building of Gillette center
A developer’s plans to build an inn and spa directly across from the King Gillette Ranch on Mulholland Highway and Malibu Canyon Road, where a park visitors center is planned, will increase traffic park officials say.
By Hans Laetz / Special to The Malibu Times
As planning starts for a “world class” visitors center for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, parks officials are worrying that traffic from a nearby proposed timeshare resort will choke Malibu Canyon Road and prevent the visitors center from being built.
National Park Service officials held a preliminary meeting last week to begin plans for the 588-acre King Gillette Ranch visitors center at the southeast corner of Malibu Canyon-Los Virgenes Road at Mulholland Highway.
After decades of unsuccessful public efforts to buy the ranch, Soka University sold the coveted rolling ranchland and pastures for $35 million to a consortium of state and federal parks agencies this year.
When the Tokyo-based university moves its graduate school to Orange County in 2007, its classrooms and office buildings will be available for public use.
The campus centerpiece is a California ranch house built in the late 1920s by famed architect Wallace Neff for razor baron King Gillette. The house, similar in grandeur to the Adamson House in Malibu, is expected to become the centerpiece of what has been described as “the crown jewel of the Santa Monica Mountains.”
But just across Mulholland Highway is a private parcel where owner Brian Boudreau wants to put a 203-unit timeshare resort, equestrian center, restaurant and winery. And park officials say if the Malibu Valley Inn and Spa is built, it will put a maximum load of traffic on the two-lane canyon roads that would also be used by park visitors.
“My gravest concern is that all the traffic capacity will be eaten up by the Malibu Valley Inn and Spa,” said Joe Edmiston, executive director of the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, at the parks meeting last week.
“If the inn and spa is built, and then we want to open this world-class visitors and education center, then a lot of you will justifiably come to me and say ‘Joe, you can’t do that, we don’t have the traffic capacity’,” Edmiston warned.
Calabasas voters will cast ballots next week on an advisory measure asking for opinions on whether its city council should annex Boudreau’s ranch and rezone the plot for the inn and spa. If the annexation fails, the county’s existing zoning will block the resort project.
Boudreau said he already has county zoning for 81 houses on the same site, but neighborhood opponents say he does not have Coastal Commission permits and probably cannot get them. Park agencies and many residents who live near the resort site oppose the inn project, which would line Mulholland Highway with multistory hotel rooms just across the street from the meadows and oaks of the proposed park visitor center.
Former SMMNRA Superintendent Art Eck has been hired by the state and federal parks agencies that co-own the Gillette Ranch to coordinate planning for the visitors center. Last week’s meeting was held to reintroduce Eck to local residents and to unveil the timetable for conversion of the university campus to a park.
Under that timetable, a public hearing to discuss possible alternatives for the classrooms, ranch house and rolling oak hillsides will be held in late June of next year. After environmental planning and renovations are complete, park officials hope to open the visitors center in early 2008.
Some participants called for creation of an educational foundation or institute to promote ecological studies.
“We could turn out some great scientists at this crossroads of the all the mountains,” Margot Feuer said.
Other participants urged parks officials to find ways to link the Gillette Ranch to hiking and equestrian trails to the south, including a crossing under Malibu Canyon Road to link to Malibu Creek State Park and the Backbone Trail.
Canyon resident John Low urged the National Park Service to include an advisory committee of local residents as it makes plans.