Tujunga Wash

* According to “Council Delays Decision on Golf Course” (Dec. 10), the developers of the proposed Tujunga Wash golf course expressed confidence that they could win their [multimillion-dollar] lawsuit or extract a large settlement from the city.

Hopefully, the City Council reads the business section of The Times. For the last several months, we have been reading news articles about the financial crisis in Asia. One cause of the crisis has been bad real estate investments whose inflated book values cannot be actualized. The Tujunga Wash fiasco is a perfect illustration. The Japanese owners [of] Cosmo World lost over $50 million in one real estate transaction involving the Pebble Beach golf course in the late 1980s. They bought the Tujunga Wash flood plain for an undisclosed sum at approximately the same time. They claim that they have spent over $21 million on the property, yet periodically Sunland / Tujunga residents have to organize to pick up trash on Cosmo World property. This development is the home to an endangered species, the slender-horned spineflower, and the wash periodically floods, destroying everything in its path.

The Tujunga Wash: a bad real estate investment whose inflated book value cannot be realized. The city should fight this lawsuit and not bail out foreign real estate speculators with our tax dollars.

JOHN YARD

Sunland-Tujunga