Las Urbanistas

Jeff Clark for The New York Times

Hillary Hauser, an environmental activist, believes getting rid of septic tanks will make the water cleaner.

RINCON POINT, Calif. — Septic tanks or sewers? The question of how to treat wastewater in this exclusive beachfront community is pitting neighbors, surfers and environmentalists against one another.

Surfers have long complained about getting sick at the world-class surf break here that straddles Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. And blame for the pollution has long been laid on the septic tanks of the multimillion-dollar homes in the gated enclave of Rincon Point.

After nine years of debate and several lawsuits, homeowners are to vote next month on whether to convert from the tanks to a sewer system. While most residents appear to back the conversion, a vocal group of residents is questioning its wisdom, with several saying they feel bullied into paying for an expensive system that would only encourage more development and more pollution.

“There is no evidence that our septic tanks are polluting anything,” said a homeowner, Billy Taylor, who with his wife, Brook Harvey-Taylor, is a surfer and an outspoken opponent. “Are we cleaning up the ocean? Or are we just moving our waste into another part of the ocean?”

Tests in 1999 showed signs of human waste in a creek that runs through Rincon Point into the ocean. But no fecal coliform bacteria were found upstream, which proponents of a sewer system say proves the septic tanks are responsible.

Opponents of the change say that since 1999 malfunctioning or old septic tanks have been repaired or replaced. Lauren Orlando, a wastewater expert from Boston University whom they brought in, said that the tests proved nothing and that the bacteria could have come from the diaper of a child swimming in the creek or ocean.

If the sewer vote passes, the owners of Rincon Point’s 72 homes will have to pay about $80,000 each to build the infrastructure to hook up to the waste treatment center in the city of Carpinteria, next to Rincon. The state would contribute about $2.1 million.

In part because Rincon Point property is so valuable — a beachfront cottage considered a “tear down” by at least one agent is now listed for $4.4 million — most residents can afford to pay, either up front or over 30 years.

An environmental advocacy group, Heal the Ocean, has been pushing for sewers for nine years. But Hillary Hauser, who recounts founding the group because surfers asked her to help clean the water off Rincon Point, says “misinformation” could derail the project. Ms. Hauser pointed to what the Carpinteria Sanitary District’s general manager, Craig Murray, said were “absurd” reports that homeowners were being asked to bankroll the project because it is critical to developers of a proposed resort.

Still, Ms. Hauser was optimistic the sewer project would pass because of homeowners like Steve Halsted, who says the “silent majority” of residents support the sewer.

Mr. Halsted said the public perception of Rincon Point was of “ a lot of rich people polluting their ocean.”

“It’s time we do the right thing and get off of our septics and onto sewers and get this cloud away from us,” he said.

Some homeowners also say they want sewers so they can add bathrooms and bedrooms to their homes and not have to worry about litigation or alternative treatment systems that could require permits.

The ballots, which have been mailed to homeowners, will be tallied at a public meeting in Carpinteria on Oct. 16.

If the sewer is turned down and more fecal bacteria is found, enforcement action against individual homeowners is possible, said Harvey Packard of the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. But it is not clear how violators would be identified. Ms. Hauser speculated that homeowners could be required to put dye in their tanks, so polluters could be singled out.

Hugh Kaufman, a senior engineer with the federal Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, said that too often sewers were thought of as the only solution for water pollution.

“In Rincon, it appears to me the biggest problem for the ocean is the discharge from the sanitary district going into the ocean,” Mr. Kaufman said. “If it is a problem with a particular septic tank, that’s easy and cheap to fix, a heck of a lot cheaper than sewering an area.”

But Mr. Murray and Ms. Hauser noted that the district dumps treated water into the ocean 1,000 feet offshore — not into Rincon Point’s creek.

In Southern California, it is common practice for people to stay out of the water for days after rain because of runoff pollution. But surfers often opt to take their chances in places like Rincon Point and Malibu, which has problems similar to Rincon Point’s.

“I don’t think you can blame the septic tanks for the pollution,” said Ray Gann, who has been surfing Rincon since 1962. “We get surfers getting sick up and down the coast.”

Other surfers disagree. Wayne Babcock, a cofounder of Clean Up Rincon Effluent, said that the beach at Rincon Point was “notorious” for making surfers sick and that the homeowners should be forced to stop using septic tanks. When asked why they continue surfing here, Mr. Babcock and other surfers waxed poetic.

“You don’t have a choice,” Mr. Babcock said. “It’s Rincon. There’s nothing like it.”

SAN LUIS OBISPO — Like seasoned actors in a long-running play, both sides feuding here over a 50-acre swath near Huntington Beach’s Bolsa Chica wetlands had refined their speeches and memorized the other’s lines. After all, both environmentalists and development backers had almost three decades of practice sparring before the state Coastal Commission over various slivers of Southern California’s largest remaining wetlands.

Last week, as the two sides went back and forth over a proposed project called Parkside Estates, the ending was emblematic of past episodes in the Bolsa Chica saga: To be continued.

The battle’s epitaph has repeatedly been written: when the State Lands Commission bought hundreds of wetland acres in 1997, sparing them from becoming housing tracts; when workers began siphoning oils and heavy metals from the salt marshes in 2004; and last year, when the marshland and the Pacific Ocean were reunited for the first time in a century.

But the more than 1,000-acre Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve — pushed up against tract homes on one side and spilling into the Pacific Ocean on the other — was created through piecemeal victories in a decades-long display of an oft-repeated activist mantra: “The coast is never saved; it is always being saved.”

With 95% of the state’s coastal wetlands destroyed, preservationists are too invested in Bolsa Chica to shrug off any plan for construction nearby; each skirmish is treated as a potential Waterloo. In turn, with coastal property at a premium and the state’s population expected to leap 75% by midcentury, developers still consider waterfront land a potential cash machine.

“This is a battle coming from population growth and development’s desire to move into more and more ecologically and culturally valuable land,” said Travis Longcore, director of urban ecological research at the USC Center for Sustainable Cities. “And you can’t save a wetland by putting a fence around it and building up to that.”

So in 2005, when The Times wrote that Bolsa Chica’s imminent restoration “marks the last chapter in a decades-long battle,” Huntington Beach activist Julie Bixby sent a letter to the editor saying she “took umbrage” with the idea that a detente was near.

She ticked off several parcels “threatened by homes,” including the Parkside Estates land.

“With a project like this, you can’t just sit back and say, ‘This is cool and I’m not going to do anything else,’ ” said Flossie Horgan, executive director of the Bolsa Chica Land Trust.

That sentiment carried over to Parkside Estates, a proposal whose history has unfolded in the traditional lumbering fashion of things Bolsa Chica.

A decade ago, Shea Homes purchased property that shoulders the wetlands.

With the site’s proximity to ecologically delicate land and the city’s slow-growth backers carrying some clout, officials figured any project would demand an extra year or two.

“But it didn’t seem like a wild idea to get homes approved,” said Shea spokesman Laer Pearce. “There’s no piece of California you can buy these days and say, ‘Gee, this will be simple.’ “

In 2002, Huntington Beach tentatively approved the developer’s plan to build up to 170 homes on 38 acres, with about a dozen more acres of parks and open space. Shea’s plans would seal the fate of the last large parcel in the area; the other two are about six acres each.

“In terms of acreage, this is the last big one,” said Mark Bixby, a software engineer who joined the Bolsa Chica battle about five years ago with his wife, Julie. “Not to say there won’t be points of contention on the other two.”

Farmers have harvested alfalfa and celery on the Shea property for half a century, making it difficult for biologists to figure out how much of the land could be restored as marshlands. Two prior commissions blocked building in the 1980s, saying the site contained precious wetlands.

Not so, said Shea officials, who touted $15 million in planned flood-control upgrades.

The Parkside project was placed on the commission’s February agenda but was postponed.

Meanwhile, the Coastal Law Enforcement Action Network filed an enforcement lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court accusing Shea Homes of illegally filling in the wetlands.

In May, at a lengthy commission meeting in San Pedro, similar accusations swayed several commissioners to ask staff for a revised development plan.

“This is an integral part of the Bolsa Chica wetlands, and we need to treat it that way,” said Commissioner Mary K. Shallenberger.

This at least kept with tradition, environmentalists said. Few victories at Bolsa Chica have been claimed with a single knockout punch.

Developer Signal Landmark, which had purchased 2,000 acres from a duck-hunting club that had sealed off the ocean’s path to Bolsa Chica, began tussling with the state in the 1970s, eventually agreeing to set aside about 300 acres.

A few years later, a newly formed activist group, Amigos de Bolsa Chica, filed a lawsuit against Signal, the state and an oil company that in part sought penalties for degrading the wetland.

It took a decade to resolve the court case and another after that for the State Lands Commission to agree to buy and restore 880 acres of Bolsa Chica.

More courtroom dramas and bruising political fights whittled down Signal’s initial proposal of 5,700 homes, commercial development, marinas, canals and a new harbor entrance to a single neighborhood.

The chief executive of Signal’s parent company once characterized the protracted wrangling as “approvals and lawsuits followed by more approvals and lawsuits.”

The spat lasted so long that the name of the developer on the application for ocean-view homes changed from Signal to California Coastal to Koll.

An Amigos founder and former Huntington Beach mayor, Shirley Dettloff, became a coastal commissioner, and the Land Trust was created to fight for Bolsa Chica’s upper mesa.

In 2005, the commission finally gave approval for Hearthside Homes — a Signal relative — to build 349 houses and a park on the upper mesa, which disappointed the Land Trust but also underscored the scope of activists’ previous victories.

At a predawn ceremony the following year, three decades after the wetlands warfare began, a 15-foot-tall, 400-foot-long sand berm was knocked down and the ocean and wetlands were reunited.

“It took so long because it was so important,” Dettloff said.

And, apparently, it wasn’t over.

This month, commission staff pitched a version of Parkside Estates that environmental groups applauded: chopping the development’s size in half, to 17 acres, and adding wetlands and buffers around them, in the process protecting a eucalyptus grove that lures Cooper’s hawks and white-tailed kites.

The developer said the shrunken blueprint would make construction too pricey and asked that the vote be put off until fall.

“With the Coastal Commission,” said Pearce, “living to fight another day is a victory in itself.”

Independence, Calif. — Healing ailing rivers is Mark Hill’s specialty. So when the tall and lean ecologist visits one of his works in progress, he’s prepared to paddle a long and sinuous route to assess the health of his watery patient.

In this case, his charge is the Lower Owens River, a 62-mile-long stretch left essentially dry in 1913 after its flows of Sierra snowmelt were diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. After decades of political bickering, water was directed back into the riverbed in December, launching the largest river restoration effort ever attempted in the West.

Scientists have been surprised by some of the early answers, and to flesh out the details Hill recently took his first survey by kayak of the river. Hill, the lead scientist in the Lower Owens River Project, stepped into a blue inflatable 16-foot kayak, said “Let’s go,” and was soon scooting through the channel that cuts across the Owens Valley.

Hill’s daylong journey, which included visitors in a separate kayak, was marked by striking displays of birds, fish and insects already setting up shop during the restored river’s first summer. The water ran cold and, in this part of the channel, about knee deep. But the water was so clear that it seemed as though the kayaks were moving barely above the gravel bottom.

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Locals call this vast, arid region, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, “The Big Quiet.” It’s easy to see why. The only sounds were the slosh of waves along the hulls, the dip of paddle blades and the occasional melodic konk-la-ree of red-winged blackbirds nesting in bulrushes.

“Wow! Look at that,” Hill said, nodding toward a cloud of baby largemouth bass — evidence of the species’ first spawn in the revived river system — wafting through a tangle of water lilies. Nearby, carp and Owens River suckers, some of them more than a foot long, grazed amid submerged pastures of moss that, in turn, fed on nutrients in the channel that for decades “had more cow poop than water in it,” Hill said.

Great blue herons and kingfishers plucked fish from myriad shallow inlets created by the new flows. At dusk, bank swallows caught flying insects after emerging from small caves they had chipped out of steep riverbank cliffs.

The water, which comes from the Upper Owens River, began its journey high in the Sierra Nevada. Most water from the Upper Owens continues to pour into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, but some now heads into the Lower Owens and travels 62 miles to Owens Lake, which was left dry after the aqueduct opened in 1913.

The original river channel here was formed about 25,000 to 50,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene Epoch, and the water flowed in torrents as fast as 3,000 cubic feet per second. The water now courses at a carefully controlled rate of about 40 cubic feet per second.

That rate is about the pace of a leisurely stroll, and when the diversion project began Dec. 6, it took about 19 days for the water to arrive at the northern end of Owens Lake. When the water reaches the lake, it is pumped back into the aqueduct to head for Los Angeles. (It appeared that no water was taken from the river to fight fires that started Friday in the Inyo National Forest.)

The Lower Owens River can’t be called pristine. For nearly a century, the riverbed was trampled by cattle, overgrown with invasive plants and trees and mostly dry, save for a few spring-fed ponds. Paradoxically, these conditions provide benefits that will help in the channel’s recovery.

The manure-fed moss provides food for unexpectedly vigorous populations of fish, which have begun venturing out beyond the spring-fed ponds. Gravel in the riverbed provides an ideal habitat for diatoms, beautiful microscopic algae and early links in the food chain.

Tree stumps, eyesores when the channel was dry, now offer shelter for young fish or redirect currents, which sometimes gouge the riverbed. Mathematical simulations predicted the water would run about 2 to 4 feet deep, depending on the width of the channel. But the redirected currents are digging out sections 6 to 10 feet deep in places.

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“We didn’t expect to see this much velocity in the river,” Hill said. “We didn’t expect to see this much clarity in the river. We didn’t expect to see this many deep holes in the river.”

Groundwater has recharged and risen faster than anticipated and oxygen levels remain high, creating hundreds of channels and ponds that will soon become ideal habitat for waterfowl and fish. “All good signs the river is coming on strong,” Hill said.

Later this year, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power plans to release pulses of water at rates of 200 cubic feet per second to mimic annual flood cycles and distribute willow seeds. If all goes according to plan, within a decade, willows will cloak the banks, creating shady canopies over pools that Hill predicted would be “prime bass and catfish real estate.”

But the arrival of some species means the departure of others. When willows and cottonwoods finally shade parts of the river, sun-hungry moss will disappear from those areas. Some desert shrubs, such as salt brush, rabbit brush and bitter weed, are already dying because they don’t like the high water table.

“We’re witnessing the start of a recovery that will occur in stages in what has become an enormous outdoor laboratory for river restoration,” Hill said.

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The project was long in coming and, like most issues involving water between Los Angeles and the Owens Valley, a source of irritation. In a place where residents like to say “Los Angeles stole our water fair and square,” tensions between the DWP and environmentalists and local communities continue to flare.

Earlier this year, a judge said the DWP had not done all that was required in the Lower Owens River Project. As a result, Inyo County Superior Court Judge Lee E. Cooper denied a request by the city to lift fines of $5,000 a day that the judge imposed Sept. 5, 2005, for failing to restore the river in a timely manner.

These days, the river’s flow and nature’s rapid response are instilling a new sense of pride at the DWP, long viewed as a hostile landlord and responsible for environmental devastation. For locals, the project is a remarkable gift of conservation and potential boon for the tourist stops along U.S. 395 just east of the snaggletoothed Sierra range.

Francis Pedneau, a lifelong rockhound and bass fisherman in these parts, described the improved relations with Los Angeles this way: “I have a big bias against the DWP, but they’ve been so cooperative with us fishermen lately that it makes us wonder what they’ve got up their sleeves.”

During a recent flight over the Lower Owens, pilot and local motel owner Martin Powell banked his single-engine Cessna over glistening marshlands north of the community of Lone Pine and said, “It’s as green as I’ve ever seen it. There’s a lot of sand down there seeing water for the first time outside of a rainstorm. Very nice. Very nice.”

Back in the river channel, Hill maneuvered his kayak among clumps of tumbleweeds, tree stumps, beaver dams and tule thickets, which are a continuing problem because they obstruct ideal flow patterns.

The DWP is considering using a special machine to remove tules, Hill said.

But the project’s biggest challenge, he said, will be keeping the valley’s cattle herds away from pioneer colonies of willows and cottonwoods until they can grow to a height of at least 4 to 6 feet.

“We’re putting up more than 50 miles of barbed-wire fences along the river channel to manage the cows,” Hill said. “To cows, willow shoots are like candy.”

Most of the restoration work, then, falls to Mother Nature. There are no plans to stock the stream with fish or new plants. In about five to seven years the larger species in the food chain, such as elk, deer and mountain lion, will establish themselves along the river system.

For now, that system continues to awaken. The kayaks slipped past willows spewing seeds into the flow. Brambles buzzed with dragonflies that were dropping eggs into the water, which will produce larvae to feed fish. A green tree frog climbed aboard a patch of bunch grass.

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After exploring six miles of the river, Hill dragged his kayak onto a sun-bleached, sandy shoal where he was greeted by William Platts, his associate and mentor at Ecosystem Sciences Foundation, a Boise, Idaho, firm specializing in the development of river restoration and watershed management programs.

Standing on a bluff and watching the river flow, the affable 79-year-old Platts smiled. “It’s working good, Mark,” he said. “This will be a better river than it was before the DWP came into the Owens Valley.

“It took a long time to get this far,” he added. “All we have to do now is get out of nature’s way.”

ASTRIDE his horse, Benjamin Coates could gaze across 21,400 acres and see the sweep of his power reflected in nature. A riot of mesas and meadows laced with gurgling streams. Miles of chaparral and clusters of stately oaks. A mountain that Native Americans considered a deity. Herds of deer, golden eagles overhead, enough wildlife to stock a zoo. And not another soul in sight.

This was Xanadu and it belonged to Coates.

Most people have never heard of Rancho Guejito, in northern San Diego County. Few have seen it. Shielded from view by ridgelines, with only one road leading to a locked gate and a security guard, the ranch is a time capsule from 1845, when Mexico’s California governor awarded the core of it to San Diego’s customs inspector.

Since then, a series of wealthy men ran cattle and used Rancho Guejito (pronounced Weh-HEE-toh) as a private playground. Coates was the last. It was the jewel of a billion-dollar-plus fortune the 86-year-old aristocrat planned to pass down to generations of heirs with instructions that it never be developed.

“No American family lasts. In Europe they still do but the times are against families lasting out,” Coates wrote to an acquaintance. “I do not want my life’s work to be dispersed. It is organized to go on and I want it to go on.”

Then, in 2004, he died. Soon, neighbors in Valley Center, a once-rural enclave tilting toward suburbia, noticed surveyors around the land. An attorney for Coates’ daughter floated vague development ideas.

The mere suggestion that any part of Rancho Guejito could be paved over has mobilized environmentalists.

Bill Horn, a San Diego County supervisor and property rights advocate, is no environmentalist. But he feels betrayed. For years, he worked to keep government regulators off Coates’ back. Now, Horn believes the government needs to buy Rancho Guejito.

“This place is like a little Shangri-La that everyone forgot about,” he said.

Whether one of the most ecologically valuable swaths of private land in California remains that way is anything but certain.

At the center of the drama is Coates’ daughter, Theodate, a 60-year-old New York artist who controls her father’s empire. Some suspect the recent talk about development is part of a broader scheme to get around proposed county zoning changes and other government regulations that would undercut the ranch’s value. Then it could be sold to the state for preservation at a higher price.

Hank Rupp, the attorney who represented Benjamin Coates for two decades and now speaks for Theodate, denies that that’s the strategy — although he won’t shut the door on the possibility.

“Let me cut through the cat-and-mouse stuff and give it to you straight,” he said. “We’re absolutely not interested in selling it to the state in the foreseeable future.”

Rupp won’t say how far into the future he can see. Nor will he elaborate on the development proposals. But he has approached Escondido city officials to explore whether the ranch can be annexed to remove it from county oversight.

If Escondido won’t, maybe San Diego will, he says.

On another front is an acrimonious legal battle in which the great-grandson of legendary Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt contends that he, not Theodate, is the rightful manager of Coates’ estate.

Al Hill III says Coates, a longtime family friend, didn’t think his daughter or son was up to the job. Hill contends that Coates all but adopted him and was finalizing a deal that would have put him in control. The only problem: He didn’t get around to signing the papers.

Such public skirmishes would have angered Coates, an intensely private man accustomed to giving orders and getting what he wanted, a steely entrepreneur who relinquished his U.S. citizenship so he could move his holdings overseas and avoid taxes.

“When you went to see Mr. Coates, you listened and he talked,” said rancher Willie Tellam, who ran cattle on Rancho Guejito for decades. “That’s why we got along. He lived quite a life, and I heard the same stories over and over again.”

Tellam, 75, is among the few locals who got to know Coates, who would visit several times a year and survey his land on horseback wearing English riding clothes.

“Like a lot of rich guys, their word was the law,” Tellam said. “I think Mr. Coates thought he was going to live forever.”

*

RANCHO Guejito was off the beaten path even by the standards of early California. It was far from the traditional travel routes of the Mission era.

This isolation has engendered a mystique common to veiled places. It’s a mystique that has grown with California’s population and the division or disappearance of hundreds of Spanish and Mexican land grants.

Those lucky enough to get an invitation — or bold enough to trespass — say Rancho Guejito lives up to the legend.

“It was a very emotional journey for me that first time,” said Bob Lerner, a San Diego County historian who was a guest several times. “I felt like I was being transported back to when California was part of Mexico. Nothing had changed.”

A request to tour the ranch for this story was denied. Seen from the air, Rancho Guejito is a startling contrast to the jumble of housing tracts and commercial strips that inch closer with each year. That one man owned this much of Southern California — a spread five times the size of Griffith Park — is nearly unimaginable.

The 8,000-square-foot hacienda-style home Coates built is on a ridge at the ranch’s southern end. Its U-shaped courtyard and swimming pool overlook the property — a dozen miles long, 3 across.

A broad mesa stretches north flanked by two pine-studded valleys that converge in a vast meadow fed by Guejito Creek and its numerous tributaries. Cows munch grass that is 2 feet high in places. Everywhere are stands of Engelmann oaks. Over the lush hills are more mesas, valleys and creeks. A maze of rugged mountains anchors the ranch’s northern end.

The property’s catalog of riches include Indian archeological sites, bobcats, coyotes, wild turkeys, mountain lions, and 16 types of raptor.

In the early 1970s, the state nearly bought it all for use as a park. Coates, who already owned a Hemet ranch that once belonged to John Wayne, scooped it up for about $10 million.

Over the years, he fought attempts to take parts of it for a reservoir and an airport but rejected offers to sell it for preservation.

Land was in Coates’ blood. In the 1680s, his Quaker ancestors were among the settlers of Pennsylvania, established under the King of England’s royal charter.

Coates prospered in a variety of businesses — shipping, oil wildcatting and furniture among them. But land is what stirred his passion.

He sold a thoroughbred that won a major French race to buy a 23,000-acre spread in Scotland. Wanting to watch the America’s Cup yacht race off Newport, R.I., Coates is said to have bought a seaside estate — then sold it after the race. When he couldn’t find a suitable penthouse in Manhattan, he financed an apartment building on the Upper East Side and took the top for himself.

Coates, solidly built with a broad forehead and square jaw, was a man of the world. He was a decorated Navy pilot who hunted Nazi submarines in the Atlantic between Brazil and Africa. His friends were royalty — the Bismarcks of Germany and Japanese Prince Fumitaka Konoe, whom he met in college at Princeton.

With a passport from Belize, he moved between homes in Europe, the United States and Japan. For a time, he owned the world’s fourth-largest yacht and docked it in the French Riviera.

“As long as I had her I was king,” Coates wrote in a letter. “When I let her go, I was never king again.”

In 1960s, Coates began transferring his holdings to a complex web of foreign companies, many of them in Liberia. Rancho Guejito is managed from Colorado Springs, Colo., New Jersey and New York and is owned by a Netherlands Antilles company that, in turn, is owned by a trust in Liechtenstein.

But Coates wasn’t a nouveau riche jet-setter. Money was as natural as the rising sun. He was born with it, married into it (Nancy Coates inherited her own fortune) and made far more through entrepreneurship. Coates believed such wealth should be nurtured and passed on. A student of history, he also recognized money’s dark side.

“Almost in the entire history of the world great wealth has been highly associated with disaster, tragedy and unhappiness,” Coates wrote.

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COATES possessed Old World sensibilities that shaped his views on issues from global politics to family affairs. He could be dismissive of women, those who know him said. He didn’t think much of most men either.

“There are very few men that I have great respect for now,” Coates wrote to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a few months before he died. “Greatness is a passing phenomenon…. When I see you on the television, I am convinced you have the strength that we are so lacking now.”

The letter is similar to others Coates wrote late in life, rambling autobiographical narratives that depict a man of the past intent on controlling the future.

The Liechtenstein trust Coates created in 1986 was the vehicle to accomplish that. Coates named his son, Ben Jr. — listed as vice president of Coates Bros. Co. Inc. on the father’s letterhead — to become principal trustee upon his death. Theodate Coates isn’t mentioned in the document.

But something happened that changed Benjamin Coates’ mind. He had a falling out with his son — no one familiar with the details will say why.

“I just don’t think they saw things eye to eye … on making a profit, on doing what you’re supposed to do, on working a job regularly,” said Matthew Dowling, an Oklahoma City attorney who once represented the younger Coates. “Things that a man would expect from his son.”

So Coates went looking for a man he could groom for the job.

Coates came to know the Hill family of Texas in the early 1960s after he got into the oil business and bought a home in the blueblood River Oaks neighborhood of Houston.

Al Hill married heiress Margaret Hunt, the first of H.L. Hunt’s 14 children from three families, two of which he kept secret for years. The Hunts and Hills were Texas royalty and embodied qualities Coates admired: generational wealth built by shrewd, self-reliant risk-takers.

Hill’s 36-year-old grandson, Al Hill III, is a Dallas investor and socialite who married a former Miss Georgia. Hill was 18 when he met Coates.

How the aging billionaire came to consider Hill worthy of managing his holdings — and passing this responsibility to Hill’s male heirs — is spelled out in Hill’s lawsuit against Theodate Coates, filed in a New York court. (A separate action was filed this week in a Liechtenstein court.)

“I believe it was the second time I met Al III that I realized the marvelous presence the boy presented,” Coates wrote to a lawyer representing the Hill family.

Documents cited in the suit show that Coates told business advisors and attorneys to create a company overseeing a new Cayman Islands trust that Hill would be paid handsomely to manage. Theodate was to play a secondary role, the documents show.

Hill’s role, Coates wrote, would be “overlooking what women cannot necessarily do properly — lawyers, employees, etc. … Nobody would have ever given me the chance that I am suggesting for Al III.”

Hill says he and Coates made an oral agreement for Hill to begin managing the Liechtenstein trust and oversee its transfer to the Caribbean. Coates told his attorney to provide “strong incentives” to prevent his children from challenging the new trust, according to a memo between the two.

Hill wants the courts to hand him the keys to Coates’ empire and assess monetary damages against Theodate.

“He’s rolling over in his grave right now over how it’s being handled,” Hill said. “He became like a grandfather to me. And I became like a son to him.”

Hill was a pallbearer at Coates’ funeral. Ben Coates Jr. didn’t attend.

Attempts to reach the younger Coates, 57, were unsuccessful. He carried driver’s licenses from Brazil and the Bahamas when he was arrested in 2002 after a confrontation at a Colorado Springs office from which Rancho Guejito’s accounting is done.

Witnesses reported that Coates burst in screaming about forest fires, suing President Bush and how the Irish Republican Army had killed his wife. He had to be subdued by police. Eventually, charges of disorderly conduct and resisting arrest were dismissed.

Rupp, the Coates family attorney, won’t discuss the younger Coates. And Theodate Coates doesn’t grant interviews, he said.

Rupp is the public face of Rancho Guejito. A former Riverside County prosecutor, he seems to enjoy upsetting adversaries. Rupp left conservationists aghast when he recently proclaimed, “There isn’t enough money in the state treasury to buy Rancho Guejito.”

Rupp is an indoorsman who finds the ranch’s wildness unnerving. “When you go out there, you want to strap on a sidearm,” he said. “I don’t get out of my car. Things sneak up on you there…. There’s a rumor that there’s a jaguar.”

Equally predatory, Rupp says, is Hill’s attempt to wrest control of Rancho Guejito and the rest of Benjamin Coates’ holdings.

Hill says he is simply trying to fulfill the wishes of his mentor.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” Rupp said, erupting into laughter and slapping his hand on a table.

Lawyers for Theodate Coates argue that even if her father had signed the new trust documents, it wouldn’t have been legal because the original was to last 100 years and is irrevocable. Hill’s purported oral agreement with Coates is unenforceable in New York, they argue, and filing a claim in Liechtenstein is irrelevant because, well, this isn’t Liechtenstein.

“Mr. Coates only had trust in his daughter. He had trust in Theodate’s business acumen, integrity and abilities. That’s the way he left it — intentionally,” Rupp said. “He basically flirted with the idea of other business [arrangements] but never was serious about any of them.”

The detailed memos and draft documents indicate far more than flirtation. Coates, who spent his final years working through the complicated personal and legal issues of his legacy, may have simply run out of time.

“My father’s inability to finalize his thinking and put pen to paper,” Theodate Coates wrote in a letter to Hill’s father before the dispute wound up in court, “has made things more complicated for us than we all would wish.”

And his desire to keep Rancho Guejito from becoming “mixed up with money,” as he wrote, now seems as fanciful as this unique expanse of Old California that few have ever seen.

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On latimes.com

Aerial view

For a flyover view of Rancho Guejito, go to latimes.com/rancho

Around this time each year, thousands make the pilgrimage to the Antelope Valley to see California poppies shining in the fields around Anne Aldrich’s Lancaster home.

“There are fields of orange, just like in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ when you first spot the Emerald City,” Aldrich said.

But not in 2007, as Southern California is poised to experience its driest year on record.

The relentlessly dry weather has made this a spring like no other across the region, wreaking havoc on the ecosystem.

Downtown Los Angeles has recorded less than 4 inches of rain since July 1 — less than a quarter of normal. The region was hit Monday with another round of high heat, low humidity and dry winds, prompting officials to issue a red flag warning for brush fires. (It will continue through tonight.)

The effects of the prolonged dryness can be seen and felt all around. Seasonal ponds are cracked dry, leaving no haven for some frog eggs or fairy shrimp to hatch. Some flower-dependent butterflies are staying dormant for another season.

Plants aren’t bearing berries; some oak trees aren’t sprouting acorns. Bees are behaving strangely.

The problem is apparent in Ventura County, where ranchers are selling their cattle early or thinking about moving them to other states. Ranchers’ lands, starved of rainwater, have not grown the natural grasses key to feeding cattle through the spring and summer.

John Harvey, a Ventura County ranch owner for 30 years, said he will have to sell half his herd of 350 mother cows by summer.

“This is the worst year I can ever remember,” said Harvey, president of the Ventura County Cattlemen’s Assn.

A nature hike through the parched hills of Griffith Park offers few of the usual spring blooms.

“Look at how miserable they are, these seeds,” said longtime ranger Giuseppe Pira, pointing to the shriveled berries of a California toyon shrub, which normally should be plump and green in the spring.

Many of the plants in the park show signs of stress. Leaves droop and seed pods are wilted. Even if a shrub’s leaves are green, they are brittle to the touch.

Because there has been so little rain, Pira said, dust is sticking to the leaves, giving them a sickly look and making plants more susceptible to disease.

“This is entirely different in my years of experience, no flowers, no nothing,” Pira said. “Even the bees — they don’t have much to eat.”

Fewer flowers means a poor honey season for California beekeepers, who rely on wildflower nectar to feed their bees.

“It looks like we’re going to have one of the worst years for honey production in Southern California,” said Red Bennett, owner of Bennett’s Honey Farm in Fillmore. “Wildflowers represent about 90% of our honey production.”

During the near-record rainy season two years ago, Bennett’s farm produced 2.3 million pounds of honey. He said he expects to produce “40,000 to 50,000 pounds this year, if that.”

“I think that’s optimistic,” said Bennett, who is buying expensive sugar syrup to keep his bee population alive this year.

“We’re kind of like in the Oklahoma Dust Bowl right now,” Bennett said. “There’s nothing we can do about the weather. We don’t cry about it. Our bankers cry a little bit when they don’t get paid.”

In urban areas, bees are becoming more of a nuisance as they try to find additional sources of water. Los Angeles County agricultural officials have detected a spike in complaints about beehives in buildings. There was even a report of a swarm forming inside a sidewalk water main in Highland Park.

“Once natural sources of water in the hills or mountains are dried up, there’s so many backyard swimming pools and people watering their lawns, forming puddles — it’s attractive,” said Ken Pellman, spokesman for the agricultural commissioner.

The dry weather has resulted in more fires that have been harder to extinguish this winter and spring. A study of moisture levels of plants like sagebrush across Los Angeles County found that they have half the water content this month that they had in May 2006.

Unless there is significant deluge in the next few weeks, which is unlikely, L.A. will set a dryness record this year.

Lush, irrigated lawns and gardens are also attractive for wildlife. That has prompted the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to warn that animals such as deer and rabbits might be tempted to look for succulent vegetation in neighborhoods — and their predators might not be far behind.

“It’s going to be a pretty desperate year,” said Paul Edelman, chief of natural resources and planning at the conservancy.

A resident of La Cañada Flintridge reported to the Theodore Payne Foundation, a native plant center, what she considered to be an extremely rare sight: deer roaming around her subdivision, eating ivy.

Elsewhere in the hillside community, Kitty Petti said she saw a bobcat staring at her as she was unloading items from her car April 10 — the first time she has seen one since she moved into her home 11 years ago.

“The part I found disconcerting was it didn’t head for the hills. It went behind my neighbor’s house,” said the mother of two.

The heat also has Southern Pacific rattlesnakes slithering down from the hills — and into backyards and even homes.

Snake wrangler Bo Sylapich said he is getting three times the normal business for May. He recently was called to actress Sally Field’s Malibu home, where her gardener was bitten by a snake.

The heat, Sylapich said, has awakened snakes from their winter slumber, and as their prey — mostly rodents — search for water, the snakes tag along, taking them closer to water sources.

“Temperatures control their movements,” he said. “They’re just like we are. When we go into air conditioning, they’re looking for air conditioning too. When we come out, they come out.”

Vegetation is parched in forests, and in some spots there will be less surface water for coyotes, bears and mountain lions to drink from, said Stanton Florea, fire information officer for Angeles National Forest.

“There’s not enough green forage,” said Steve Loe, a forest biologist for San Bernardino National Forest.

Though Southern California saw near-record rainfall in 2005, officials are quick to point out it was an aberration. For much of the last decade, the region has experience drought-like conditions, with less rainfall than normal.

The lack of rain has long been a concern as the wild turkey population has dwindled in the San Bernardino forest. Loe worries the turkeys will be particularly hard-hit this year.

Sylapich is concerned, but he’s also philosophical.

“Mother Nature’s having fun with us.”

Times staff writer Amanda Covarrubias contributed to this report.