Not sure what Mitch means by an easement claim. Here is where we were in Feb 1989. The Dept of Water Resources informed Juanita it intended to purchase her land at fair market value to build the Devil’s  Canyon 2nd Afterbay. Juanita would have the option to do what she wanted with that money. If she chose not to sell then the DWR intended to condemn the land and a judge would decide what value Juanita would get for it. The amount of money that Juanita would receive was estimated to be perhaps in the $150k to $200k range at most. There was no way that the money received would be enough to build another Airpark. Additionally there were no obvious sites that were suitable.

An embarrassing challenge was that the business definition of the LZ was almost non existent plus it was conducting operations that violated San Bernardino city ordinance. Neither of these were huge challenges but would be additional hurdles to tackle.

Pilots bickering among themselves was not making it attractive to convince Juanita to spend her nest egg and build another landing field from scratch. Pilots even started dividing into sides independently drawing the DWR into the pilot bickering. It was a time of tact and diplomacy. What else is new?

Mitch is absolutely right that the State had no desire to operate a hang gliding facility. They wanted nothing to do with it mostly due to obvious liabilities.

That was Feb 1989. As mentioned in a previous post we were awarded rights to receive a replacement landing field just 17 months later by means of an amendment to the FERC license to Devils Canyon 2nd Afterbay. That was a busy and challenging 17 months.