The Tulare County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved the conversion of a long-abandoned compound of the Synanon commune into a Badger vacation-home development.
Reinhard Roland Hess of Badger, who owns 377 acres off Highway 245 south of the Fresno County line, plans to divide the property into 74 lots. Hess would not say for how much the homes are expected to sell.
Hess has built five homes in the area and removed most of the 140 or so mobile homes and buildings used by Synanon, supervisors were told. Synanon, which started as a drug- and alcohol-rehabilitation program in Los Angeles, evolved into a communal social movement that in the 1970s attracted the attention of authorities for, among other things, the way it dealt with ex-members.
It moved its operations from Marin County to Badger in the early 1980s. Members manufactured and sold pencils, cups and other items bearing the "Synanon" name.
In 1987, Synanon employed 160 nonresident workers and 325 resident workers at the Badger compound, according to news reports. It largely disbanded in the early 1990s after losing its tax-exempt status and after its founder, Charles Dederich, suffered a series of strokes. He died in 1997.
"It was a trashed site," Hess said.
Hess expects to begin building the new homes within a couple of years, he said.
Supervisors established as a condition of Hess' permit that he donate land for a fire station and establish a homeowners association and, possibly, a volunteer fire brigade that residents would operate under the command of the Tulare County Fire Department.
Cal Fire's fire station in Badger is manned only about half the year, and county officials want fire protection for the Badger Creek homes year round.
Forming the fire brigade may be a moot point, however, if the state elects to open the Badger station year round, Supervisor Steve Worthley said. Currently, the station is manned around the clock only during the declared fire season, from about mid-May to mid-November, depending on weather, said Ed Wristen, the chief over CAL FIRE in Tulare County.
The county may one day build a fire station on the land Hess has set aside for it, officials said, but that may not occur for several years.
