Offer for Big Tujunga Wash Golf Site Isn’t Out of Bounds

The Los Angeles City Council took the proper course last week when it postponed a vote on whether to allow a golf course in the Big Tujunga Wash. But that was just the first--and perhaps easiest--step in an effort to preserve the ecologically sensitive wash. The two-week delay is meant to allow the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to make a purchase offer for 350 acres on which Foothill Golf Development Group intends to build a public course and wildflower preserve.

The catch: Foothill Golf representatives insist that they are interested only in building their course. And from their perspective, there is not much political or economic incentive to sell. They know the council has little choice but to approve the golf course or face a lawsuit rightly accusing the city of condemning the land without due process. Nonetheless, Foothill Golf ought to reconsider and at least entertain a serious offer from the conservancy.

For the past 10 years, various incarnations of a golf course project have been proposed and rejected for the wash. The grandest was a $50-million championship golf complex that inspired the fury of environmental groups, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and many residents in the surrounding communities of Sunland and Tujunga--in large part because the project destroyed habitat of the endangered slender-horned spineflower. By comparison, the current proposal for a $12-million public course with a preserve for the spineflower appears to be the best possible. Many residents and the local chamber of commerce now support the course.

Even with its new design, the course remains in the wrong place. The dramatic landscape of the wash as it tumbles out of the San Gabriel Mountains evokes the memory of how wild this region once was. Burying a landscape this rare and this close to the city under turf only further erodes the connection between the urban and natural environments. Sadly, this treasure has been neglected. Trash litters the stream bed and graffiti scars many of the wash’s most magnificent boulders. Foothill Golf promises to clean up this mess. So does the conservancy, but without the golf course.

Conservancy Executive Director Joseph T. Edmiston told the council last week that the agency has commissioned an independent appraisal of the property and is prepared to value the land as if a golf course was already approved. That makes it worth more than just raw land without a permit. If the offer is fair, Foothill Golf should accept it and leave the land to be preserved as a public park.

But the choice rests entirely with Foothill Golf and the land’s owner. The council would assume a legal risk if it rejected the project solely because of the conservancy’s purchase offer. Although a gray area in land-use law, it’s doubtful that a court would look favorably on one government agency--in this case, the city--rejecting a development because another government agency--such as the conservancy--makes a purchase offer.

Individual council members can help preserve the site by using this week to make it as clear as they did last week that they want the land left untouched. The cynical observer might suggest that the delay is nothing more than that--an easy way for the council to boast it did everything it could to save the wash and then go ahead and approve the project when it comes back July 22. Let’s hope that’s not the case.