The River’s End RV park, a tiny quiet community at the east end of the Santa Clarita Valley on the doorstep of the Cemex mining site and tucked inside a bend of the Santa Clara River, got a new lease on life this week when county officials gave park owners the thumbs up to keep doing what they do.
Officials with the Los Angeles County Department of Regional Planning held a public hearing Monday to review the zoning permit granted to Project No. 97159-(5), more commonly known as the River’s End.
At the end of the meeting, planners gave park owners permission to keep doing what they’re doing.
“The zoning permit allows them to continue operating as a recreational vehicle park,” Mitch Glaser, assistant administrator for the planning department, told The Signal Tuesday.
When officials from both the city of Santa Clarita and Los Angeles County voted in favor of adopting a blueprint for future development in the SCV called One Valley, One Vision about six years ago, zoning conditions came under greater scrutiny for owners of land in the unincorporated areas.
And, while OVOV set guidelines on population density for rural areas, it wasn’t the reason park owners suddenly found themselves temporarily “out of compliance.”
The recreational trailer park was approved in 1970 and complied with the zoning code at the time. That approval expired in 1990, Glaser said.
In the 1980s, the County set new zoning rules for recreational trailer parks and River’s End recreational trailer park became non-conforming at that time.
Park owners were considered non-conforming, Glaser said Wednesday, for two specific reasons.
- The Park has a freestanding sign with 48 square feet of sign area and the Zoning Code currently allows only 20 square feet of sign are.
- The average size of the recreational trailer spaces is 720 square feet and the Zoning Code currently requires an average size of 1,000 square feet.
In 1997, park owners applied for a Non-Conforming Review which was approved in 1998 and expired in 2008. So, in 2008, they applied for a new one.
Park owners were pleased to get the county’s stamp of approval Monday.
“Every 10 years you get a permit from the (Los Angeles) County and we got an extension on the renewal of our permit,” Andrew Kozlowski told The Signal Tuesday.
Kozlowski is the president of the Polish Center of Los Angeles which bought the property back in 1972.
Over the past four decades, the mobile home vehicles have gotten bigger but the 2-acre slice of watershed land permitted to the Polish Center has stayed the same, Kozlowski said – allowing fewer vehicles on site.
“There used to be 44 units there, but now there’s only 15,” Kozlowski said, speaking to the issue of population density. “The new units are much larger.”
When planners met Monday it was to authorize the continued operation and maintenance of the RV park on land zoned as “heavy agricultural.”
For the last couple of years, park owners have been asked to produce stamp-of-approval reports from a variety of agencies to ensure that the park was not violating any of their permits.
Regional planners, for example, asked for a report from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health in December. And, before that, they asked for a report from the Los Angeles County Regional Water Quality Control Board.
On Monday, all the necessary paperwork was produced by park owners to the satisfaction of regional planners.
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