Model Plane Buffs Lose Round

Model airplane enthusiasts lost out to golfers Thursday when a judge denied a preliminary injunction that would have blocked an $8-million golf course expansion at Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley.

Superior Court Judge Eileen C. Moore, who had granted a temporary restraining order to the Save Mile Square Park Committee, said the group did not prove that a golf course was a “nonpublic purpose,” said Ward Brady, Orange County deputy counsel.

Moore dissolved her restraining order, clearing the way for Mile Square Partners to begin work on the expansion. The partnership has operated the Mile Square Golf Course at the park since 1968.

But the committee immediately filed an appeal of Moore’s decision with a request to prevent construction until it is heard.

“We will not give up,” said committee chairman Robert Richards of Fountain Valley.

The committee is composed primarily of hobbyists who for decades have used the park’s 137-acre interior triangle for such recreation as flying remote-controlled model airplanes.

Because the Fountain Valley park is the county’s only public place where the planes can be flown, the hobbyists sued, arguing that a golf course expansion would force them to travel to the Sepulveda Basin in the San Fernando Valley.

Vincent Goodwin, the committee’s attorney, said Thursday that the judge’s ruling was flawed because the law is vague on public uses for recreational areas.

Her decision “is even more surprising because there is little or no law on this matter. That’s why we need to take it to the appellate level,” Goodwin said.

The county contended that it would not be eliminating a park, but would simply be changing its use, Brady said.

“We argued that public golf was a recreational purpose,” Brady said. “They did not prove that public golf was a nonpublic purpose.”

The site was owned by the U.S. government and used for military training from the 1940s to the 1970s, when the county acquired most of it.

In 1992, the county traded some land near Irvine for the government’s remaining 137 acres in the middle of the park. The swap enabled the military to build housing near its two bases in Tustin and at El Toro.

Before then, the government leased the land to the county on a year-to-year basis.