Flower May Sink Golf Project : Recreation: Putting a championship course in Big Tujunga Wash would harm the endangered slender-horned spineflower, wildlife service rules. The decision may kill the $50-million development.

Federal wildlife officials have ruled that a proposal to build a championship golf course in Big Tujunga Wash, one of the most environmentally sensitive areas in Los Angeles, would jeopardize endangered wildflowers found there.

The long-awaited decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deals a blow to plans of Cosmo World Inc. to build an 18-hole course in Big Tujunga Wash, situated in the extreme northern part of the city of Los Angeles. The area is marked by rugged terrain and, during rainy periods, fierce flooding.

The ruling increases the likelihood that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over the wash, will not issue the permit needed for the $50-million project as it is currently planned, officials said.

“There’s nothing that says they can’t override our biological opinion, but they rarely do,” said John Hanlson, a wildlife service biologist who has worked on the Cosmo World golf course project for several years.

The developer is now studying the decision and deciding what to do next, said Mark Armbruster, an attorney for Cosmo World. A Cosmo executive did not return phone calls Thursday. Officials with the Corps of Engineers also did not return phone calls about the status of the project.

“I think it makes it very clear that there won’t be a development here,” said state Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), whose district includes the wash. “A lot of us in the Valley consider the wash to be a significant open space. It’s the last free-flowing river in the area.

“Now, with the developer’s eyes opened by this decision, I want to sit down with him and with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and see if we can’t put the wash in the hands of the park system.”

Cosmo World, owned by Japanese business magnate Minoru Isutani, has owned numerous golf properties in Japan. But the company’s luck with golf ventures in California has been bad, starting with its $841-million purchase of the Pebble Beach resort near Monterey in 1990. After two years, Cosmo sold the Pebble Beach property at a reported loss of $341 million.

At Big Tujunga Wash, Cosmo planned to build a championship golf course that developers said would be so stunning and challenging that it would lure the L.A. Open from its longstanding venue at the Riviera Country Club in Pacific Palisades. The company developed a cadre of supporters in the Sunland-Tujunga area who claimed that the golf course would give their communities a much-needed economic boost.

But biologists for the wildlife service concluded that construction of the course “is likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the slender-horned spineflower.”

A federal endangered species, the tiny spineflower grows in alluvial scrub habitat, which is itself a rapidly disappearing ecosystem. The Big Tujunga Wash area is also identified in the city’s General Plan as one of half a dozen “ecologically important” areas. Another is the Ballona Wetlands in Marina del Rey.

To protect the golf course from being devastated by flooding, Cosmo proposed channeling and deepening Big Tujunga Wash. But this system of waterworks--in conjunction with the existing Oro Vista levee--would interrupt the periodic flooding of the acreage where the spineflower grows. Such flooding is critical, the biologists have contended, to the spineflower’s existence.

To answer the agency’s concerns, the developer had proposed setting aside 78 acres within the golf course as a spineflower preserve. But this proposal, the biologists said, would be inadequate to sustain the population and would be “bisected by golf course features and a (golf) cart path.”

Additionally, Cosmo offered to try growing spineflower plants on a 100-acre site downstream from the golf course. But wildlife agency biologists asserted that there is no assurance that the spineflower would survive replanting.

Instead, the only way to build a golf course on the Cosmo site and save the spineflower would be to establish a 203-acre spineflower preserve next to the wash that would be “adequately buffered from direct or indirect effects of golf activities” and deeded to “a responsible public or private resource management entity,” according to the agency opinion.