The golf course, a practice range and 3,500-square-foot club house, will be located in a flat, 581-acre irrigated pasture area across from the Langtry Estate and Vineyards Winery, said Langtry Farms President Chuck Doty. The project's address is 21423 Butts Canyon Road and 23000 Oat Hill Road.
The Planning Commission is scheduled to consider the project at 10:10 a.m. at its Feb. 28 meeting.
The project seeks a use permit that would allow holding 18 special events per year, importing approximately 60,000 cubic yards of material and rezoning a portion of the site to rural lands, which will require a general plan amendment, according to planning documents.
Melissa Floyd, a county planning consultant working with Langtry on the golf course plan, said Langtry Farms also is seeking to rezone about 195 acres of land as part of the plan, changing it from agriculture to rural lands.
She said the soils on the land proposed for rezoning don't allow for intensive crop production due to the level of serpentine, which leaches out magnesium. In order to farm the soil would need to be successfully enriched, which so far hasn't worked.
“So it's not great ag land to begin with and probably never would be used for intensive farming,” she said.
Langtry is offering to rezone to agriculture a 35-acre vineyard up on a hill – part of the original Lillie Langtry vineyard – as a trade, Floyd said.
“The intent and the purpose of the golf course is for an amenity to improve the sales of wine for the winery,” said Doty.
The winery current produces 150,000 cases of wine annually, making it Lake County's largest-producing winery, as Lake County News has reported.
The 21,349-acre estate and winery has been owned since 1963 by the Honolulu-based Malulani Investments Ltd., formerly known as Magoon Estates. The company's president and major shareholder, Easton Manson, bought out the shares of former company president, Orville Magoon, whose family initially formed the company.
Doty said the winery has the ability to produce 500,000 cases annually, but to reach that number they need to make more sales. In order to connect with distributors, the company hopes that the golf course will be both an amenity and a way of establishing those sales relationships.
The plan has been on the drawing board for about a year, said Doty.
He anticipates construction could start as early as the first of May. “We anticipate opening the course in July of '09.”
Former Professional Golf Association player and British Open champion Tom Weiskopf is designing the course, said Doty.
Last Friday, Langtry's new director of golf operations, Johnny Pott – another golf champion and expert in course design – began work. Doty said Pott will oversee the course's construction.
Doty said he anticipates that the golf course will take no more water to irrigate than the current pasture does, which is irrigated through a reservoir. “Water is not an issue for us.”
Within the last few years a plan had arisen in which Malulani considered building a large housing developing on the property.
“There was some very preliminary discussion early on,” said Floyd.
However, Floyd said the company never actually filed any permits on that proposal.
The county's Planning Department told the company that county planners wouldn't support a large development in that area based on community boundaries and the Middletown Area Plan, Floyd said.
Doty emphasized that plans to build residences on the property are not part of any current or future plan. “It's not even anywhere near consideration, drawing board or thought,” he said.
So far, the golf course plan doesn't seem to be encountering any serious opposition. Floyd said the only issues she's heard concern converting the agricultural lands.
Chuck March, executive director of the Lake County Farm Bureau, said his board of directors plans to discuss the project at its meeting next week. “Where my board will go I have no clue.”
March himself didn't perceive any serious issues, noting that Langtry's rezoning will actually create larger parcel sizes, include no residential, keep population densities the same and have limited loss of prime agricultural soils.
One of the intents of the county's General Plan Agricultural Element Committee, he added, was to create an agricultural commercial zone that could allow uses – like a golf course – as long as they don't impede on adjacent landowners.
In a November letter to Floyd concerning the project, Sierra Club Lake Group Chair Victoria Brandon wrote that the group was “generally supportive” of the project, which she said appeared to have minimal environmental impacts “and offers genuine potential for community betterment.”
Brandon's concerns related to several areas, including keeping heavy applications of chemicals used in golf course management – including herbicides and pesticides – out of ground and surface waters.
She also said thorough biological and archaeological surveys should be completed; that grading for construction be guided by practices intended to protect against erosion and damage to air quality; and that a full 196 acres be rezoned to agriculture to cover for those lands moved into the rural lands designation.
Brandon suggested that Langtry should consider the golf course one component of “the comprehensive recreational development of their lands.” She said that less-structured leisure activities like hiking, biking and horseback riding seem more popular these days than golf and might be an additional way for Langtry to promote its agricultural business.
Doty and Sandy Tucker, Langtry's director of hospitality, said there are other plans under way at the property, including the renovation of British stage star Lillie Langtry's home.
“We expect that to be ready for this summer,” said Doty.
The home had previously been renovated in the 1980s, Doty and Tucker explained, and has changed significantly over the years.
They said the renovation is endeavoring to return the building to its original character, when Langtry lived in it, although its footprint will be much different.
Langtry – who counted Queen Victoria's son, the Prince of Wales, among her admirers – owned about 8,000 acres of the current property from 1888 to 1906, where she also made wine, according to a Langtry Estate and Vineyards history.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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