Golf Might Turn Trash Into Cash : Development: Investors hope to turn a buried dump into a golf course that would be the centerpiece for a 455-unit residential complex.
Situated on a flat hilltop with panoramic ocean and Saddleback Valley views, the seemingly untouched stretch of grassland should be a developer’s dream.
Schools and shopping centers thrive nearby and Interstate 5 cuts through the valley below, lending easy freeway access up and down the coast. But there’s one hitch: It’s a trash dump.
Now, however, a group of Santa Ana-based investors are trying to turn trash into prime real estate. San Juan Creek Associates next week hopes to win approval for a plan based on transforming the dump site into a golf course to serve as the centerpiece for a gated country club community.
The San Juan Capistrano City Council is scheduled to vote Aug. 18 on whether to allow the investment group to build a 455-unit residential project on 100 acres surrounding the 40-acre dump site. If the golf course transformation is realized, the investors hope to tap simultaneously into the coastal- and golf-course oriented real estate markets with a mix of single-family homes, townhomes and senior housing.
With the population booming and dump sites quickly reaching their capacity, the formula followed by San Juan Creek Associates is being used all over the country. Its premise is based on the fact that golf courses are desirable because they not only provide a revenue source themselves but also cause the value of the adjoining real estate to skyrocket.
County officials, who advocate finding some sort of public use for abandoned landfills, say similar negotiations are now underway that could make a golf course out of the Irvine Co.’s 300-acre Coyote Canyon landfill in Newport Beach, which was closed only last year.
While the plan has proved profitable all over the country, it works best in areas such as Southern California, where land is scarce and there are not enough golf courses to meet the demand, said Mike Heacock, a vice president of Santa Monica-based American Golf Corp., which operates about 135 golf courses in 23 states nationwide.
“There is a crying need for golf courses in Southern California,” Heacock said. As opposed to south Florida or Ohio, the two places in the country with the highest per capita golf course rates, the cost of real estate in Southern California has made it difficult to develop public golf courses, Heacock said.
American Golf Corp. has made extensive use of landfills in its golf course operations at such places as MountainGate Country Club in West Los Angeles, Brookside Country Club in Pasadena and at Rancho San Joaquin Golf Course in Irvine, as well as other courses in places as far away as Texas and North Carolina. The popular, 36-hole Industry Hills Golf Club in the City of Industry is one of many Southern California courses located on former landfills.
Before the transformation, property around the MountainGate site could be had for a song, Heacock said. “Today, homes around the golf course sell for $5 million,” he said.
While the concept of a landfill often conjures up frightening images of dangerous toxic waste problems, in reality it is just the opposite, said Jack Miller, the program manager of the county’s solid waste program, which is the watchdog of about 100 closed landfills in Orange County. The horror stories of the McColl Dump site in Fullerton and the Love Canal in Upstate New York are the exceptions to the rule, Miller said.
“If you know it is a landfill to begin with and have documented its contents, that minimizes your problems right away,” said Miller, who is in the process of analyzing all the county’s closed landfills. “By and large, most of the sites were small municipal landfills run by the city or private ones. It’s doubtful we will run into anything real serious like McColl.”
Golf course companies have found that buying a landfill often turns out to be a better bet than raw land in areas surrounded by older development, Heacock said.
“It’s a helluva lot safer buying a known landfill than finding an old, illegal fill on your property,” Heacock said. “Also, most of fills done in the last half of the century are relatively well designed and controlled and there are systems built in that allow us to monitor what’s going on underground.”
The modern, more stringent monitoring laws only help, Heacock said.
“The landfills and monitoring methods they are building today are great,” Heacock said. “Nothing gets by these things.”
Actually, current requirements for covering landfills make a golf course nearly a perfect fit. While state law forbids building on landfill sites because of the potential for sinking ground, a layer of some type of vegetation--such as golf course grass--appears to be a good method of stabilizing the sites while at the same time providing a return on the investment, said Frank R. Bowerman, former director of the county’s Integrated Waste Management Department.
“It makes more sense for the land to go to some active use,” said Frank R. Bowerman, former director of the county’s Integrated Waste Management Department. “And a golf course has an additional factor over something like a park. It generates income.”
Of course, the transformation projects are not without their problems. First off, they are expensive. Officials peg the cost of closing the small Forster Canyon landfill at $5 million and Coyote Canyon at about $30 million. But most of the time that’s an expense borne by the county or the agency that ran the landfill.
Another major drawback is growing turf, or grass, over the clay caps put on the landfills. It can be done, but it is tricky and requires the expertise of turf experts and constant maintenance, Heacock said. Adding other landscape features such as trees or bushes requires first grading a much larger layer of soil in those areas.
But the largest problem is undoubtedly the natural settlement that goes on for decades in landfills, Heacock said. How much settlement is a function of the depth of the fill and how long ago it was shut down, officials say.
At MountainGate in West Los Angeles, for example, the dump site covered 250 acres and was more than 300 feet deep, causing parts of the course to sink as much as 40 feet. The slumping earth has necessitated that “all the greens on the course are rebuilt routinely every three years. We’ve had to totally redesign the golf course because of it,” Heacock said.
Officials expect similar problems at Coyote Canyon, which covers about 300 acres and will be the largest landfill ever closed by the county to date, Atkinson said. Settlement of as much as 50 feet is expected there, officials say.
The good news for golf course architects is that most of the settling occurs early in the closure process, Atkinson said.
Rancho San Joaquin, on the other hand, was a much smaller, shallower landfill that goes down only about 35 feet and was an active dump site for seven years, from 1954-61.
“You still have settlement, it’s just not as bad,” Heacock said.
A similar situation can be found at the former Forster Canyon Landfill in San Juan Capistrano, which was operated by the county from 1958 until March, 1976. Since it has been closed for 16 years, San Juan Creek Associates is counting on much of the settlement to have already occurred, said Ray Poulter, one of the company owners.
But settlement problems or no, the bottom line is that San Juan Creek Associates is glad the landfill is there, Poulter said. He looks at the old dump site as an opportunity rather than an impediment.
“If it wasn’t a landfill, it probably would have been sold a long time ago, before we got there,” Poulter said.
Sealing a Landfill For landfills to be closed off, they must be covered using a state-prescribed layering procedure. How a landfill is sealed and the land coverted to other uses, such as a golf course: Monitors: Placed around the outlying parts of the landfill. These detect leakage of gases that might escape from landfill into surrounding compacted dirt. Gas extraction wells: Gases from decomposing trash are captured and channeled to a holding tank or collector. Close-Up of Final Cover 1. Vegetation: 30-inch layer protects layers below from erosion; grass and golf-course turf make exceptional protective layers. 2. Fabric: Thin, woven fabric provides moisture control, protects next layer from becoming too moist or dry. 3. Clay: 18-inches of clay-like material compacts the trash below, prevents moisture from penetrating it. 4. Soil: Two feet of soil covers the trash. 5. Trash: Garbage is bulldozed into crown-shaped pile to facilitate drainage. Source: Orange County Intergrated Waste Management Department Researched by LEN HALL and APRIL JACKSON / Los Angeles Times
