In the Balance, Merit
This is a tale of two golf courses. One good, the other not so good. One in the southwest San Fernando Valley, the other in the northeast. Both got green lights last week. One from an advisory board at Pierce College, the other from the Los Angeles City Council. Each in its own way, the separate fights over the two golf courses illustrate the difficulty of balancing preservation with development in a region where usable land is at a premium.
The Pierce College council approved a $10-million plan to turn 200 acres of pasture and cropland into a golf course and agricultural facility. The deal would generate as much as $750,000 for Pierce’s cash-starved agriculture department and would help preserve at least part of the Valley’s farm heritage. It’s a fair proposal. The land, although largely unbuilt, is hardly pristine. It’s been the site of a working farm for decades.
Neighbors understandably fear the effects of development. They’ve grown accustomed to living near one of the largest undeveloped patches of land in the Valley. But Pierce College faces a severe budget crunch and must learn to leverage its assets to stave off cuts to its curriculum. Clearly, the college’s biggest asset is its land--and a disproportionate amount of it is consumed by an agriculture program that needs help. The golf course proposal offers that help and would affect surrounding neighborhoods far less than yet another mini-mall.
About the same time as the Pierce course was debated in Woodland Hills, the City Council was in Lake View Terrace arguing the merits of another golf project proposed for the Big Tujunga Wash. Merit, in this case, had very little to do with the council’s decision to allow Foothills Golf Development Group to build a course in a unique ecosystem that’s home to an endangered flower. The decision had everything to do with politics and just plain bad governance.
The council painted itself into a corner last summer when it denied Foothills Golf’s application to build in the wash. Rather than base their opposition on legitimate and defensible environmental and planning regulations, council members instead appeared swayed by the outcry from city unions involved in an unrelated beef with the owner of the land. Predictably, the developer sued, arguing that the council had deprived him of “economically viable” use of the land. That’s debatable. But because the council was so sloppy in its denial last summer, the odds of winning in court were slim. And the costs were high.
To his credit, Councilman Joel Wachs negotiated a deal with the developer that preserves more open space and provides better protection for the endangered spineflower. So at least future residents will have a few reminders of what Tujunga Wash looked like before bulldozers forever altered the last free-flowing river in Los Angeles. In Tujunga Wash, the balance between preservation and development--although tidily typed into the approval paperwork--tilted the wrong way.