Happy Camp Golf Plan Is Knocked Off Course

A developer who wanted to build two 18-hole public golf courses on the lower portion of Happy Camp Canyon Regional Park said Tuesday that he is abandoning the plans because of too much governmental red tape.

Moorpark developer Ralph Mahan said that regulations would have quadrupled the cost of the water he needed for the courses.

Unable to come up with an affordable alternative source of water, Mahan decided not to pay the county the $25,000 that was due to keep open his two-year lease option to develop the lower 700 acres of the 3,700-acre county-owned park.

The county is still interested in finding a developer who wants to build a golf course on the property, said Blake Boyle, a county parks official.

A 1992 study showed a demand for at least eight more public golf courses countywide, and golf courses at Happy Camp could bring in as much as $400,000 a year in lease payments, Boyle said.

“A golf course is still our first priority for the area,” he said. If the county can’t find a developer, the agency would consider building courses itself or looking for another type of project for the land, Boyle said.

But Mahan insisted that any effort to build a golf course will be doomed.

“There’s no one that is going to be able to develop a golf course in that park,” Mahan said.

Water turned out to be the sticking point for Mahan, although when he proposed the golf courses more than a year ago, Mahan thought he had a solution to that problem.

He drilled two wells that had an abundant supply of nonpotable water on his own ranch, which is next to the park property.

Because the water did not come from the local Fox Canyon aquifer, Mahan said he thought he would be able to use the wells free of government regulation.

Instead, Mahan said he was told by a county Public Works Agency official that he could only use his well water if he paid for an equal amount of water from the Calleguas Water District that would in turn be pumped into the ground to recharge the Fox Canyon aquifer.

Officials from the Public Works Agency and the Calleguas Water District were unavailable for comment Tuesday.

It would cost an additional $200,000 to use water from the Calleguas Water District, Mahan said.

His only other alternative would be to get reclaimed water from the Simi Valley water treatment plant, but those plans also failed because of governmental regulations, he said.

In that case, Mahan said, he ran up against the State Water Resources Control Board and the county Public Works Agency.

Mahan thought he would be able to extract about 400,000 acre-feet from the Arroyo Simi, pump it up a drainage canal, mix it with slightly purer water and use it on the land.

But to extract any water from the arroyo, he needed a permit from the Water Resources Control Board. That, he said he was told, would take at least five years and could cost about $50,000 in environmental studies with only a 50-50 chance that the permit would be approved.

On top of that, the Public Works Agency would not let him use its drainage canal for his irrigation pipe, he said.

Mahan plan’s for the park also had been met with skepticism and criticism by Moorpark officials and environmentalists.

Although noting that Mahan’s proposal had potential, Moorpark Mayor Paul Lawrason said city officials had been totally left out of the planning process.

In December, Mahan asked Moorpark officials to join him in the development by investing $250,000.

“He didn’t get a real positive response in favor of it,” Lawrason said. “We just hadn’t been consulted on any of it. It looked like a very difficult thing to do.

“He was running into problems with water. . . . I think he had a dream to produce something he felt was good, but he had resistance from just too many people.”

That resistance included complaints by representatives of a local environmental organization who were worried that Mahan’s project would destroy sensitive habitat in the park.

In a letter to the city, Roseanne Mikos of the Moorpark chapter of the Ventura County Environmental Coalition accused Mahan of planting nonnative trees on the property and drilling wells even before the project was approved. Mahan said Mikos was mistaken.

He and several other ranchers already have an easement that runs across the property, and he was planting trees along that road, which he said was his right under the law.

Mahan also was miffed at the local environmental community because, he said, they were criticizing him even though he had conceived the idea for a park at Happy Camp 25 years ago and then spent four years working to get the state of California to purchase the property.

Despite the time and more than $125,000 he said he invested in the proposed development, Mahan is not angry.

“I’m not bitter about this,” he said. “I’m just disappointed because I think we missed an opportunity to bring in a lot of revenue for the county and the park and build something really worthwhile.”