TEMECULA -- Call it the beginning of the middle of the end for the Vail Ranch restoration.

After years of back and forth, waiting, lawsuits and planning, a vote this week by the Riverside County Board of Supervisors puts the restoration of the pioneer complex back on track for a multimillion-dollar overhaul.

A unanimous vote by the board Tuesday will allow a developer that specializes in historical restorations to begin work on Temecula's oldest pioneer sites.

Darell Farnbach, chairman of the Vail Ranch Restoration Association, said the move will put the historical restorations in the hands of Arteco Partners, a Pomona company.

Arteco will replace Kimco Realty Corp. as the developer of the 4-acre site. Kimco will remain the owner of the 43-acre Redhawk Towne Center at Highway 79 South and Redhawk Parkway, on which the Vail Ranch headquarters is situated.

"The county agreement affirmed that Kimco can release their responsibility of the property," Farnbach said. "This project has gone through different developers and the property has changed hands over the years, those are some of the various reasons (the restoration) has never gotten off the ground."

However, Farnbach said the recent action clears some of the major obstacles that have stalemated the project for more than a decade. He hopes to see the project, which is expected to cost approximately $7 million, be completed within the next two years.

"I've been involved with this for about eight or nine years. We've had lots of disappointments, but I actually feel as if this is going to go through," Farnbach said. "We're happy with the new company that has taken over, Arteco. They seem very sensitive to historic restorations and authenticity."

There are five buildings on the Vail Ranch headquarters site, an adobe, a bunkhouse, a ranch house, the foreman's house and a smaller building, once used as an office for the Rancho California Water District.

The restoration plan calls for the intermingling of commercial with historical. The bunkhouse, for example, will include an example of a bunkroom mixed in with retail shops. Likewise, another barn will house a re-creation of a blacksmith shop amid the stores.

While the history of the site spans almost 140 years, the recent history gives light of the struggles to preserve the area.

In December 2004, New York-based Kimco bought the land and shopping center on Highway 79 South from developer Price Legacy.

Price Legacy, a San Diego-based developer, bought the property in 2000, to build the Redhawk Towne Center, which includes a Wal-Mart and Kohl's department store.

When the county approved the proposed project in 2002, $9 million was intended to be used for the renovation of the Vail Ranch headquarters and also would have turned several of the ranch buildings into commercial shops and possibly a restaurant.

However, lawsuits against the county over the shopping center's development were filed and were not settled until May 2003.

As part of that settlement, Price Legacy agreed to spend about $7 million to refurbish the historic site and an additional $3 million in county sales tax revenue generated from the surrounding shopping center would go toward the project.

With the site's turbulent past, Farnbach remains cautiously optimist about the future of the Vail Ranch restoration efforts.

"The vote by the county just signaled that Arteco and Kimco … go into escrow. The developers still have to get approval from the city and the county, as well as securing financing, a process that may take months," Farnbach said. "Not to mention the actual work on the site. It's still going to be a while, but we're closer than ever."

Contact staff writer Nicole Sack at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2616, or nsack@californian.com.