Homeowners Block Drive to Build Golf Course

Christina Zimmerman didn’t know she lived by a landfill until four years ago, when she inadvertently caught a bit of a televised Rolling Hills Estates council meeting while putting on a movie for her kids.

The discussion was about a proposal to build a golf course on the Palos Verdes Landfill.

Soon Zimmerman and other residents of Rolling Hills Estates in Palos Verdes started asking questions. Would digging on the site expose toxic materials? How would community safety be ensured?

The developer recently scrapped the golf course plan, citing high costs.

But Zimmerman and fellow community members say they helped kill the plan with questions.

The developer, Meritage Rolling Hills Golf, had answered Los Angeles County’s call to build a new course in the area, which some people have described as golf-starved because existing public courses are heavily used.

By the time Meritage walked away, it was estimated that, because of the costs of developing the site, a round of golf there might have cost more than $200, instead of the hoped-for $50 to $60, Supervisor Don Knabe said. Meritage spent “a couple million dollars” trying to make the project work, said David Sommers, Knabe’s spokesman.

The 173-acre site, bordered by Crenshaw and Hawthorne boulevards and Palos Verdes Drive North, lies on land that for 16 years was a dumping ground for hazardous waste. Opened in 1952, the landfill was officially closed in 1980, before U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations required landfills to be lined and sealed.

Meritage Rolling Hills Golf, which did not return repeated calls for comment, probably expected some community opposition to the South Coast County Golf Course -- but not the 3,000 comments submitted in response to the developer’s draft environmental impact report.

Many of the comments came from a core group of equestrians, parents and homeowners, who worried about the 47 billion pounds of waste, much of it hazardous, that lay below a hill of lush green grass, palm trees and riding trails.

They said they couldn’t shake the sense that the developer hadn’t thought things through.

Some, like Joan Davidson, a passionate high school art teacher, kept asking the City Council about the consequences of shaking up land filled with toxins.

There were schools and day-care centers within a mile of the area -- including Rancho Vista Elementary School, just around the corner on Palos Verdes Drive North.

Some people’s homes were practically next door too.

Over four years, as they spent thousands of hours looking through documents, Zimmerman, Davidson and other residents became experts on the landfill.

“It was clear that the people that wanted to do this were not putting the safety of the community first on their list of priorities,” said Angela Houle, a resident who helped lead the effort.

The more meetings they attended, the more residents became convinced that no one seemed to “have the answers to help our community feel assured that this was something that’s going to be safe,” Zimmerman said.

So they sought answers themselves. With the help of Jim Tarr, a fellow resident and air pollution expert, they learned technical terms like “PM10” and “toxic air contaminants.”

Tarr taught the group how to recognize inconsistencies in the developer’s proposal, in air and soil tests performed on and around the landfill.

One problem they focused on, Tarr said, was a plan for burying the green gas-collection pipes that run aboveground and around the landfill: If they were underground, he asked, how would those pipes, which had a tendency to break, be checked?

Together the residents sifted through hundreds of air-quality control, water-board and toxic-substances records to bolster their case, sticking Post-it notes all over complex engineering diagrams to decipher them.

They took officials on what they called “Disneyland tours” of the site, Zimmerman said, pointing out their concerns about broken gas pipes and splintered trees succumbing to sliding land.

In the spring of 2003, they formed the Citizens Advisory Board for the Palos Verdes Landfill, which gave them the power to meet with regulatory agencies and question how the area was maintained. California law allows for such public participation groups to encourage a community review of actions taken by the Department of Toxic Substances Control on sites containing hazardous substances.

“We weren’t going to sit there and shut up,” Tarr said. “We were going to stand up for our rights ... [and] ask the questions that needed to be asked.”

Some supporters of the golf course contend that the residents weren’t concerned with safety so much as the newcomers that would come with the development.

“The only thing they really coalesced around was that they didn’t want a golf course,” said Craig Kessler, executive director of the Public Links Golf Assn. of Southern California, who followed the project’s development.

Golf courses have been built on closed landfills throughout the country, he added, including in Oxnard and Glendale.

While he applauded the residents for bringing the site’s hazards to light, Kessler wondered what they would do next.

“The landfill’s still there, still the same problems. And it was actually the golf proposal that was going to solve some of these problems,” by addressing community concerns about safety, Kessler said.

But residents say that their work isn’t finished. More meetings lie ahead as they continue to monitor the site, they say.

In particular, they’re watching the Department of Toxic Substances Control’s five-year review of the land, which started in 2004.

“This is really not about a golf course,” Davidson said. “This is about a landfill.”