New Reservoir to Offer Recreation Mecca : Outdoors: Project in Riverside County will include extensive facilities for boating, hiking, biking, camping, golf. A commercial water park also is planned.

When it is finished, it will be a mecca for sports enthusiasts, with $100 million worth of marinas, campgrounds, bike trails, hiking paths, swimming pools, golf courses and places to hunt.

And all within a tank of gas for millions of Southern Californians often crowded out of the region’s aging and often inadequate parks.

The main purpose of the Domenigoni Valley Reservoir project in Riverside County, where construction will begin this week, will be to store water.

But the chance to create new recreation opportunities, and the need to appease local officials and environmentalists, led the Metropolitan Water District to develop a recreational center that will be one of the largest, most diverse and expensive in state history.

Like the reservoir itself--about 4 1/2 miles long, 2 miles wide and costing $2 billion--everything about the recreational center just outside Hemet will be big.

When completed in four years, it will include an Olympic-size pool, nearly 500 campsites, slips for more than 250 boats, launching facilities to quickly handle up to 900 boats, 80 miles of hiking and biking trails and a commercial water park. In addition to the reservoir, the 20-square-mile project will include two other man-made lakes open to fishing, sailing, swimming and hunting.

“There is nothing else like it in the state, maybe the country,” said Rod Cooper, director of the Los Angeles County Parks and Recreation Department. “It is an entire parks system by itself.”

The little-known recreational component of the reservoir will be one of the first outdoor facilities of its kind to be constructed in decades in California and one of the few designed from scratch. That gave planners a unique opportunity to design a park-like facility tailored to Southern Californians’ needs and wants.

But even with the extensive facilities planned, recreation authorities acknowledge that they will only put a dent in the enormous pent-up demand for outdoor recreation. “We turn away thousands every month,” said Dick Troy, chief of the southern division of the state parks department.

“It’s amazing, but as soon as you open a park it is filled to capacity the first weekend,” said Domenigoni project director Dennis Majors, who has built several other water storage projects that included recreational facilities.

What the planners included says a lot about who we are, what we like and how we are evolving as a society in Southern California.

“Park projects designed in the 1960s were the suburban shopping malls of recreation,” said planner Kerry Gates. “Now there’s a growing recognition that we are not Ozzie and Harriet any more. . . . We’re a lot of different people. And we need much more diverse recreational opportunities.”

So, the extensive Domenigoni plan acknowledges the changing demographics of the region.

Historically, parks were designed to serve individual families with solitary picnic tables or campsites. But recreation researchers found that ethnic communities in Southern California often favor group activities, requiring different landscape designs.

Conventional wisdom dictates that mountain bikers are all young and seek rough terrain. But Domenigoni recreational planners discovered that a large number of the bikes are being bought by senior citizens. So for the less adventurous, they included a number of paved trails.

Because recreational concerns have been incorporated from the outset of the reservoir’s development, rather than as an afterthought, planners have been able to make greater use of the site.

The reservoir has been designed to accommodate marina facilities and provide optimum habitat for bass--a prime target of area anglers.

“They’re talking about building [bass] breeding areas and habitat areas,” said Dan Hinkel of the San Diego Bass Council, who served on MWD’s 40-member working group that helped plan the recreation area. “Most water districts just care about storing the water.”

The tremendous expenditure on recreational facilities helped MWD officials head off the usual chorus of protests from local officials and environmental groups, which have delayed or stopped other giant water projects.

“A water storage facility is not complete or acceptable without recreation,” said Majors.

It wasn’t always that way.

The MWD and other large water agencies have been criticized over the past several decades for being aloof and uncaring about environmental and community concerns.

“I expected to do battle with a rapacious agency,” said Riverside County Supervisor Kay Ceniceros. “But they have been cooperative.”

Gates said the MWD “tried to establish the need and demand and then match it to the site. We tried to strike an appropriate balance. It’s not an ivory tower view, it’s what the community wants there.”

Perhaps as a result, the project has proceeded at a near record pace.

In addition to the recreational investment, the MWD spent about $35 million to purchase nearly 4,000 acres of ecologically sensitive land on the Santa Rosa Plateau as a nature preserve in an attempt to appease environmentalists. An additional 9,000 acres surrounding the reservoir site will be maintained as a nature preserve.

“The MWD really stretched themselves in meeting environmental concerns,” said Jane Block, a Riverside County outdoors activist who served on the reservoir advisory group.

The project will be one of the largest water storage facilities in the state, and may be one of the last water projects of its kind to be built in the West.

The reservoir will double the amount of above-ground water storage in all of Southern California. It will require three dams--one more than two miles long--to seal up the former farming site in the picturesque Domenigoni Valley.

Ultimately, the reservoir will be 250 feet deep and contain 800,000 acre-feet of water, enough to serve nearly 2 million families for a full year. Even after construction is complete in 1999, it could take up to four years to fill the reservoir to capacity.

There are some important issues that still must be hammered out that could have a major impact on the number of visitors drawn to the site.

MWD officials are uncertain if they will allow swimming, water-skiing and sail-boarding in the main reservoir. Body contact with the water is forbidden at many reservoirs because of the danger of organic contamination. But such recreational activities would greatly increase the number and types of visitors to the development, studies show.

The complex is planned to be financially self-supporting, and will feature several large-scale commercial enterprises, including a lodge, restaurants, hotel, ferry service on the reservoir, 18 and possibly 27 holes of golf, an outdoor amphitheater able to serve 15,000 people, an agricultural market and museum, and a water park.

“With most state and county projects, we usually don’t have enough money to ever complete a project, or have any money left over for maintenance and operations,” said Paul Frandsen of the Riverside County parks department. “But the MWD has the financial depth.”

Local officials say the development could be an economic boon for the area. An MWD study found that the project could add $32 million annually to the regional economy by 2010.

But there could be costs as well.

The project, said Supervisor Ceniceros, “is of such scope I don’t think everyone has figured out that it will greatly change our lives. . . . We are sacrificing some things. Small-town life is hard to find in California.”

She said some in the area fear that the massive project could jeopardize their country lifestyle.

Still, said Ceniceros, “The majority view is, ‘gung-ho, let’s go.’ But if we are not careful in how we do it, we could really screw this up royally.”

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A New Playground

The Domenigoni Valley Reservoir project will include $100 million worth of marinas, campgrounds, swimming pools, golf courses and other recreational facilities. Located just outside Hemet, it is about a two-hour drive from Los Angeles.

WEST RECREATION AREA: Camping, Day use, Lagoon, Farmers market

EAST RECREATION AREA: Golf, Camping, Day use, Sports complex

RESTAURANT, LODGE AND VISITOR CENTER

MARINA AND BOAT LAUNCH