Palos Verdes’ Golf Handicap

Secluded and affluent, the Palos Verdes Peninsula has for years been home to three popular golf courses, with increasing demands for more.

Today, with a fourth nearing completion and as many as three more under consideration, the peninsula seems likely to become a smorgasbord of golfers’ paradises.

If all are built--and even their most ardent advocates concede that’s a big if--there would be seven 18-hole courses on the 26.3-square-mile peninsula, one hole for every 555 of the area’s 70,000 residents. They would range from county-owned public courses to private luxury links with some of the highest greens fees in the country.

But concerns about landslides and other environmental issues are countering the rush to put more courses on the peninsula’s remaining empty spaces, many with sweeping ocean vistas and refreshing sea breezes.

The area’s newest course, Ocean Trails, with its spectacular coastline views and $200-a-round weekend greens fees--was just weeks away from opening when a June 2 landslide sent about half its 18th hole into the Pacific. Its dramatic collapse highlighted the controversy that has surrounded new course proposals for the slide-prone peninsula.

It will take an additional 30 days or so before results are ready from the investigations into the cause of the slide, which also ruptured a county sewer line running beneath the course.

But Ocean Trails developers Kenneth and Robert Zuckerman contend that the slide was caused by an as-yet unidentified problem with the sewer line and not by one of the ancient and active slides that dot the peninsula’s coastline. They already are planning to rebuild the 18th hole on the same spot, although with a slightly different design. (County sanitation officials insist their line was in good shape.)

Conversely, environmental activists, arguing that the collapse was the dangerous and predictable result of geological conditions in the area, have renewed their objections to Ocean Trails and other development proposals nearby.

“I think the community is really rising up” to fight further development, said Tony Baker, a landscaper and longtime resident of nearby Portuguese Bend, where a slow but inexorable slide since the mid-1950s has buckled roads, ruined houses and stymied further development.

Baker was walking his dog, Rocky, and taking photographs of newly restored habitat on the bluff trail next to the Ocean Trails course when cracks began opening around him to popping noises and the earth started sliding away.

“We took off running, but the crevices kept opening up and we were separated from solid land,” said Baker, who had to be airlifted, hanging tightly onto Rocky, to safety.

“It was a life-altering experience. . . . It was horrific,” said Baker, who is grateful that a few minutes earlier he had left the beach below, where much of the sliding earth came to rest. The slide made a natural dam that kept the nearly 1 million gallons of raw sewage that spilled from the broken pipe from reaching the ocean. (The Zuckermans said they had closed the bluff and beach access trails the day before, when they noticed the first small cracks and called out geologists.)

The slide at Ocean Trails also stirred concerns among officials of Rancho Palos Verdes, the city that, along with the California Coastal Commission, approved the development, which includes 75 luxury home sites. The city contains the sites of two more potential courses, also controversial.

One proposal is for a golf course, homes and luxury hotel at Long Point, on the site of the now-closed Marineland aquatic park. Developers are also seeking chunks of adjacent public land for the course, a move that has already brought criticism from preservationists. The developer’s latest version of the plans was submitted last month and is under review by city staff members, one of several required steps.

Another possible golf course proposal, still at a very preliminary stage, is likely to be the most controversial of all. The site, which also might include several luxury homes, lies across the hillsides set back from the coast at Portuguese Bend, in the middle of a landslide zone subject to a city-imposed development moratorium. The developer would need to win an exclusion from the moratorium area before trying to seek permission to build.

In addition, the property owner, Barry Hon of Hon Development, was involved in building the homes that slid off their hilltop perches in Laguna Nigel during the El Nino storms in 1998. Rancho Palos Verdes and adjacent Rolling Hills residents have already joined environmental activists in objecting to a potential Portuguese Bend development.

Hon representative Mike Walker said the site is continuing to undergo extensive geologic studies.

For a city that is zoned predominantly for residential development, and which has little commercial base, golf courses can be a pleasing and lucrative alternative to more houses, he said. Rancho Palos Verdes adopted an ordinance in 1993 requiring that 10% of greens fees go to municipal coffers; the city expected to reap almost $340,000 from Ocean Trails during the 1999-2000 fiscal year.

To win city and Coastal Commission approval Ocean Trails developers restored a habitat for the gnatcatcher--an endangered bird species--improved and added bluff and beach access trails and built a public park and will shoulder maintenance costs.

Yet another new course is in the works for another part of the peninsula. Los Angeles County is planning a second public course on the site of its former landfill in Rolling Hills Estates, across Crenshaw Boulevard from the South Coast Botanic Garden. The peninsula’s three existing courses are testament to golf’s growing popularity.

At the county owned Los Verdes course, where greens fees peak at just $25 on weekends, the biggest problem is getting a tee time.

The most popular of the county’s 17 golf facilities, the challenging Los Verdes, with an ocean view from every hole, averages 129,000 rounds a year and contributes more than $1 million annually to the public treasury.

At Rolling Hills Country Club in Rolling Hills Estates, members buy a share in the private club and must sell it back, minus a transfer charge, if they want to leave. The course opened with nine holes in 1963. It later expanded to a full 18 holes and built a clubhouse and other amenities. Membership stands at 465; the club does not disclose membership costs.

But the granddaddy of them all is the elegant, lushly landscaped Palos Verdes Golf Club, where bougainvillea drapes split-rail fences and nobody seems to mind that the trees have grown so tall they obscure some of the ocean views.

Seventy-five years ago this November, banker and land speculator Frank A. Vanderlip and a group of New York investors opened the course on the then-barren peninsula, hoping to lure home buyers to their new community 23 miles south of Los Angeles. Today the privately leased club has a 200-person membership waiting list (restricted in recent years to Palos Verdes Estates residents) and contributes half a million dollars annually to the coffers of the affluent bedroom community that owns it.

Because it is city owned, the course is open to the public on off-peak times, with Palos Verdes Estates residents getting breaks on greens fees and playing times.

City residents wait about three years and pay $20,000 to become full members. After that, monthly dues take the place of greens fees, which range from $50 to $135 per round.

Ashie McAllister, an athletic grandmother in her 70s who has played golf most of her life and is a board member of the club, said Palos Verdes is by far her favorite golfing spot.

“It’s challenging, it’s beautiful, it’s very well maintained--and it plays differently every day.”

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Many Links

With three existing golf courses, another one nearly completed and up to three more in the works, the Palos Verdes Peninsula is a duffer’s dream. But the proposed additions have sparked controversy.