Massive Project Proceeds in Spite of County Policy.

The Tejon Ranch Co., a 156-year-old cattle and farming concern, recently announced it is moving full-steam ahead with a new 4,000acre town planned for grazing land atop the Grapevine in North L.A. County.

Company officials signed a joint venture deal with three homebuilders, and said they've begun planning in earnest with the hope of completing master plans and an environmental study by year's end.

There's just one problem. L.A. County has a policy of not approving projects that aren't contiguous to existing urban areas, and one high-ranking planning official described the Tejon Ranch plan as the kind of "leap-frog development" that county planning commissioners and the Board of Supervisors are likely to oppose.

"You're talking about an area that is 30 minutes north of Castaic on a good day and 45 minutes to an hour from Santa Clarita," said Donald Culbertson, who heads the division for the county Regional Planning Department that would oversee the project. "At this point, it's rather premature to entertain something of that nature in that location."

Culbertson said the developers have yet to approach his office, but if they had, he would have shared his concerns with them.

John McGee, a vice president with Pardee Construction Co. who is overseeing the project for the venture partners, said his group did meet with Supervisor Mike Antonovich's office and some lower-level planning officials, and those officials expressed similar concerns about the project.

However, it's common for government officials and others to express initial concern about a project only to come around when they learn the details about how it will work.

"We expect every time you go and start to master plan in any area, the jurisdiction and people in the area will have concerns about the quality of development and absorption," McGee said.

McGee conceded it may seem premature to push L.A. County's development out to the Kern County border, but naysayers said the same thing about Orange County years ago.

"All you have to do is look back in the history of Southern California," McGee said. "Most of us can remember when Mission Viejo started and how people considered that way out there. When Valencia started, people considered that remote."

Tejon Ranch Co., whose stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TRC, plans to develop the as-yet-unnamed community along Interstate 5, just north of Highway 138 near Quail Lake. The company last month announced it had formed a joint venture partnership with three other developers to build the community: Pardee, Lewis investment Co. LLC and Standard Pacific Corp.

The proposed master-planned community is part of a push by Tejon Ranch Co. to tap into the company's biggest resource -- the 270,000 acres it owns in the far northern portion of L.A. County. The company is developing a 350-acre business complex near Gorman, featuring a truck-refueling stop, fast-food restaurants and light-industrial buildings, including a 4 million-square-foot warehouse.

The developers are betting that an expected surge in Southern California's population, and increased industrial development in Santa Clarita, will drive residents up the Grapevine in search of affordable housing. Indeed, Southern California's population is projected to explode over the next several years, with 2.6 million additional people expected to move to the greater Los Angeles area by 2010.

Orange County, meanwhile, expects to run out of developable land within the next 10 years. And while San Bernardino and Riverside counties will still have property to develop, L.A. County will continue to experience pressure to expand northward.

The venture partners are moving to complete master planning and environmental documents by year end, at which point they plan to formally submit an application to the county.

"On that time frame, we'd expect we would be going through the process of getting general plan, specific plan and development agreement approvals over the next three to five years," McGee said.

That seems a bit ambitious to Culbertson.

Newhall Land & Farming Co. has 9,000 residential housing lots left to develop in Valencia, and another 21,000 lots slated for Newhall Ranch, the company's 12,000-acre town planned along Highway 126 northwest of Valencia Meanwhile, there are thousands of other lots being readied for construction by other developers in the greater Santa Clarita Valley.

"Even if you're looking 10, 15, 20 years ahead, (the Tejon Ranch community) is probably a bit premature in light of Newhall Ranch," Culbertson said.

Supervisor Antonovich has similar concerns about the project's distance from Santa Clarita and other urban areas, said Conal McNamara the supervisor's planning deputy.

"This is kind of out in the middle of nowhere. Really, there's no infrastructure in place at this time, such as fire and sheriff services, hospitals," he said. "They do have a tough row to hoe at this point."

McGee expects the partners to be able to address the county's concerns, as information from the many studies they have commissioned begin to trickle in.

The partners have hired the Planning Center of Costa Mesa to prepare the master plan; Impact Sciences of Agoura Hills to prepare environmental studies; and Hall and Forman of Santa Ana to do the civil engineering work, he said.

"We tend to be cautious in our development approach. We want to do a good job," he said.