Golfers See No Fair Way to Replace Threatened Course

Golf courses abound in Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley in particular, providing an oasis of manicured green lawns, shimmering ponds and lusciously full trees in a city with a paucity of parkland and replete with concrete.

For those who take advantage of them, the courses are as distinct as people, their different terrains like individual personalities, their various layouts like so many temperaments.

So for the aficionados, closing a course--even if another will be opened to take its place--is almost like losing a friend. And that’s why members of the Senior Men’s Golf Club in particular at El Cariso Golf Course in Sylmar are so distraught that just such a plan is in the works for their longtime pal.

Mission College, which abuts the Cariso course and a county park on the course’s west flank, says it needs to expand its inadequate 22-acre campus to accommodate swelling enrollment. The state Legislature agreed in 1992, and allocated $4.2 million for just such a purchase.

The natural place to turn, the college says, is to 30 acres now taken up by the golf course.

College officials say they’ll build a new course on land that straddles Pacoima Wash, southeast of where the Cariso course now sits. They also hope to find a way to please the hang gliders, equestrians, baseball players and other groups in the community that now use the wash as a playground.

The senior golfers, however, are not mollified. The college plans call for a regulation golf course, rather than the shorter, so-called executive course at El Cariso that is much more attuned to older knees and eyes.

And the seniors wonder about the beautiful trees and other signs of maturity that make their course interesting--the types of markers that cannot be transported because they come with age.

“They say they’re going to move the El Cariso Golf Course, but you cannot move a golf course; you can destroy El Cariso and build another course,” said 77-year-old Howard Lockwood, a longtime El Cariso player who lives in Lake View Terrace.

“I would cry if I saw that golf course destroyed,” he added. “That golf course didn’t just happen, it’s a living thing. It’s a treasure.”

After years of studying the issue, the college is now in a hurry. Barring a last-minute extension, any money the college has in its land-acquisition fund must be returned to the state if it is not spent by the end of the year.

So now college officials are crossing their fingers for an extension so they’ll have time to tackle several huge obstacles: Finishing and circulating an environmental impact report, winning community support and gaining the county Board of Supervisors’ approval for the sale.

What the seniors and other community groups have going for them is the fact that the supervisors are nowhere near a vote on whether to sell the county-owned land to the college.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who represents the area, says the college so far has no realistic plan. The best the school can hope for, Yaroslavsky says, is more time to study the issue.

“In concept, we are open to it,” Yaroslavsky said. “But we have to know a lot more about what’s in the wash, whether it can be done economically, what the environmental impacts are and what the community impacts are--there isn’t a single community organization in Sylmar which has embraced this.”

The college’s “plans have changed weekly, sometimes more than once a week, and they’re panic-stricken now because they’re running out of time,” he added.

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Mission College moved to Sylmar, in the San Gabriel Mountains foothills, in 1991, after 19 years of holding classes in locations scattered in and around the city of San Fernando.

Even then college officials knew they would need more space-- enrollment is projected to more than double from the current 6,500 in the next five to six years--and was granted state money for that purpose the next year, said Mission College President William Norland.

Plans call for 1,000 additional parking spaces, four new classroom buildings of 30,000 square feet each and 10 acres of open space, said college administrator Shari Borchetta.

Those buildings would house night courses not taught off-campus, fine arts programs and growing culinary arts and multimedia programs, Borchetta said.

At first, college officials thought they could turn to El Cariso Regional Park for their expansion, but county supervisors quickly registered their disapproval in an area with few open green spaces.

The college eyed the golf course next, and moved ahead with an environmental impact report that is still being prepared.

Norland acknowledges making some mistakes in that process.

“We should have been involving the community earlier,” Norland said. “There are people who do not want change.”

Lockwood is firmly among that group. He said that having played some of the country’s finest resort courses, he is in a position to extol the virtues of El Cariso, which he says is unusually fine for a municipal course.

The accommodation plans he’s heard of so far, which include proposals to make a new course able to be played as either a regulation or executive course, just won’t satisfy, he said.

Tees will necessarily be farther apart than they are at El Cariso, Lockwood said; par scores would have to be higher. He also worries that the fees would go up from the current senior price of $7.75 per nine-hole round.

For its part, the college says it is doing everything it can. Borchetta promises that El Cariso will not be closed until the new course is completed, meaning golfers will not have one golf-less minute.

What’s more, there is likely to be overlap, when both courses are in operation, while the college solidifies its building plans and finances.

“It’s a tough issue,” Borchetta said. “The educational needs of the community have to be weighed against all of the other needs of the community.”

So if it sounds as if the golfers are whining about nothing, then people are missing the point, Lockwood said.

“I guess you’d have to be a golfer to understand, if you think one golf course is as good as another,” he said. “It’s not like a tennis court, which is a slab of concrete. A golf course is a beautifully designed facility. Each one is unique and this one is particularly unique.”