ORANGE : City Council Approves 160-Home Project

A section of the old Santiago Golf Course will soon be bulldozed to make way for a 160-home development to be called Sycamore Crossing.

The proposal from Riverside’s Van Daele Development Corp. for a private, gated subdivision on the 18-acre site won approval from the City Council last week, but with a list of conditions.

The council insisted that the developer save existing trees and also not have recurrence of the flawed grading that caused a development, built on that land 20 years ago, to sink into the ground. Those homes eventually were razed.

Developers of Sycamore Crossing will take up to a year to haul as much as 150,000 cubic yards of dirt on and off the site, Public Works Director Harry W. Thomas said. A hauling permit approved by the council allows 40 to 60 trucks to go to and from the site daily. Haulers must follow dust-control and street-cleaning measures, he said.

Those requirements did little to appease neighbors of the site, which is bordered by Tustin Avenue, Cambridge Street, Fairway Drive and Rosewood Avenue.

“There goes the little bit of open space we had left in town,” Robert Siebert said. “This project just doesn’t fit in.”

Other residents complained of the noise and dust from site preparation, the additional traffic that will flow onto Tustin Avenue and the loss of privacy when the developer rips out the eucalyptus trees on the site to prepare for construction.

Stephen S. King, vice president of Van Daele Corp., reassured neighbors that the “eucalyptus trees will be preserved where they fit in with grading” plans.

That was not adequate for council members, however, and a “tree inventory” was added to the list of conditions for plan approval.

“Maybe I’m a bit of a tree freak, but I’d like to see any tree that can be saved be saved,” Councilman Mike Spurgeon said.