Land Deal Puts Competing Federal Issues at Stake : San Bernardino: Agency says it needs to get best price. Others claim RTC should consider environmental matters.

At first glance, the proposal to put 620 expensive homes and an 18-hole golf course on a large parcel of foothill land looks like a loser.

The 762 acres on the edge of the San Bernardino National Forest are in a flood plain and brush-fire zone at the confluence of three reverse-thrust faults similar to the one that caused January’s Northridge earthquake.

The property, known as Oak Summit, includes one of the state’s last stands of a unique and threatened wild plant community and may support at least two endangered animal species. Local Native American groups regard it as sacred land.

“It would be a great loss to Southern California if this parcel were bulldozed,” said one government environmentalist familiar with the place.

But bulldozed it may be, if the property’s owner has its way. The owner, as it happens, is the federal government, whose Resolution Trust Corp. acquired control of Oak Summit with the 1991 failure of a Louisiana savings and loan.

Despite the parcel’s ecological significance, the RTC is pressing ahead with efforts to win San Bernardino County government approval to build the golf course and homes. Already, those efforts have cost federal taxpayers more than $250,000 in planning fees paid by the RTC’s designated managers of the property.

The idea is to increase the money that the RTC will receive from bidders at a public auction of the land Sept. 13. If the RTC wins the planning approval that it seeks, Oak Summit’s value probably would soar well beyond the $7 million at which it is now assessed.

In theory, that would be a boon for federal taxpayers. But at the same time it could price the property well out of the range of several public agencies interested in buying the land for use as a permanent ecological preserve.

The conflict over Oak Summit is more than a garden variety controversy over whether to build on ecologically sensitive land. The involvement of the RTC--established in 1989 to sell the assets of failed savings and loans, thereby defraying the costs of the feder& L bailout--raises important questions about how such land is managed.

RTC officials argue that the agency’s legislative mandate is to enhance the price of its properties in whatever way possible. They say federal law allows them to make virtually no provision for countervailing public interests, such as environmental preservation.

“This is a business too, and we have to try to get what we can” for the property, said RTC spokesman Steven Katsanos.

But in this case, developers working under the RTC’s supervision have moved with extraordinary aggressiveness to push the project through the county planning process by cutting procedural corners.

On at least one occasion, sources say, the developers--Landmark Land Co. of Carmel--threatened a top Interior Department official with legal action if he testified in favor of protecting the parcel as an ecological preserve. As a result, the official--Allen McReynolds, special assistant to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt--decided not to testify.

Landmark officials declined to comment on the incident, and Katsanos said he was unaware of it.

The land at the center of the dispute is a parcel that builders in San Bernardino County have been trying without success to develop for years. Lined up against the project as proposed are private environmental groups, the California Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Department of the Interior, local school and fire officials, who say they do not have the facilities to serve the new home buyers, and San Bernardino area tribal groups.

Moreover, county planners regard the developers’ economic assumptions about Oak Summit’s potential value as inflated. State and federal agencies label the environmental impact study done for the project inaccurate and inadequate.

They question the developers’ contention that homes on the property would sell in the $700,000 range. A more likely estimate is $330,000, the planners say--a level at which the development would represent a drain on county resources rather than a net producer of revenue.

As for the environmental study, officials contend that--among other shortcomings--its survey of rare flowering plants was conducted before the blooming season. State officials say the survey missed at least six species of endangered flora thought to be on the site.

On the other side of the battle are the developers--representatives of Landmark, which acquired the property in the 1980s but lost it to RTC conservatorship when Landmark’s own savings and loan became insolvent in 1991. The RTC accused Landmark in court of having “shamelessly looted” the New Orleans S & L of $900 million, causing its collapse.

Up to that point, Landmark principally had been known as the developer of a number of championship golf courses in California and elsewhere, including La Quinta and PGA West near Palm Springs.

But with the failure of its savings and loan, Landmark came into direct conflict with the RTC. In 1991, its executives attempted to shield the firm’s properties from RTC control by placing them in bankruptcy. The next year, a federal judge awarded the agency power over the properties, and the RTC sold the desert golf courses and other valuable Landmark projects to outside investors.

Nevertheless, the RTC has left several Landmark officials from that era in control of Oak Summit. Landmark official Andrew R. Vossler, the project manager, refused to comment on the project, referring all questions to the RTC.

Also energetically supporting the project is Jon D. Mikels, chairman of the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors, in whose district the property lies.

In an interview, Mikels--the recipient of a $1,000 campaign contribution from Landmark and another $1,000 from a company executive in his 1990 supervisorial race--said he regards the project as a “net plus” for the county.

Mikels--who has reported no additional donations from the firm in his reelection campaign this year--flatly dismissed claims of the land’s ecological significance.

“There’s nothing special about the property,” he said. “It’s 762 acres out of 7,000 acres of the same stuff. There are no endangered species.”

Environmental studies have identified as many as seven species on the site that are eligible for listing as endangered. Surveys have also confirmed a sighting of the California gnatcatcher, a small songbird listed as threatened, and two sightings of the least Bell’s vireo, an endangered species, near enough to its boundaries for any construction on Oak Summit to represent a potential negative impact, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Environmentalists say the site is a combination of several rare plant communities whose proximity to one another makes it unique. These plant communities include 352 acres of Riversidean alluvial fan sage scrub, which the state Department of Fish and Game describes as “one of the most threatened rare natural communities left in Southern California.”

Often found at the feet of canyons, where regular floods wash out into a fan shape and deposit rich soils, only 14,000 acres of alluvial fan sage scrub remain in Southern California, where as recently as 50 years ago there were 150,000 to 200,000 acres.

Much of what remains is slated for development or mining, and some is likely to be destroyed by the planned extension of the Foothill Freeway into San Bernardino.

That road project has inspired one preservation strategy: the purchase of Oak Summit by the California Department of Transportation.

State law requires Caltrans to mitigate any environmental damage that its projects cause by acquiring and preserving parcels of equivalent ecological value along the route--in this case the Foothill Freeway extension.

“Oak Summit provides an incredible opportunity for (Caltrans),” said James Burns of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which has joined the state agency and the San Bernardino Assn. of Governments in trying to negotiate a purchase of the property from the RTC. “It would be 90% of their mitigation requirements.”

But the RTC has pressed ahead with the sale. “We were hoping the RTC would be more helpful,” Burns said, “but it isn’t making things any easier.”

Meanwhile, Vossler and other Landmark managers are pushing for county approval of their project with what planning sources say is unusual vigor. On July 28, they brought it before the county Planning Commission, even though they had no specific plot maps showing how the homes and golf course would be situated.

The planning commissioners balked.

“When we have a plan before us, it sets out exactly what’s going to happen” on the land, Commissioner Sheryl Brown said. “That’s not the case with this project. It wasn’t a plan, just a concept.”

Fearing that approval of such a vague proposal would give the developers too much leeway, Brown--along with a majority of the commission--voted to send it back to the planning staff for more specifics. Anything else, she said, “would set a precedent that would say to others that we would OK a concept.”

But Landmark appealed that ruling to the Board of Supervisors, the county’s ultimate authority, and Mikels obliged the developers by setting a hearing and vote on the matter for Tuesday.

The date raised eyebrows because it is the day after Labor Day, and the board’s bylaws state that it does not meet on the day after a national holiday. Tuesday also is one week before the RTC auction, so the meeting leaves open the possibility that the project could win some form of official approval before the sale.

Mikels acknowledged that he called the special meeting and that Landmark’s appeal will be the only item on the agenda. He said he did so because he was on vacation last Tuesday when the appeal would otherwise have been heard. “It’s not our practice to delay appeals, but to get them heard as expeditiously as possible,” Mikels said.

The intensity of Landmark’s efforts perplex planning experts. Even with county permits, they note, construction of a project on Oak Summit’s scale will face tremendous legal obstacles.

“There are a lot of issues that would be very difficult for a developer to resolve,” Burns said.

Among the 400 environmental and other restrictions proposed by county planners, environmental agencies and other official bodies are many that cannot be reconciled with one another.

Regional fire officials insist that sage scrub in the development be thinned out by as much as 80% to prevent forest fires from crossing the development and reaching neighboring Rancho Cucamonga. But that would violate environmental requirements that the scrub be preserved.

Native Americans, who say their tradition of collecting rare white sage on the property makes it a cultural legacy, also have vowed to sue to halt development.

Conflicting Missions

The Resolution Trust Corp. is seeking approval for an exclusive golf course project on the edge of a national forest. Critics say the project could undermine efforts to preserve the land.