commission meeting in April, Wulliger said he became convinced that the club was no longer a tennis ranch when he learned that its restaurant was named “Le Cafe Bubba.”

“With all due respect,” Wulliger said before voting to revoke the permit, “I don’t know of any tennis players named Bubba.”

The neighbors aren’t laughing.

At the April meeting, they complained of loud engines and alleged that crime and drug use emanated from the club. Teresi denied that any criminal activities were ever traced to his club and said the noise problems had been corrected.

One neighbor, Mulholland Highway resident Carl Schroeter, said the club’s pre-existing permit should be amended from describing the land’s use as “tennis instruction in a ranch-like setting” to “hot rods and Harleys welcome.”

Now that it appears that Teresi is taking those sarcastic comments literally, neighbors are even angrier.

“It is funny, but not if you live here,” said Sandra Schroeter, Carl’s wife. “This is just retaliation.”

Of particular concern, she said, is Teresi’s offer of free beer at the opening celebration and a map used in advertising that shows the Rock Store, a nearby motorcycle hangout, as the only area landmark.

“We could end up with racing back and forth between the Rock Store and the hog ranch,” Schroeter said.

Ray Ristic, an assistant administrator in the county Regional Planning Department, said he is “doing some more research in terms of the alcoholic beverage” but otherwise has found little fault with Teresi’s plans, as long as he limits himself to activities allowed in the light-agriculture zone.

That zone permits all of the animals Teresi has advertised so far, as well as horses, cattle, sheep, goats, bees and earthworms, Ristic said.

Establishing the Malibu Mountains Hog Ranch is neither an exercise in spite, Teresi said, nor an attempt to prove to his neighbors that they should have left well-enough alone. Instead, he says, it is part of a fall-back plan to protect his investment.

“If they take away my permit to operate a club, I have to have something else going on there,” he said. “I’m a businessman, and I’m trying to make money any way I can.”

With the name change, Teresi has also signaled his intention to continue to woo motorcycle riders to the property. Even if the ranch becomes just a farm, he said, he will advertise his farm products in his magazines, Easy Riders and American Rodders.