On August 25, 2026, the Orange City Council approved a set of agreements putting roughly 67.7 acres of the old Sully-Miller gravel pit on a formal path toward becoming permanent public open space, according to the environmental filing recorded that day. If you ride, hike, or just live along the edge of Orange Park Acres, that number probably sounds like good news. It is, with a catch worth understanding before you start planning routes across land that isn't yours yet.
The site sits at 6145 E. Santiago Canyon Road, wedged against the creek and the bridle trails that define daily life in this pocket of 92869. It has been mined, fought over, voted on, and re-fought over since before most current residents moved in. The acreage in August's agreement is smaller than the 96 acres the city's plans designated for this parcel more than fifty years ago, and the path to it includes new homes on other parts of the site.
What Three City Plans Already Promised
The gravel operation ran from 1919 to 1995, pulling sand and aggregate out of the creek bed for most of a century. Before it even closed, the city had already decided what should happen to the land afterward. Three separate planning documents, the Santiago Creek Greenbelt Plan first printed in March 1971, the Orange Park Acres Specific Plan of 1973, and the East Orange General Plan of 1975, each designated roughly 96 acres of the site as permanent Open Space once mining ended, according to a history compiled by United Neighborhoods of Orange. Only a sliver of the parcel, somewhere between 12 and 20 acres depending on which boundary line you read, was ever actually zoned for houses.
So the 67.7 acres approved this August is a portion of an acreage figure that has been on paper since the early 1970s.
Two Decades of Proposals
Mining stopped in 1995, and the fight over what came next started almost immediately. Fieldstone proposed 189 units in 1999, the council approved it in 2003, and a resident referendum forced the council to reverse itself. Milan Capital bought the roughly 110-acre site in 2007 and, over the following decade, floated proposals running as high as 395 homes before landing on a 128-unit project called Trails at Santiago Creek. The council approved it unanimously on October 22, 2019, and the plan included 68 acres of dedicated open space and trails alongside the houses.
Residents weren't satisfied. They gathered 13,200 signatures in 27 days, nearly double what was required, and forced the approval onto the November 2020 ballot as Measure AA. Voters killed it, 63 percent to 37. The council decertified the underlying environmental report in July 2021, and the project was dead.
The open space figure in that 2019 plan was 68 acres. The figure in this year's agreement is 67.7 acres. The acreage held nearly steady across seven years, and the structure of the deal around it is what changed.
The Trade Actually On The Table
The current path started quietly. On April 22, 2025, the council voted 6 to 1, with Council Member Barrios opposed, to enter a nonbinding letter of intent with Milan REIX LLC and a firm called Landify ECT Corporation to explore converting the site into open space or parkland. City Attorney Wayne Winters was careful to tell the council the letter transferred no rights and created no obligation. It was a conversation starter, not a deal.
By early 2026, that conversation had split the property into two separate tracks. One piece, roughly 30 acres, got tied to a 22-home tract map the city says it cannot walk away from because a prior council already approved it back in 2020. Foothills Sentry's February 2026 coverage quotes Councilman Jon Dumitru explaining why that piece is locked in:
"You have to know our hands are tied. None of us were on the council in 2020, but we have to abide by its decision."
The other piece, described at the time as "the balance" and estimated at 66 acres, is the harder one. The same reporting lays out the shape of the trade: if the city accommodates the 22-home project and rezones a parcel currently used as a horse arena for additional units, Milan is willing to fund a full cleanup of the dumpsite and transfer the remaining acreage to the city outright. Add the 30-acre piece to the 66 to 67.7 acres now under formal agreement, and the total lands close to the 96 acres those three plans promised back in the 1970s. It took a referendum, a decertified EIR, two ownership entities, and a rezoned horse arena to get the math to finally add up.
Residents haven't stopped watching the fine print. When a related memorandum of understanding came before council, resident Laurel Maldonado pointed out that two of the three parcels named in it sit inside Orange Park Acres boundaries, and asked why the association hadn't been included in reviewing it. Others pressed on whether the state's Density Bonus Law could push the unit count toward 30 homes on land currently zoned for far fewer, and whether any equestrian center promised in earlier conversations was actually secured. It wasn't. City staff described the memorandum as non-binding, a road map rather than a commitment.
What August 2026 Locked In, and What It Didn't
Read the actual language of the August agreement and the caution becomes clearer. The filing is explicit that approving these agreements is not itself a project under state environmental law, because it doesn't authorize any physical change to the site. It sets contractual terms for a future conveyance and divides up environmental liability between the city and the landowner. No trails get built by this agreement. No equestrian facility gets guaranteed. Those would all require separate planning, environmental review, and funding down the road, and the broader framework still leaves room for residential development on other nearby parcels.
There's also a cleanup problem that has to clear before any of this becomes real. Testing on the site's waste stockpiles has turned up arsenic in at least one sample, and remediation has to satisfy the Regional Water Board before the land can change hands in any usable condition. The council has already settled the logistics for that cleanup, approving a preferred haul route running from the 55 Freeway through Katella and Villa Park Road to Santiago Canyon Road, with a route through Mabury Ranch held in reserve only if the primary path falls through.
Why the Acreage Matters More Than the Headline
None of this is abstract for people who actually use the land next door. The Orange Park Association maintains roughly 25 miles of multi-use trails that connect Orange Park Acres into Santiago Oaks Regional Park, Peters Canyon Regional Park, and Irvine Regional Park. Plenty of properties back directly onto that network, and riders leave straight from their own gates most mornings. The Sully-Miller parcel currently sits as a gap in that system, fenced off, contaminated in places, and functionally off limits. The August agreement is the first real mechanism that could close that gap. It is not a promise that it will.
There's a small, exact coincidence worth noting here. The Orange Park Association's Fall Barbecue, its oldest and largest fundraiser, has run every year since 1971, the same year the Santiago Creek Greenbelt Plan first went to print promising this same acreage as parkland. Fifty-five years of the same barbecue, funding the same trail system, waiting on the same promise.
The land west of the creek is closer to becoming parkland than it has been at any point since the last gravel truck rolled out in 1995. It is not parkland yet. What was signed in August still needs remediation, engineering review, and a City Planning process before a single trail marker goes in. For a neighborhood that has already watched three planning documents, two referendums, and two ownership groups pass through this same 110 acres, the gap between an agreement to convey and land that's actually converted is the part still worth tracking.
If you live along the Sully-Miller boundary or ride these trails often enough to have opinions about the haul route, and you want a plain read on how the pending conveyance might touch your property line, an easement, or a fence you've been meaning to ask about, reach out to The O'Dell Group. We follow land-use filings like this one with the same attention we give the comps, because in Orange Park Acres, they tend to be the same conversation.
