Golf Course Stands in Way of Proposed Bike Trail

While one arm of county government is working to build a network of bike paths from the mountains of Orange County to its beaches, another just approved plans for a golf course project that could block a key link in a south county network of trails.

The Planning Commission approved Rancho Mission Viejo’s proposed 240-acre golf course last week, but without a requirement that the company build a bike trail that would run the length of the course. Instead, the developer will be required to build a smaller trail that dead-ends into ecologically sensitive preserve land.

Trail advocates say that if the plan goes forward as is, it could kill plans to link O’Neill Regional Park with San Juan Capistrano by bike path, and they will ask the Board of Supervisors to reconsider the commission’s decision.

“If they build what they are proposing, they will potentially preclude the bikeway from happening,” said Jeff Dickman, the county’s chief of trail planning and implementation.

Dickman said the preserve land probably would have too many environmental restrictions to allow a trail extension. He said he would prefer that a bike path be built along the western edge of the golf course, but that company officials have ruled out such a trail.

Rancho Mission Viejo Co. officials say they’ve already been generous enough by dedicating the preserve to the county along with hundreds of other acres. They said they’re turning over dirt hiking and equestrian trails, plus agreeing to build the 0.7-mile bike path.

“It would cost us $3.5 million to connect the bike trail all of the way up to Crown Valley Parkway,” company spokeswoman Diane Gaynor said. “That is more than the cost of the golf course.”

She said the county has yet to even build three miles of a 10.4-mile trail segment that the golf course intersects. “It doesn’t make sense for us to have to go forward with this before the county gets more of it built,” Gaynor said.

The proposed bike path network is written into the county’s Master Plan of Trails and into the Orange County Transportation Authority’s general plan. Developers seeking to build within the trail corridor typically are asked to provide links to the network in exchange for zoning changes. Such contributions are crucial, because building bike trails often costs about $1 million a mile and public funds are limited.

The network is far from complete. The golf course will sit on the proposed part of the trail that would extend from Avery Parkway to Crown Valley Parkway, where another trail is being built that would link up to it from the north. That’s about two miles. The company agreed to build a trail one-third that length, from Avery Parkway to the preserve border.

Planning commissioners say that because the network still is in its infancy, they could not justify forcing the developer to spend millions on part of a project that may end up linking to nothing.

“I don’t think the Planning Commission thought it was the developer’s job to work out a county master-planned trail system if the county has yet to figure out exactly where the system will be located and what it will cost to construct,” Commissioner Brian Fisk said.

But Dickman said his department did not even see the company’s trail proposal until a few days before it was approved, allowing little opportunity to work for a collaborative solution.

Trail advocates are watching the struggle closely. They say its resolution may set a precedent for how the county works with the landowner on its proposal to build 14,000 homes on its 25,000 acres in the south part of the county. That property is the last swath of privately owned open space in Orange County, and environmentalists are eager to preserve as much of it as possible.

Trails4All, a nonprofit advocacy group, is mobilizing its members to fight the golf course approval and to lobby the county’s elected supervisors.

“This kind of sets the stage for what’s to come,” said Jim Meyer, executive director of Trails4All. “This trail requirement has been on the county’s master plan and it has been ignored. . . . We need to get people from the mountains to the sea. If developers are not conditioned to put this in, it will never happen.”

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Unhappy Trails

A proposal to build a golf course on Rancho Mission Viejo Co. land disrupts a county plan to create a mountains-to-the-sea bike trail network.