Bank Takes Over Simi Golf Course : Foreclosure: Wells Fargo hires a team to evaluate the Wood Ranch club. The decision ends the immediate danger of a shutdown.

Wells Fargo Bank on Tuesday took over an exclusive Simi Valley golf club, eliminating the immediate threat of the club’s demise more than a year after its developer defaulted on a $15.2-million loan.

Simi Valley Mayor Greg Stratton called the foreclosure on the 8-year-old Wood Ranch Golf Club a welcome resolution to one of a series of financial failures by Wood Ranch developer Olympia/Roberts.

“It would have been better if the company didn’t go bankrupt in the first place,” Stratton said. “But I think they did work out a very equitable settlement.”

Starting today, a management team hired by Wells Fargo will begin conducting an evaluation of the club and its 74 employees, said John Nicholson, an attorney for Wells Fargo.

Nicholson said he was not aware of any other golf clubs owned by the bank. “We realize this kind of asset is unique,” Nicholson said. “We’ve hired people who specialize in this area to get a handle on the club’s operations.”

Crown Golf Management President Scott Flynn said that under terms of the foreclosure, he will fire and then probably immediately rehire most of the club’s employees.

“While we’re in the process of evaluating, we’d like to keep things running as smoothly as possible,” Flynn said. His Chicago-based company manages the golf club at the Ojai Valley Inn and other private golf clubs in California, Colorado, Chicago and Florida.

The club’s director of operations, Angus MacKenzie, said he has been meeting with Crown officials for a month, devising a plan to keep the private 18-hole, 200-acre golf course operating without a glitch.

“The members will not notice any change,” MacKenzie said. “A member that plays until dark tonight can come in tomorrow at dawn’s early light and take it up again.”

MacKenzie said Crown may be stepping up marketing efforts to try to bring new applicants to the 500-member club. In the past six months, no one has applied for membership, which ranges from $10,000 to $25,000.

The drop in membership applications “probably has something to do with all the publicity” about the financial problems, MacKenzie said. “No one was quite sure what was going to happen.”

The developer initially ran into trouble after its parent company, Olympia & York Developments Ltd., the world’s largest real estate company, filed for court protection under Canadian bankruptcy laws in May, 1992.

Olympia/Roberts then began seeking agreements with Wells Fargo, the city of Simi Valley and the school district to resolve its debts.

Foreclosure on the golf course was postponed repeatedly until agreements could be reached with the city and school district, Nicholson said.

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In November, the Simi Valley City Council granted Olympia/Roberts up to five years to repay a $250,000 debt. The agreement also allows Olympia/Roberts in the next 14 years to build an additional 1,500 homes already approved by the city.

In exchange, the developer gave the city a 65-acre portion of the Wood Ranch property and agreed to pay the city $6,000 each for most of the units it builds.

Olympia/Roberts also gave the Simi Valley Unified School District 1,800 acres of undeveloped residential land in lieu of a $6.5-million elementary school that the developer had promised to build at Wood Ranch.

The development, located on 3,000 acres southeast of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, now consists of about 2,000 houses and condominiums, a partly completed community park, a small shopping center and a fire station.