Speculation vs. Democracy in Topanga : The Disney family wants to blitz the hilltops for a golf course and mansion pads.

On Feb. 10, the five supervisors of Los Angeles County will vote on a real-estate scheme scheduled for the summit of Topanga Canyon: 257 acres to contain up to 97 sites, selling for up to $750,000 apiece, with all future mansions, assuming any get built, appropriately gated and guarded.

The whole development --another word they’ve stolen from us--will be anchored to a golf course and club house offering membership at $55,000 a pop.

Topanga Canyon links a state park to the mountains to the west. Particularly around the proposed site, “Canyon Oaks Estates,” the landscape is still wild. Topanga Canyon creek flows naturally to the sea. The unpretentious community in the canyon, largely moderate in income, prudent in evolution, considerate of its environmental circumstance, has always heeded the values that generations of planners have said Los Angeles should pursue.

The area plan for Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains, approved by supervisors more than a decade ago after careful review by citizens and relevant agencies, laid down sensible guidelines to protect natural habitat and recreational lands--lungs for a crowded and suffocating city.

The Canyon Oaks scheme flouts all 10 goals of the area plan. It is a flatland project foisted on mountain terrain. It will require the drastic transformation of landscape. Up to 80% of this mountainous land would be recontoured and shoved flat by bulldozers.

Irretrievable alteration of landscape would be mere prelude to a shunting of Topanga Canyon from a modest corner of the greater L.A. Monopoly board to a corridor of water-intensive, environmentally devastating, community-ripping high-end speculations carving through from the San Fernando Valley to the sea.

The proposed golf course alone will require several times the daily water use of the community, up to 1.6 million gallons daily pumped up to the canyon’s highest point to irrigate the toxic sump that any golf course inevitably becomes.

These are among the costs that economists call “externalities,” meaning that the community at large will bear the environmental price.

And if the speculation fails, if the golf club--fulcrum of the project--attracts insufficient members, if the price of the sites is too high, there’ll be no going back. The bulldozers will have gouged out the hills, bladed out the oaks, destroyed the ecosystem. The “developers” will have moved on.

Canyon Oaks has already led a prolonged and checkered existence. It was floated in 1977 as the Montevideo Country Club. Fourteen years later, after 35 times at bat before county officials, the project went into Chapter 11, during which time the county supervisors voted it down 3-1 (Mike Antonovich not present). Antonovich later allowed it to creep back into the review process.

With the original promoter out of the picture, the prime partner in the enterprise until her death was Sharon Disney Lund, daughter of Walt. Disney family interests, including Lund’s heirs, now control the scheme.

They wield great clout, not least that useful solvent of impasse and obstruction, money. Supervisors Antonovich and Deane Dana have accepted ample contributions running into many thousands from the Disneys and their representatives. Supervisors Ed Edelman and Gloria Molina have declined. The crucial vote is held by Supervisor Yvonne Burke, who has seen her own campaign coffers pleasingly augmented by very substantial contributions, including $20,000 from Canyon Oaks Estates and Lund early last year.

Of course this does not mean that Burke has committed herself to Canyon Oaks. Her moving New Year pledges about the future of Los Angeles would suggest otherwise.

The scheme rejected in 1991 by Edelman, because it was utterly contrary to the area plan, is substantially unchanged. Molina’s stance, that a gated enclave hacked from hillsides flouts the desires of a vibrant local community, is as valid as ever.

This is speculation versus democracy. The area’s political representatives--state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), Assemblyman Terry B. Friedman (D-Brentwood), Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills)--are all opposed. So are the city councils of Calabasas and Malibu; the Hillside and Canyon Federation, representing 300,000 homeowners; the Topanga-Los Virgines Conservation District, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, both national and state park services, plus the Restoration Project for Santa Monica Bay.

Drive up Topanga Canyon now and one sees hillsides seared by the November fires. They will recover. The community has come through fire and quake. Drive on up to the summit. If those bulldozers roll, there will be no recovery.