Revving Up for Battle : Recreation: Neighbors say an off-road vehicle park would spoil the canyons north of Santa Clarita. Backers cite growing demand.

SANTA CLARITA —  The silence and starkness of Baker and Hume canyons along Sierra Highway, the wind disturbing only the occasional quail, belie the boisterous debate over the land’s future.

Just after the first autumn storm hit the area last week, Susan Kachelek stood on a hill overlooking the 291-acre Baker Canyon just north of Santa Clarita, musing over what she fears would occur if plans to turn the area into an off-road vehicle facility are realized.

“We get off-roaders buggying through here once in a while, especially after it rains,” said Kachelek, who, with her husband, John, has been fighting the proposed off-road facility. “I can only imagine how that would increase if there were a park here.”

The off-road park--which Los Angeles County officials said would include two or more motocross tracks, a flat track, caretaker’s facilities, a bicycle motocross facility, storage space, wash racks for vehicles, a pro shop, training areas and trails--will be discussed at a public meeting tonight at Mint Canyon Elementary School.

The meeting, which starts at 7 p.m., will be conducted by county Parks and Recreation planning chief Jim Parks, and is expected to draw community members vociferously opposed to an off-road competition facility that they say will upset their equestrian community with noise, traffic and pollution.

“This isn’t just a couple of trails for dirt bikes,” said Winthrop Taylor, who lives half a mile from the proposed site. “We’re talking about a major day-and-night, charge admission, competition racing facility.”

Supporters of the track say owners of the nearly 70,000 registered off-road vehicles in the county need a facility closer to urban areas.

“The ones that there are are horribly overcrowded and there is a tremendous demand,” said Dana Bell, an officer of the American Motorcycle Assn. “If you don’t provide people with a legal place to do this, then you’ll have truck paths in places that are not appropriate.”

Bell said Baker and Hume canyons’ proximity to Los Angeles makes them attractive. As evidence of the high demand, she also cited the more than 110,000 visitors a year that the state-run Hungry Valley facility in Gorman receives, the 500,000 patrons at Roher Flats in Canyon Country and the 170,000 people who go to the San Gabriel Valley facility in Azusa.

Los Angeles County accounts for more than 20% of the more than 345,000 off-road vehicles in the state, according to state parks officials.

But opponents said it would make more sense to expand the 20,000-acre Hungry Valley site than to try to make an off-road competition facility out of the relatively paltry 531-acre Hume-Baker site.

Opponents also accuse Supervisor Mike Antonovich of using the park as a political payoff to longtime campaign donor Ray Watt, head of Watt Industries Inc., which owns the Baker-Hume site. Both Antonovich and Watt, through their aides, denied the charge.

Santa Monica-based Watt Industries purchased the property in 1989, a year after Hume Canyon was identified as a possible site for an off-road vehicle facility, property records show, and the seven parcels that make up the Baker-Hume site are now assessed at $6.4 million.

Although it is unclear how much the land is worth or how much the county would pay for the parcel if it were to go forward with plans to build an off-road vehicle park, the county would have bought the Baker-Hume site for $17 million under an option agreement that expired in August, said Peter Whittingham, parks deputy for Antonovich.

Watt has donated about $28,000 to Antonovich’s campaigns since 1984, state records show.

“It’s just pay-back for a good ol’ boy,” said John Kachelek, who moved to his 13-acre Baker Canyon Road lot five years ago so he and his wife could house their horses.

Donal MacAdam, an associate with Watt Industries and partner in the Sierra Colony Ranch development in Agua Dulce, said the accusation is baseless.

“We can make more money on the land if we developed it,” MacAdam said. “We do a lot of things for community service. We have 200 projects going through the county, and when they ask for your cooperation in an intense manner, you follow through.”

Tonight’s meeting is evidence that Watt doesn’t have the political clout that he is accused of having, MacAdam said. The county earlier in the summer had been set to approve the development of a $156,000 master plan for the off-road park, but the vote was delayed at the request of Antonovich to hold the meeting, which is not required by law.

“We face the same problem of residents all the time,” MacAdam said. “They buy an acre or two and they think they can tell people how 500 acres should be used. Property rights are property rights.”

Whittingham said the Baker-Hume site provides access to several trails into the Angeles National Forest, has a natural bowl-configuration ideal for a track setting and is close to Los Angeles.

But, Whittingham said, the public meeting is being held to determine how much and what kind of local opposition there is to the proposal.

“We have not predetermined our results either way,” Whittingham said.

Opposition to a site in Whitney Canyon by the Disney Co. and the city of Santa Clarita forced the shelving of a similar proposal in 1988, Whittingham said. Unlike Baker-Hume, however, the Whitney proposal had been nixed only after the county had already spent tens of thousands of dollars on a master plan, a mistake, Whittingham said, that the county does not want to repeat.