Nature Stays the Course

The Hill Canyon golf course proposal is dead. Long live Hill Canyon.

After 10 years, $2 million spent on studies and design, and a rising tide of opposition, the joint proposal by the city of Thousand Oaks and the Conejo Recreation and Parks District has been officially abandoned. The combined boards voted last week to suspend work on the plan, cancel all contracts and pay off remaining obligations.

On Tuesday, the Thousand Oaks City Council will discuss rezoning the canyon to remain open space forever. It’s the right thing to do--a prudent response to public sentiment, the current financial picture and a not-so-subtle hint from Nature.

The Hill Canyon recreation facilities project was born in a different era--before the countywide clamor for preserving open space reached its current pitch, before the construction or approval of several competing courses within a few miles of the site, and before the massive 1998 sewage spill that landed the city in regulatory hot water (and foul-smelling water at that).

In part, the audacious idea of squeezing a golf course into the narrow, Y-shaped canyon at the northwestern corner of the city had been inspired by the city’s desire for a second public course and its need for a moneymaker to help it maintain its 15,000 acres of open space. After a proposed bed tax on new development failed to win the required two-thirds majority at the polls, the city turned to the idea of a golf course to help pay for open-space maintenance.

The idea was controversial from the start. City officials tried to make it more palatable by hiring a designer nationally renowned for creating environmentally sensitive golf courses and by adding a nature center and trails for hiking, biking and horseback riding.

But as the years passed, other golf courses opened. A study by Golf Dimensions of Irvine, the same consultant Thousand Oaks hired for the Hill Canyon project, concluded that Ventura County already had as many courses in the works as demand would call for in the foreseeable future. The figure mentioned as the likely greens fee for the new course rose higher--reinforcing public perception that the plan would disproportionately attract upper-income golfers.

Concerns about watershed pollution and increased flood hazards plus the loss of habitat, wetlands and wildlife corridor added to the project’s handicap.

The sewage spill may have been the final blow. When El Nino rains washed out a pipeline that had gone unreplaced because of City Council politics, 86 million gallons of raw sewage cascaded down the Arroyo Conejo, into the Calleguas Creek and all the way to the coast--fouling Mugu Lagoon and Pacific beaches in two counties. In the aftermath, the California Department of Fish and Game has taken a hard line in requiring the city to mitigate the wetland damage. This posture put another substantial roadblock in the path of the golf course plan.

As expenses grew and the likelihood that the project could be built declined, calls for a public vote on it got louder. In the end, no referendum was necessary.

“We were elected to make decisions, and we’re making one tonight,” said Councilman Andy Fox in moving to drop the project.

The decision was the right one. Although the problem of funding parkland maintenance remains unsolved, it is better to recognize now that this plan would not have fulfilled that mission. Councilman Michael Markey has suggested trying again for a bed tax; another possibility would be to create an endowment that would yield interest for that purpose.

It is good that all the controversy has brought this spectacular place to the attention of residents who otherwise might not have known about it. Hill Canyon is indeed a remarkable, wild place of just the sort that becomes ever more important as Ventura County grows and urbanizes, however slowly.

Humorist Mark Twain once famously described golf as “a good walk spoiled.” Thanks to this action by the City Council and Parks District, Hill Canyon will remain simply a good walk.