Ahmanson Pressed on Open Space Guarantees : Parkland: State agency is worried the developer may back out of its pledge to donate 10,000 acres for public use.

State parks officials who engineered a deal allowing the Ahmanson Land Co. to build a mini-city in exchange for 10,000 acres of open space are pressing for firm guarantees that the developer will turn over the rugged terrain as promised.

Increasingly worried that Ahmanson may back out of its pledge to buy Runkle Ranch and Corral Canyon for parkland, trustees of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy have urged the developer to reaffirm its commitment to donating the oak-studded parcels to the public.

A simple verbal pledge won’t be enough. Park officials plan to demand a letter of credit or another document proving that Ahmanson has money available to buy the long-coveted land, which sweeps across 4,700 acres in the Santa Susana Mountains and Malibu bluffs.

“We don’t want this one to get away,” conservancy Chairman Jerome Daniel said.

Under the terms of a 1992 development agreement, Ahmanson must convert four privately owned ranches into parkland before beginning construction on a golf course community in the Simi Hills.

Taxpayers helped the developer meet that obligation by purchasing two of those properties, Jordan Ranch and Liberty Canyon, through state and federal park agencies for $26.7 million.

The remaining two parcels, Runkle Ranch and Corral Canyon, remain in the hands of entertainer Bob Hope--and the developer must buy the rocky expanses for parkland before digging a single foundation on the vast sheep pasture known as Ahmanson Ranch.

The development agreement set a deadline of December, 1995, for Ahmanson to complete the land transaction. But nine lawsuits objecting to the mini-city have kept Ahmanson executives tied up in court, and the firm has asked that the deadline be pushed back three years, to December, 1998.

The Ventura County Planning Commission will hear that request next Thursday, and the Board of Supervisors will take up the issue in October. Conservancy officials plan to address both hearings, urging county planners to squeeze firm guarantees from Ahmanson that the open-space transaction will take place as planned.

“The great genius of that project is that it was a grand transaction: a new town for a giant swath of open space,” Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the conservancy, said. “Without that (trade-off), it’s back in the realm of average development--well, not exactly average, I guess, because it’s way larger than average.”

Edmiston said he could envision the developers returning to the supervisors in several years and pleading: “We can’t buy the Hope properties . . . they’re too expensive.” To make up for a failure to buy the parkland, Ahmanson might offer an array of cheaper, but still valuable, goodies--such as improvements to the county infrastructure.

Such an offer might tempt future supervisors, Edmiston predicted, who might consider a new library or state-of-the-art sheriff’s station a worthy substitute for a passel of rocky hills.

“We want (Ahmanson) to assure everyone that they are not going to seek to get out from under the conditions” imposed in the original development agreement, Edmiston said.

Ahmanson spokeswoman Mary Trigg said she could not speculate on whether the developers would be able to fulfill their obligation to turn over Runkle Ranch and Corral Canyon.

“We’re trying to take this one step at a time rather than speculate on the future,” Trigg said. “We’re concentrating all our efforts now on resolving the litigation and then we’ll move on.”

Before modifying the development agreement, county supervisors must hold a public hearing. And Lenora Kirby, an aide to Supervisor Maria VanderKolk, said she is confident the agreement contains enough strict language to ensure that both Runkle and Corral enter the public domain.

“We were really surprised that (Edmiston) sees a potential problem,” said Kirby, who represents VanderKolk at conservancy meetings. “We think our development agreement is excellent and has a lot of assurances in it.”