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September, 2005
When the LPGA’s professional golfers tee off September 30 in
the LPGA tournament at the Trump National, the new course on Los Angeles’ Palos
Verdes Peninsula will have already recorded one major achievement.
Cut from one of the region's most environmentally-sensitive areas,
Trump National includes 125 acres of restored coastal sage scrub in
which the population of the federally-listed, threatened Coastal California
gnatcatcher is actually growing. Breeding pairs of gnatcatchers have
increased from 4 to 15 and more than 205 fledglings have been raised
since the restoration began in the late 1990s.
“The course now exports young gnatcatchers to habitats in other
areas on the peninsula,” said Mike Sweesy, project manager with
Dudek & Associates, an Encinitas, California, environmental services
firm that developed the course’s habitat restoration program. “Even
during the 2003 drought when other gnatcatcher populations were decreasing
dramatically, the population at Trump National held steady.”
While the gnatcatcher has been the bete noire of California developers,
Trump National succeeded at blending land development with environmental
protection. “It shows that economically-viable development can
co-exist with environmentally-sensitive resources through appropriate
design,” Sweesy said.
The gnatcatcher is at risk of extinction due to a decline in natural
coastal sage scrub habitat. Of the 2.5 million acres of coastal sage
scrub that once stretched from Ventura to the Mexican border, only
10 percent remains. Trump National sits in the middle of one of the
last habitats for the bird in the Los Angeles Basin.
The restoration plan began in the mid-1990s when regulators told the
course's original owners they would have to show they could restore
coastal sage scrub before construction began. The owners brought in
Dudek biologists and landscape architects, who successfully demonstrated
a restoration program.
Donald Trump bought the course out of bankruptcy in 2002, renamed
it Trump National Golf Club and closed it in August 2004 for reconstruction
and renovation.
Throughout course development, Sweesy walked the rolling hills to
map out what to plant in areas sometimes as small as 20 square feet
to accommodate micro-topographical features. The most challenging part
of the design was restoring 20 acres on the slopes and out-of-play
areas passed daily by golfers.
“Conventional wisdom before this project held that these sites
would have been too compromised for the gnatcatcher to thrive,” Sweesy
said.
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