Planners OK Homes at Cook’s Corner

The Orange County Planning Commission on Wednesday endorsed a developer’s plan to build 283 homes in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, despite warnings from state biologists that the proposal threatens to disrupt crucial wildlife links between two of the country’s biggest urban conservation districts.

“To hold up a private property owner is a shame,” Commissioner Ben Nielsen said while joining the 4-1 majority in favor of the 230-acre Saddleback Meadows plan. “We need to move on with it.”

Commissioner Barbara Merriman cast the lone vote against the proposal. She cited concerns that the property is too steeply sloped for homes to be built safely.

The plan will now be forwarded to the Board of Supervisors. Opponents vow to bring the matter back to the courts, where they have had success in holding up development for several years.

In 1984, the county approved plans for 705 mobile homes on the property, a zoning designation that still stands. Since then, developer California Quartet has tried to revise the plans so it could build houses instead. The county approved that plan in 1998, but the courts threw out the approval, saying that the environmental documents were inadequate.

California Quartet returned a few months ago with new environmental studies.

County planners urged the commission to approve the project Wednesday, making the point that 283 homes is less harmful to the environment than 705. The developer has said it will go forward with the mobile homes if its other plans are rejected.

Environmentalists, however, contend that the mobile home plan is a bluff. They say that the steep slopes of the property will make grading extremely difficult, if not impossible, and that mobile homes simply would not bring in enough of a return to make it worth the developer’s while.

Bill Tippets, environmental program manager for the state Department of Fish and Game, warned the Planning Commission that the proposal for 283 homes on the property threatens a “critical linkage” for large mammals and endangered gnatcatchers between regional parks, the Cleveland National Forest and tens of thousands of acres that either have been or will be set aside by the Irvine Co. and Rancho Mission Viejo for wildlife protection.

But California Quartet shot back with its own expert, Dennis Murphy, who in the early 1990s helped draft the Natural Communities Conservation Plan for the area--the plan the wildlife agency officials say they are trying to protect.

“This piece of property is a biological desert,” he said. “It may be one of the most disturbed and least valuable properties for species habitat.”

Murphy said that the science on wildlife corridors is suspect and that they are merely a “handy tool to extract more acreage from landowners.”

In approving the plan, the commission also declined to consider an alternative plan offered by opponents that would have allowed the developer to build 87 units on 37 acres and preserve the rest for wildlife.

“What’s wrong with saying, ‘Developer, you can make several million dollars this way and then we can put an end to all this,’ ” said Ed Connor, an attorney who presented the alternative plan. He vowed that approval of the California Quartet proposal will be met with many more years of court fights.

“There will be no peace ... until one group comes forward and says I don’t have to have everything, I have enough,” Connor said.