Park’s Foes Making Misleading Statements

* The Times printed an article July 29 (“Judge Freezes Work on Mountain Park”) and a letter July 30, each of which contained inflammatory and misleading statements regarding the Big Sky Gateway Park at the southern end of Reseda Boulevard.

At a board meeting of the Tarzana Property Owners Assn., it was agreed unanimously that we should declare our support for the much-maligned Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy in this matter, and clarify some of the issues.

This park plan, which has been ongoing for several years and has been subject to minute scrutiny during at least 10 open community hearings, will indeed provide a magnificent entrance to Topanga State Park, a wonderful access for rugged hikers into the big wild. It will also make it possible for disabled and wheelchair-bound persons to experience the joys and pleasures of these hills in their natural state.

Contrary to an accusation that this has become a “flatland grasslands type of park,” landscaped with lush greenery, this park is restoring naturally what the original developer had leveled and left barren. The ridgeline is no longer flat from bulldozers; the conservancy has restored the hills and planted them with natural plants and grasses and trees indigenous to the terrain. They are irrigating, yes, with a drip system to start the sage and sugarbush and toyon. Eventually, such irrigation will not be needed.

The “expansive lawn” consists of two small patches of grass where small children might play. And the classroom, which the Friends of Caballero Canyon has succeeded in halting temporarily, would consist of some boulders arranged in a semi-circle, where these children could be educated about this precious but endangered environment of ours.

To read that one of the Friends of Caballero Canyon, a professed environmentalist, actually said “I hope it all dies,” is just plain shocking.

It would be even more shocking if a few exclusionists succeeded in denying the public access to this wonderful respite from city life.

HELEN NORMAN

Tarzana