Road Warriors : Courts: Homeowner files suit to prohibit the Boy Scouts from using a camp access road that crosses his property. The Scouts respond with a lawsuit of their own.

The way Winston Salser sees it, he is fighting the good fight. Never mind that his adversary is the Boy Scouts.

Salser contends that the Scout administrators who run and use Camp Josepho in the hills near his Pacific Palisades residence are desecrating Scouting principles in their dealings with him and his neighbors. Un trustworthy, dis loyal, un helpful, un friendly, dis courteous . . . you name it.

Not only do the Scouts run roughshod over homeowners, Salser says, they are also hostile to hikers and bikers and they flout road protocol, speeding in their vehicles and improperly maintaining the access road to the camp, which runs through Salser’s neighborhood.

For more than a year, Salser and the Scouts have been embroiled in a legal fight over Casale Road, specifically over a 900-foot section of it that crosses land owned by Salser. The road provides the only motor-vehicle access to the 50-year-old Boy Scout camp, which is in upper Rustic Canyon surrounded by Topanga State Park.

“This is a worthwhile fight,” Salser said. “I am never going to give up. . . . I worked on this park and I want to live near it, but I had no idea (the Scouts) were the Mafia.”

Salser, a UCLA professor and cancer researcher, contends that the Scouts have no legal easement giving them the right to use the road. In October, he filed a lawsuit against the Scouts, the city, the state, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and numerous others requesting exclusive rights to his property and the road. The Scouts countersued, asking for a declaration of legal right to use the road.

So far, the Scouts say, they have spent $74,000 on the case, even though their lawyer, Keith B. Bardellini, is working without fee. Salser declined to say how much he has spent on the matter.

Police and other city officials are exasperated at being continually summoned to referee the dispute.

“Half the officers in West L.A. have been out there a time or two,” said Sgt. Doug Abney of the LAPD. “We lack the authority to do anything about an easement. . . . We just try to keep any punches in the nose from happening.”

Despite such peacekeeping efforts, Salser allegedly struck a Scoutmaster in the face late last month in yet another confrontation over the road. A few months ago, Scout officials made a citizen’s arrest of Salser when he came up to the camp.

In May, the police tried to arrange an unusual mediation session. They invited Salser to the West Los Angeles station along with representatives from the city Building and Safety Department, the city attorney’s office and Councilman Marvin Braude’s office. Also attending were Salser’s attorney and several of the officers who had been repeatedly called to Casale Road.

Scout representatives were excluded because police believed that the meeting would get too confrontational. But it didn’t work. Two days after the meeting, both parties were back in court.

Casale Road offers the only available public access to the camp. It connects with a ridge-top fire road above Sullivan Canyon that extends to Mulholland Drive but which is closed to motor vehicles. A recent editorial cartoon in a weekly Pacific Palisades paper depicted the limited alternatives: It showed some Scouts parachuting into the camp and others being hurled in with a giant slingshot.

The Boy Scouts obtained the land in 1941 as a gift from Scouting enthusiasts Anatol and Hanna Josepho. Bardellini, the Scouts’ attorney, said the Josephos acquired the Casale Road easement from a prior owner. The document conveying the land to the Scouts has an attached easement grant, but that easement grant does not name the Boy Scouts.

In what was apparently an effort to clear up the confusion, the Josephos’ sons, Marco and Roy, signed a quitclaim deed transferring the easement to the Scouts in 1991. Bardellini said the transfer may not have even been necessary because the Scouts could have established a “prescriptive easement” by using the road for so many years.

The suit and countersuit are scheduled for trial next year in Santa Monica Superior Court. After the latest roadside fight in late June, the Scouts obtained a temporary restraining order prohibiting Salser from getting closer than 25 feet to Boy Scouts and Scout-affiliated people. A hearing is scheduled July 16 on a request for a permanent restraining order against Salser that would last until the lawsuits are concluded.

A turning point in the dispute occurred in February, when heavy rains eroded a portion of Casale Road. Salser contends the erosion was aggravated by illegal grading done by the Boy Scouts. Gene Richey, executive director of West Los Angeles County Council of the Boy Scouts, conceded that the Scouts graded the road without a permit during the fall to satisfy requests made by the Los Angeles Fire Department for wider roads to allow passage for heavy fire vehicles to Camp Josepho.

But there is some question as to whether the illegal grading caused the erosion. Richard Staeffler, a regional engineer for California state parks, examined the area and found that none of the illegal grading above Salser’s property was affecting any of the erosion in the disputed section in the road. Staeffler wrote in his report that the erosion problem was caused by a plugged drainage structure near Salser’s property.

Also at issue and the scene of several yelling matches and confrontations is a sign. When the erosion occurred, Salser called the Los Angeles Building and Safety Department to the damaged area. A grading inspector posted a sign that prohibited vehicular use of the road because it was unsafe. That closure forced the Boy Scouts to cancel a dedication ceremony of an Olympic swimming pool the Scouts recently had installed.

But the closure did not stop the Scouts, who pressed on. In order to continue to use the road, Richey said the Scouts promised in a written agreement with Salser to make the washed-out area safer for bikers and hikers. In return, Richey said, Salser was supposed to remove the sign prohibiting use of the road.

Richey says that the Scouts kept their agreement with Salser by erecting a chain-link fence around the eroded area to block off the area from hikers and bikers and indemnified Salser with a $1-million insurance policy that would protect him from liability in the event a Scout was injured on his property. In addition, when Scout vehicles pass over the eroded area, Richey said all passengers get out of the cars and walk over the area rather than risk injury.

After the Scouts took these precautions, Salser still refused to take down the sign prohibiting use of the road, Richey said, so Scout officials removed it themselves.

But the Scouts are committing a misdemeanor every time they remove the sign, said Terry Burgin, the grading inspector for the city of Los Angeles who signed the road’s stop-use notice. As far as Burgin is concerned, the road is unsafe and should not have vehicles driven over it.

However, whenever the sign was removed, Salser simply put up his own replica. And until the road is repaired, the sign will not be officially removed.

Susan Ross, state park superintendent for the Topanga Sector of the Santa Monica Mountains, probably spoke for many officials in many government agencies when she said: “We would just like this whole thing resolved. Why fight?”

Disputed Road to Scout Camp

Casale Road resident Winston Salser and the Boy Scouts are mired in a yearlong dispute over access to the Scouts’ Camp Josepho in the Santa Monica Mountains. The access road to the camp crosses Salser’s property for 900 feet, and the Scouts contend they have an easement entitling them to use the road. Salser claims that no such easement exists.

Disputed Road to Scout Camp