Crime Against Nature, or a Kinder Course?

Los Angeles may well be a crime against nature, but it’s our crime, and nature has a way of making us pay. Consider the events of Feb. 9, 1978, in a place where the city’s sprawl challenges the steep, crumbly foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.

It happened about midnight in the Sunland-Tujunga region. Heavy rains had soaked the grounds of the old Verdugo Hills Cemetery above Parsons Trail. Suddenly the slope gave way, sending mud and dozens of the dearly departed into the neighborhood below. Jarred open, several caskets spilled their decomposing contents along Hillrose Street.

A local newspaper, the Record-Ledger, was monitoring police radio communication:

* “There’s an old dead body down here that we’d like to have someone pick up.”

* “Coroner can’t roll. Guess you’ll have to put it in your trunk.”

* “Not in my trunk.”

Kathy Anthony remembers how some of the ghastly mess wound up in her parents’ yard. “It wasn’t uncommon for people to find somebody’s arm on the hood of their car,” says Anthony, now the president of the Sunland-Tujunga Chamber of Commerce. “It was gross.”

And now, not far from that calamity, Los Angeles is getting ready to build something that many people consider to be an unnatural act.

But not Kathy Anthony. She’s all for it.

*

The development, a decade in the planning, is an 18-hole golf course on a 351-acre propertysmack dab where the Big Tujunga Wash bumps against the Foothill Boulevard bridge. This is one of the most primitive landscapes within the city limits, and one of the world’s rarest habitats--the home of an endangered wildflower, the slender-horned spineflower. Would nature consider this a felony or a misdemeanor? Some people even argue that it’s an act of enlightened environmentalism. Having won the support of the Planning Commission and local Councilman Joel Wachs, developers expect City Council approval on Tuesday.

Opponents continue to fight, raising concerns of heightened risk of flood damage in this tributary of the Los Angeles River. “This is the L.A. River before it was lined with concrete,” says opposition leader William Eick, a resident of nearby Shadow Hills. “There are already more than 100 golf courses in the county. There’s only one Big Tujunga Wash.”

Hopes that the Santa Monica Conservancy could purchase the property seem doomed, especially since the golf interests have no intention of selling. Foothill Golf Development Group, which has a lease from owner Cosmo World Corp., is busy promising that Redtail, as they call this layout, will be at the vanguard of the movement to make golf more sensitive to nature.

These promises are what helped win over Kathy Anthony and other local residents. That and the fact that Sunland-Tujunga could use a little economic jolt.

Residents choose to live in what Anthony calls “a little hick town” because they prefer the rustic, rugged charms on the city’s edge. The Big Tujunga Wash helps keep it that way. It is what geologists call an alluvial fan, a half-mile-wide flood plain that is a gathering place for sand, rocks and boulders washed down from the San Gabriels. When it floods, as it did in 1968 and ‘78, it does so in dramatic, roaring fashion, eating into foothills and taking homes with it. Hansen Dam, further downstream, was built to protect the San Fernando Valley.

Yet not many years have passed since developers proposed channeling the wash and building homes along its banks. Old-timers here thought they were nuts; the plan went nowhere.

*

Ten years ago, Cosmo World Corp., the Japanese-owned golf company that owns Pebble Beach, acquired the property and proposed building a private country club with a stadium-style course that could serve as home for the Los Angeles Open. Country club snootiness, Anthony suggests, wasn’t welcome. Besides, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has jurisdiction over the stream beds within the wash, rejected Cosmo’s plan.

Enter Foothill Golf, which secured a long-term lease from Cosmo World. Instead of a country club, Redtail would be open to the public. The layout was redesigned to keep out of the stream beds and thus make a federal permit unnecessary. To address concerns about the slender-horned spineflower, more than 190 acres are to be set aside as a natural preserve with paths open to equestrians and hikers. Foothill Golf has also agreed to indemnify the city against flood damage related to the development and abide by special restrictions on the use of pesticides. “This golf course,” lobbyist Mark Armbruster says, “will be the model for golf courses in the future.”

There are, developers point out, many golf courses in flood plains; damage is expected and will be repaired. But even their ally Kathy Anthony seems to suggest that they are underestimating the Big Tujunga’s wrath.

“When it goes,” she says, “everything goes.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St. , Chatsworth, CA 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.