Cockburn Right on Canyon Oaks Fiasco

* Thanks to Alexander Cockburn for his commentary (Feb. 3) on Topanga’s long battle against the powers of greed and insensitivity. After years of preliminary hearings and endless delays, the developer’s project was denied in 1991. Within two weeks the denial was reversed.

The Topanga Canyon Town Council and we at the Topanga Assn. for a Scenic Community initiated a meeting with the new owners to help create a plan that would be far less destructive. The golf course resulting from the grading of more than 3.5 million cubic yards of mountaintops and the headwaters of Topanga Creek is the most environmentally egregious aspect of the plan.

No environmentally superior alternative was ever put forth. Then, in 1992, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy offered $10 million to buy the land. Fair market value, alas, was not enough for the developer, who hopes to realize greater profits by developing or selling the project after it is approved.

Instead, the developer launched an expensive public relations campaign to:

1. Discredit the community.

2. Offer handouts (called community benefits) intended to compensate for bulldozing 80% of the mountainous landscape.

3. Woo state decision-makers (through aggressive lobbying) to reject the notion that the land should be declared a worthy candidate for parkland acquisition. Essentially, the only “emendation” by the developer of the plan rejected by the County Board of Supervisors in 1991 is a change in the name from Montevideo Country Club to Canyon Oaks Estates.

The area plan for the Santa Monica Mountains, approved by the Board of Supervisors in 1981, was created to give all of us in the Los Angeles metropolitan area a better environment now and in the future. The Canyon Oaks scheme is destructive and uncaring. It violates the standards of decency that this community, and all of Los Angeles, is desperately seeking to retain and reinforce.

SUSAN PETRULAS NISSMAN

Topanga Canyon

* Many thanks to Alexander Cockburn for an accurate summation of the many years spent fighting the Montevideo/Canyon Oaks project.

As a Topanga real estate broker, I have testified and will testify again that there is no market for this kind of project in Topanga. I am sure that Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke has reviewed the latest “market projection” from Canyon Oaks and recognizes it as the kind of market projection that has built Euro Disney.

MARTY CORBETT BRASTOW

Topanga