Horse Owners Urge City to Reconsider Granting Franchise for Center : Hansen Dam: Equestrians say the facility’s operator is abusive to the public and killed a children’s program.

Los Angeles city officials should reconsider granting a 30-year franchise to the operator of the Hansen Dam Equestrian Center because he abuses the public--including killing a children’s horsemanship program--to score tactical points in his negotiations with the city, critics said Monday.

Members of the Valley Horseowners Assn. assembled at City Hall for a scheduled hearing by the city’s Recreation and Parks Commission on concessionaire Eddie Milligan’s stewardship of the city-owned center.

The hearing was postponed to July 21 in Lake View Terrace. But the horse owners poured out complaints about Milligan anyway, adding more fuel to their dispute with Milligan, who is now suing the group for libel.

Association board member Gini Barrett said Milligan discontinued the nonprofit Sunset Equestrian Team program for children on July 1--”leaving the children heart-broken”--as a maneuver to pressure city officials with whom he is involved in lease talks.

“He has a practice of intimidating the boarders and horse-riding community to help him in his negotiations with the city,” Barrett said in an interview.

Milligan said Monday that the Sunset program has “no dispute with me.” Their problem is with the government agencies that have been preventing him from entering into a 30-year agreement with the city, he said.

Since January, Milligan has been feuding with the city parks department and its landlord, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, over his desire to continue living in trailer homes at the center. Additionally, he has been pressing the city for months to complete its award of a 30-year franchise agreement to him.

Milligan has run the Hansen Dam facility on a month-to-month lease for two years as he awaits a final City Hall decision on the 30-year deal.

Milligan discontinued the Sunset Equestrian program “without any warning,” Barrett said. As a result, parents and children arrived at the equestrian center for a normal riding session on July 1 only to find that the horses had been sold that day and the program effectively gutted.

“Children were crying, parents were hysterical,” said Barrett, who is the wife of Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar).

Barrett and Valley Horseowners Assn. officer Sheila Mears said the incident with the Sunset group is only the latest example of Milligan breaking his pledge to operate a facility that serves the local horse-riding public in the northeast Valley.

“His behavior has been divergent from what was promised,” Barrett said. “We were told the local community would be welcome at the facility, that it would be competitively priced, that the community could launch rides from there.” But none of this has happened, Barrett said.

Barrett said her group believes Milligan should get a 30-year franchise only “if the community needs are met and there’s some kind of behavior modification” by Milligan.

“If every time he wants some new concession from the city during the life of his 30-year franchise, he is going to be abusive to the boarders and the community--I’m concerned about that,” Barrett said.

Meanwhile, Stacia Crane, who runs the Sunset program, said her group does “feel like a pawn in a divorce,” but she refused to blame Milligan exclusively. The Sunset program provides riding instruction five days a week to about 50 children, most from the Valley, Crane said.

“We were shocked,” Crane said. “But we have to understand he is under pressure.”

Milligan sold the Sunset program horses--which he owned--as he was fuming July 1 about the city’s inability to get the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to allow his trailer homes to remain at the center.

Milligan has insisted on his right to live on the site.

But the corps has ordered the city--which leases the Hansen Dam facility from the Corps--to remove the trailers, which violate the Army’s safety rules against human habitations in a flood basin.

Late last month, the city urged the corps to grant an exception to Milligan, but no reply has been received.