Owner of old Fig Garden Golf Course will allow public access to Fresno riverfront
After years of negotiations, a developer hoping to build estates on an old San Joaquin River golf property will cede some of the land to build a public path for people to access the water.
In a deal reached last month, Fig Garden Investments, which bought the shuttered Fig Garden Golf Course in 2019, agreed to allow the creation of a 50-foot-wide easement along the property’s northern edge, near the river. The roughly 4,696-foot-long path will connect to Van Ness Road and “open to the public immediately,” the agreement says.
The firm will also pay $451,980 to the State Land Commission’s Kapiloff Land Bank Fund as part of the deal. The state fund helps provide public access to lands managed by the commission, according to its website.
The new path through the old Fig Garden golf property will add to the short list of places on the San Joaquin River west of Highway 41 in Fresno that are truly accessible to the public.
The settlement materialized after the state declared its legally-established rights to riverside space rather than purchasing private land from willing sellers.
“We didn’t have much choice,” Ben Ewell, a Fresno attorney representing Fig Garden Investments, said of the settlement.
It came down to the state’s and the public’s rights on the land between the river and the low and high water marks on its floodplains.
State declares rights on San Joaquin River
After operating for nearly 60 years, the Fig Garden Golf Course closed at the end of 2018, citing a decline in profits. Fig Garden Investments, owned by Central Valley nut farmer Larry Freels, bought the 140-acre property in 2019 and submitted an application with Fresno County in 2020 to rezone the land into seven 20-acre estates.
That’s when the State Lands Commission took notice.
The state agency, which has jurisdiction over California’s rivers, determined about 17.6 acres on the golf course adjacent to the San Joaquin River were state land. The commission also determined about 30.5 acres spread across the property were subject to public easement requirements.
John Shelton, an environmental scientist and former executive director of the San Joaquin River Conservancy, said this is because everything between the river and its low water mark belongs to the state, per California law. The conservancy is also a state agency, but it is specifically tasked with creating the public San Joaquin River Parkway in the 22 miles between Friant Dam and Highway 99 in the Fresno-Madera area.
Shelton added that everything between the low water mark and the high water mark is subject to public easement requirements, even if it’s private property.
“If you own that property, you have to allow people to use it to access the river,” he said of the the parts of the land that are subject to public easement requirements.
Shelton said the commission sought those concessions during its negotiations with the development firm at the conservancy’s request.
“We want access to the river,” Shelton said. “I threw out a couple other wishes. But the main thing was to consolidate what was the state land and what was public trust access.”
Ewell, the Fig Garden Investments attorney, said the developer didn’t attempt to fight the state — though he pointed out the land’s previous owner paid property taxes for almost 60 years that included space now claimed by the state.
“We had reasonable negotiations over the years, it just took a long time,” Ewell said. “There’s all kinds of questions about the validity of the state’s sovereign land claims. But to avoid years of litigation, we came to a mutual agreement.”
The mutual agreement places the public easement between the sovereign land adjacent to the river and the golf property’s northern edge, so it does not cut across the owner’s land.
Estates still planned for San Joaquin River land
The 140-acre golf property has lost some of its land to the state as a result of the deal.
But Ewell said the developer is still hoping to rezone the old course into seven estate parcels, though they each would likely be smaller than 20 acres.
The idea to build homes on the San Joaquin River’s floodplains has faced strong opposition in the past. The backlash to a proposal in the 1980s to develop homes and a golf course on the Ball Ranch property — now owned by the conservancy and operated as a public space — eventually birthed the idea for a San Joaquin River parkway.
Ewell said the homes his client is hoping to build on the old Fig Garden golf property would have a “very moderate impact.”
“We’re not seeking to rezone to multi-family or very intense housing, we’re not talking 50 houses here,” he said. “And there’s a lot of other houses along the river at different locations, so it seems to be a pretty good use of the property.”
Shelton, the former conservancy executive director, said he would prefer the whole property be open space, but at least public access to the water has been secured.
“There might be a gated community in there one day,” he said, “but you will have ways to get into the river, which I think is going to be very important.”
This story was originally published July 7, 2025 at 2:45 PM.
