Air Park in Holding Pattern Despite Residents’ Opposition : Agua Dulce: Neighbors cite noise and safety concerns. The owner has long tried to sell the 208-acre site, but now says the real-estate market is too depressed.

AGUA DULCE —  Cradled by rolling hills in the north county community whose name it bears, the Agua Dulce Air Park has been controversial for much of its 36 years.

Many of Agua Dulce’s 2,100 residents consider the site a noise nuisance at the very least. At worst, they say, noting the elementary school a mile away, it is an aviation tragedy waiting to happen.

The airport’s owner has talked for years about selling its 208 acres of land for private development, and county officials have been torn between satisfying residents’ demands for closure with maintaining what could be a vital transportation link in a disaster.

But this month, the ever-threatened, tiny airstrip defied grounding yet again when the county dropped a plan to buy part of the site and owner Jim Annin announced that the real-estate market was too depressed to try to sell the rest to private developers.

Instead of being ripped up to make way for houses, the old runway will be weeded and resurfaced.

“Maybe it’s some of the same magic that helps a big heavy-metal 747 to get off the ground,” said pilot Bill Richards, who recently landed his single-engine plane at the air park for a brief stopover from Las Vegas.

“I haven’t been here often, but it seems like a good little facility.”

Opponents clearly question whether it’s good, but no one can deny that it’s little.

The air park’s main office, a dark brown structure with a stoop covered by green turf, is smaller than a single-car garage. A bright orange windsock flutters between the runways--two dirt lanes covered by asphalt.

About 30 hangars with corrugated metal sides and roofs are lined up at the far end of the runways with a rusted, brown piece of farm equipment sitting among them. One hangar bears a faded painting that shows a plane soaring over a desert landscape as the blazing sun peeks over a mountain ridge.

Time has dulled more than the picture at the airport. White paint is peeling in strips from its closed restaurant--a wooden building whose exterior bulletin board is covered with miscellaneous aviation notices. One lists sunrise and sunset times, another offers tips for quiet flying.

A typewritten sheet lists the air park’s rules:

No touch-and-go maneuvers. No multi-engine planes. No gliders, sailplanes, ultra-light or home-built aircraft. “No acrobatics, low passes or other types of irresponsible activity will be permitted within a three-mile radius of the airport.”

*

The air park has been a subject of dispute since it was built by three businessmen in 1959 for their private use. Attempts to expand the number of planes housed there met with swift public opposition. Then, as now, residents feared that an expanded airport would bring more traffic and noise to their rural community.

In 1968, the city of Los Angeles took out a 10-year lease on the site from Annin, who had bought the property seven years earlier. The air park was proposed as an auxiliary to Van Nuys Airport, but community opposition again scuttled the idea.

Debates over selling the airport to Los Angeles County have continued for the past 11 years. An advisory election in March finally settled the argument for supervisors, as two-thirds of the 835 people who voted opposed a county purchase.

Heeding the local electorate, the County Board of Supervisors voted earlier this month to abandon its plan to buy 70 acres of the property and maintain it as a general aviation airport.

Annin, meanwhile, had been openly discussing a second plan to sell the property to private developers to be subdivided into 10-acre lots for 19 single-family homes. Closure of the airport seemed inevitable.

But three days after county officials dropped their purchase proposal, Annin announced he planned to continue operating the air park “as long as it’s profitable.” He acknowledged the region’s depressed real estate market contributed to his decision not to sell the property.

Negotiations are already under way with a management firm to handle the air park’s daily operations and develop new businesses there. The site is listed in the California Film Commission Location Library, and Annin hopes the entertainment industry will provide a source of income for the airport above and beyond its regular aviation fees.

“The only thing we can say,” said Annin, “is it’s not going away.”