To Golf or Not: a Cosmic Question

We’ve been oohing and ahhing a lot lately at those stunning postcards from Ares Vallis, home of Barnacle Bill the boulder. The tilt of rocks, we’re told, suggests that Pathfinder plopped down on an ancient Martian flood plain.

Add some sagebrush and wildflowers and Ares Vallis would look a lot like another flood plain, the Big Tujunga Wash.

The cosmos is near as well as far, a fact sometimes forgotten. And while earthlings ponder the heavens, Angelenos are wrestling with the up-close-and-personal dilemma of what to do about one of the most primitive, rare landscapes left in greater Los Angeles.

To golf or not to golf, that is the question for a 352-acre swath of the Big Tujunga Wash. The decision was expected Tuesday as the City Council met before an impassioned, standing-room-only crowd. Instead, the City Council listened to arguments and decided to put off the decision to allow the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy time to bid for the property. The conservancy is to decide Monday how many millions it would be willing to spend.

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Government in action or government inaction? The golf developer and the many Sunland-Tujunga residents who favor the project may call it the latter. “We had a victory party last night that wasn’t a victory party,” Kathy Anthony, president of the Sunland-Tujunga Chamber of Commerce, said the next day.

The council’s decision may have seemed anticlimactic, but what’s a couple more weeks to the cosmos? The environmentalists arrayed against the golf course won this battle, but they are not expected to win the war, not unless nature helps by washing away the bulldozers.

There was plenty of reason to think it would all be over but the shouting on Tuesday. Consider first of all that, under council rules, opponents needed 10 votes from the 15-member council because the golf project already has been approved by the Planning Commission. Councilman Joel Wachs, whose district includes the Sunland-Tujunga region, had endorsed the project and had already won a 3-0 vote in the council’s land-use committee. Foothill Golf Development Corp., which is leasing the property from Cosmo World, already had four solid votes. Only two more colleagues had to follow Wachs’ lead.

First up Tuesday were the golf course opponents. A biologist from the California Department of Fish and Game explained how the Big Tujunga Wash is the only place where the endangered slender-horned spineflower still lives--and how Los Angeles’ growth had killed it in other areas. A Shadow Hills resident warned that the golf course could create unpredictable hazards during flooding. An attorney for California Indian Legal Services said that the environmental impact report ignored the sacred, ceremonial history of Big Tujunga. A representative of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy pleaded for time to make its offer.

There were also arguments that had little to do with nature. Among the opponents were a contingent from the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, which has been warring with Kajima International over its firing of union organizers at the New Otani hotel. Kajima, which is also involved in the controversial Belmont Learning Center project and Metro Rail construction, had been engaged by Cosmo World in a previous golf proposal and still holds liens on the property.

Then came the proponents’ turn. The attorney for Foothill Golf sought to assure the council that Redtail Golf and Equestrian, in preserving most of the Cosmo property in its natural state, would prove to be a model for ecologically sensitive golf courses. Residents of Sunland and Tujunga told of how they opposed earlier development plans but are now convinced that the scaled-down project is acceptable for property that is now too often used as an illegal dump and campground for transients. And they angrily questioned whether union members protesting the golf course even knew where Big Tujunga Wash was. Kajima, they said, isn’t the issue.

When Joel Wachs took his turn, he reminded the audience of his solid environmental credentials and explained how he’d come to the conclusion that Foothill Golf’s proposal is indeed the best alternative for this land. After so many development proposals had been denied, Wachs suggested, another rejection could put the city at risk of legal action. How strange it would be, Wachs noted, if the conservancy made a successful bid and Kajima got its liens paid off at public expense.

Foothill Golf’s attorney, Mark Armbruster, says that won’t happen, simply because his clients aren’t interested in selling.

When it became obvious Tuesday that the opponents had their 10 votes, Foothill Golf agreed to the delay. The forces of golf seem frustrated but confident. And why not? Man has already golfed on the moon.