Robert Lowe Jr. spent 10 years acquiring property entitlements for the 102 acres along the Palos Verdes coastline that from 1954 to 1987 was the world renowned Marineland of the Pacific. He invested another two years and nearly $500 million, including an $8 million loan from the City of Rancho Palos Verdes, to prepare the site for the most ambitious of his 12 nationwide destination resorts.

Next Friday Lowe will open the luxury resort Terranea, which features a 360-room hotel, 50 three-bedroom casitas, 32 two- and three-bedroom villas, an 18,000-square-foot ballroom, three restaurants, 31 meeting rooms, three swimming pools and a nine hole golf course.

Last month, construction workers and landscapers scurried around the grounds, putting finishing touches on the lawns, the suites and the roadways. The resort’s managing director Terri Haack peered off the balcony of the presidential suite down into the Pacific Ocean, where the rocks divide the cerulean deep from the foamy green shallows. She turned to face a cluster of palm shaded casitas bordering one of the resort’s three kidney-shaped swimming pools.

“To be able to create something of this magnitude is just inspiring,” Haack said.

Two miles of walking trails weave along the coastline. The trails, along with the golf course and 26,000-square-foot spa, will be open to the public.

The resort will employ nearly 700 predominately local residents and generate $8 million annually in local taxes, making it the peninsula’s largest economic engine, according to Dennis McLean, the city’s director of finance and information technology.

Haack was the second employee hired. She interviewed all 75 managers, most from other world-class hotel groups, including The Ritz-Carlton, Mandarin Oriental and Four Seasons. The additional employees were hired within four months.

Haack said they’ve already booked 40,000 rooms or nights over the next three years as well as many major conferences.

Haack said the key to the project’s success is respecting the setting.

“If you discount the feelings of the people directly impacted, you really miss the mark on what’s really important to the project — that it’s embraced by the community,” she said. “(Lowe’s) true desire to create something that will be here forever…makes us much different. We have a unique sense of place here on the peninsula…We weaved this property into the city.”

More than 90 percent of the blasted rock used was put back into the site. No land mass was removed from the area. About 50 mature trees, legacies of the Marineland dating back over 50 years, were replanted throughout the resort. Onsite stone was quarried and used as wall facades. The hotel uniforms are made of recycled fabric designed to dry quickly. After Haack and her staff walked the two miles of hiking trails lined with natural sage and lemon, she asked the amenity company to create a scent for the toiletries that matched Terranea’s natural scents.

The coins that go into the telescopes around the site will go to local charities and employees are asked to volunteer twice a year for their community.

“We want peninsula residents to be proud to bring people here. We looked at local architecture and what’s important to the residents to give a sense of history to the site. We’re creating what will be the fabric of the peninsula. Forever we will have changed the peninsula.”

The resort’s long-awaited opening appeared to be threatened last month when Lowe pleaded to the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council for financial assistance in the form of an $8 million hotel tax rebate.

Lowe said the money was needed to cover start-up costs and expected operating deficits.

Council members spent hours discussing Lowe’s request at a Council meeting on May 26 before approving the loan.

From the beginning, Council member Doug Stern agreed with city staff who termed the deal “not fiscally prudent.”

“We’re certainly not a bank. We don’t have revenue for the purpose of loaning to people,” he said. “I don’t think the government should be in the business of preserving a person’s equity in a business venture.”

Stern said if a private person can not make their investment work, the economic system must sort it out, not the government.

Lowe had argued that without the loan, the opening of the resort would be threatened, but Stern said that would not necessarily have been the case.

“The paramount question to me which was critical to answer and I don’t think we did is, ‘If we don’t do this, what happens? Does it open?” Stern said. “It may open under new ownership but no one’s going to throw a chain link fence over it and watch it turn to weeds.”

In the end, Council members voted unanimously to proceed with the deal, though the details will not be ironed out until the public hearing tomorrow afternoon.

For now, Terranea will receive 100 percent of the hotel tax in a monthly rebate from the city until it reaches $8 million or 27 months, whichever comes first, Lowe said.

Lowe will have to pay back the loan, with interest, to the city when they sell or refinance the resort with a deadline of 2013, Stern said.

Stern said his decision was and will always remain a close call.

“We will never know was it necessary in order to make sure this place opens. Will we get repaid? Stay tuned. There’s a big question mark on that,” he said.

Stern said the loan does put an additional kink in the city’s current $950,000 budget deficit.

“By giving this money to Terranea, we’re making certain that we are going to have to make cuts in goods and services we provide to our residents,” he said.

According to staff reports, Lowe used capitalization of net operating income at a rate of eight percent to predict that Terranea would be worth more than $500 million in 2014. Thus, there would be sufficient net worth to repay the city.

“I certainly wish we are very successful,” Stern said. ER