Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : Homeowners Designated Owners of Trails : Valencia: Nearly 10,000 households may have to pay fees to help maintain walkways and bridges.

The city and Newhall Land and Farming Co. have agreed after months of discussion that Valencia homeowners own the elaborate walkways and bridges running through their neighborhoods.

Which means that now they may have to pay to maintain them.

Homeowners would pay an additional $7 to $10 per year to maintain the 12 miles of trails, known as “paseos,” under a preliminary compromise between Santa Clarita and Newhall Land, said Lynn Harris, deputy city manager and community development director.

The fee would generate $70,000 to $100,000 annually from Valencia’s nearly 10,000 households to maintain the trails. The city of Santa Clarita has agreed to pay $15,000 into the fund each year as well because other city residents also use the trails.

If approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, the county would administer the fee through a landscaping district established in July, 1979, that encompasses the community. Residents now pay $47 per year for general landscaping, planting, weeding and tree-trimming work, said Dale Hall, special districts manager for the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department.

Santa Clarita officials will present the proposal to members of Valencia’s 26 homeowners’ associations Monday for their reactions.

Los Angeles County has final authority on whether to assess the fee because the county administers the landscaping district, said Assistant City Manager Ken Pulskamp.

“We want to work out something that works for everybody,” said Pulskamp. “We don’t want to jam anything down people’s throats.”

The Santa Clarita City Council is expected to review the fee proposal in November. Recommendations will then be passed on for consideration by the County Board of Supervisors in July.

“I think (people) will be OK with it,” said Pulskamp. “I think everybody realizes it is an amenity the community wants to keep.”

Any new fees would be collected in November, 1994, and go toward lighting, graffiti removal and curb installation along the trails. It is not uncommon for simple paths to be included in landscape districts, but the Valencia trails are different because they are more advanced than most.

“There’s no district that has anything as elaborate as we have here in Valencia,” Hall said.

Newhall Land has been building the walkways since 1967 as part of its master-planned Valencia community. Called paseos in Spanish, they extend south to Lyons Avenue and north to Valencia Boulevard and include about 20 elevated walkways and sunken street crossings.

The question of who must maintain the system has left two pedestrian bridges assembled but not installed for months.

“We feel like we’ve come a long way toward a formal resolution of this,” Harris said of the suggested compromise.

Newhall Land officials have maintained that the trails should be treated the same as other amenities first built by a developer but then made the responsibility of those who benefit from them. “We build paseo systems the same way we build sidewalks,” said Marlee Lauffer, spokeswoman for Newhall Land.

The city and county previously contended that because the developer built them, the developer should maintain them.