Critics Fear Wash’s Days Are Numbered

In this far corner of the northeast San Fernando Valley, motorists on the Foothill Freeway pass an embattled landscape-- a strange, rocky plain that is one of the world’s rarest habitats.

For a decade, developers fighting to build a golf course over what’s called Big Tujunga Wash have been held at bay by the presence of a federally listed endangered wildflower on the site.

But this last large, natural wash spilling down from the San Gabriel Mountains into the L.A. Basin may not remain pristine for long.

In a twist that illustrates how the federal Endangered Species Act can sometimes be circumvented, Foothills Golf Development Group has revived the golf course by altering the design.

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By trimming off a few acres here, a few feet there and leaving out flood-control measures, engineers have put the project beyond the reach of federal agencies with the power to protect the wash. That leaves the wash’s fate up to City Hall, where standards for protecting endangered species are less strict.

The developer calls this a common-sense compromise that will attract dollars to Sunland. “This is a much better project. It will be much more sensitive,” said Tom Buzbee, a project consultant who works for Kajima Engineering & Construction Inc.

But U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials say the wash--and the endangered slender-horned spineflower that lives there--are falling victim to a loophole.

“This is one of those rare ecological communities that is falling through the safety net,” said Dennis Murphy, director of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology. “It’s not a tragedy of the greatest scale, but it is a tragedy of a small scale that we will regret in the long run.”

The 650 acres of Big Tujunga Wash spreads in a fan at the foot of the steep escarpment of the San Gabriel Mountains. From a distance, it looks like a slice of the Mojave Desert plunked in the middle of the pastures and subdivisions of Sunland.

Its dry surface is so loose and pebbly that it’s difficult to walk on. Across the north side is a rare sight in L.A.--a natural river flowing freely over rocks, complete with sandbars and white egrets.

The wash is far from untouched: The 210 Freeway bisects it, there’s a dam above it and a levy below. A couch was dumped by the side of the road there recently. And not too long ago, rogue landscapers sneaked in with bulldozers to steal from the wash’s rich supply of boulders.

But in spring, the place glows with wildflowers, said Paul Edelman, staff ecologist with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, who has studied the wash. And the diverse community of native plants, fish and birds there still thrives in only about a dozen remaining large pockets in the state.

The wash is owned by Cosmo World Corp., a company incorporated by Japanese golf magnate Minoru Isutani, who took a big loss on his investment on the famous Pebble Beach golf courses a few years back.

Cosmo World first tried to turn the rocky landscape of the wash into sweeping fairways in 1987. The aim was to build a championship golf course, with cement linings in the U.S. waterways to control flooding, which is what triggered federal review.

The proposal was so controversial that in 1993, Cosmo World--apparently fed up with the opposition--threatened to bulldoze the spineflower to end all arguments.

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The public outcry put a halt to the plan, but the tone was set for a bitter debate. It ended in 1994, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dealt the plan a mortal blow, ruling that the course would jeopardize the spineflower.

Cosmo World and Kajima, its consultant, went back to the drawing board and scaled back the design.

Last summer, David Hueber, a former president of the National Golf Foundation, took over the project, forming Foothills Golf and leasing the property.

This time, the proponents have gone to great lengths to avoid problems.

The new plan under consideration calls for an 18-hole public golf course covering about 350 acres, including 190 acres of open space and spineflower habitat. The course will cost $12 million to build, one-fourth the cost of the previous plan, in part because the channels won’t be lined with concrete, said Andrew Baldonado, spokesman for Foothills Golf.

It represents “an effort to find common ground,” he said.

Because Foothills Golf isn’t touching U.S. waterways on the site this time, the plan doesn’t require federal action. So federal officials--who still take a dim view--have been reduced to powerless advisors.

The city Planning Commission, meanwhile, has already given the proposal a thumbs up, recommending a permit be approved. This decision has been appealed by the state Department of Fish and Game, the Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club, and five other groups. The Los Angeles City Council will make a ruling in the coming weeks.

The wash is in City Councilman Joel Wachs’ district; he is undecided.

Environmentalists cringe at the idea of building a water-hungry golf course in a rare desert-like habitat. “They chopped off Marie Antoinette’s head for doing things like this,” said Lynne Plambeck of the Angeles chapter of the Sierra Club.

More specifically, they say building a golf course in the wash will slowly destroy the rare wildlife community there that biologists call “alluvial sage scrub.”

This is different from the scrub of inland deserts and the hillside chaparral familiar to Southern Californians. It’s a diverse collection of some 250 species, dominated by scale broom, California buckwheat, yerba santa, pine goldenbush, desert juniper and cholla cactus.

There’s also the spineflower, a nodding, pink blossom so unlike other plants that--like duck-billed platypuses and humans--it occupies a genus all its own.

Alluvial scrub exists because it loves everything most plants hate: barren terrain, rocky soil, relentless sunlight, and catastrophic floods. The scrub is so tough that nutrients act on it like poison, causing invader weeds to take over.

In fact, the whole wash is a study in the kind of delicate, shifting habitat that regulations sometimes deal with clumsily.

A state law protecting endangered plants won’t help the spineflower much because it protects actual plants, not habitats. Since the spineflower’s seeds only germinate when floods wash them away, their whole reproductive cycle is disrupted if the flood plain downstream is destroyed, said Mary Meyer, plant ecologist with the Department of Fish and Game.

The gradual effects of a golf course’s fertilizers, pesticides and fine silt on the wash also lie largely outside the law. These are especially hard on alluvial scrub, said John Hanlon, biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

State fish and game officials estimate that 91% of California’s native alluvial scrub habitat has already been destroyed.

But unlike ecological cause celebres such as redwood forests, it has little glamour. And to the untrained eye, the wash looks like a stark, lunar landscape.

“Wasted land” is what Kathleen Anthony, president of the Sunland-Tujunga Chamber of Commerce, calls it. The chamber has organized a mass lobbying effort in favor of the golf course.

Anthony and other golf course supporters argue that the facility would upgrade the area and improve business.

She is baffled by golf course opponents. “I can’t imagine anyone opposing something so beautiful,” she said. As for the spineflower: “It’s ugly. If you saw it in your yard you would pull it up. . . . We should concentrate more on elephants and porpoises,” she said.

There is also pressure on Cosmo World to get the project going so the land will generate some cash. A few years ago, a Cosmo World subsidiary declared bankruptcy on a project in Las Vegas and the debts linger over Tujunga Wash in the form of liens on the property.

Kajima is one of the lien holders. “Let’s face it, that’s why Kajima is interested in helping this along. It would benefit us and the [other] people who have debts on the property,” Kajima project consultant Buzbee said.

If the course is built, Foothills Golf may be able to sell its course at twice the construction costs within just a few years, he added.

In the end, the last word may fall to Mother Nature.

Because Foothills Golf can’t put concrete in the waterways without invoking federal review, the golf course will be left with little protection from flooding in a terrain defined by violent floods.

The Army Corps of Engineers, which has no direct say on the current proposal, thinks that Foothill has underestimated the potential effects of floods on the site.

The corps believes the channels, which periodically shift course across the wash, will cut into the golf course. If that happens, the owners may find it impossible to fix the damage without touching the waterways, which is sure to cause a run-in with federal officials.

The boulder-strewn channels “are more likely to move than stay still,” said Mark Sudol, project manager for the Corps of Engineers. The north channel has shifted in recent years. Even in recent weeks, it’s edged sideways, flowing over tall shrubs on the banks.

City planners were so concerned about parts of the golf course getting washed out that they ordered Foothills to purchase a bond to pay for some effort at restoring the habitat should the golf course be put out of commission.

Flooding “is not a question of if. It’s when,” said Dan O’Donnell, the city Planning Commission’s hearing examiner.

But Blake Murillo, engineering consultant for Foothills Golf, said buried concrete around valuable parts of the course will protect it from being undercut by torrential waters.

If some of the rest washes away, so be it. Foothills will simply redesign the course again to avoid the new channels, he said.

Some are skeptical that it will work. But, said Baldonado, the firm “assumes all risks.”