Piece by piece

FOR years, hikers in the South Bay have treated Portuguese Bend, hiding on the far side of the Palos Verdes Peninsula near Donald Trump’s Ocean Trails Golf Course, like their own wild, immutable backyard.

Miles of unmarked trails, some of them hundreds of years old, wind through tilted fields of coastal sage scrub, up and down empty canyons and around the occasional endangered California gnatcatcher nest. Million-dollar views in this landslide-prone area overlook Abalone Cove, Catalina Island and the Pacific Ocean.

But these trails cut through private property in an area that has long been a tug-of-war between conservationists and equally tenacious land developers. To preserve miles of hiking trails and earmark habitat for rare and endangered species, the nonprofit Palos Verdes Land Conservancy has been working to patch together what is poised to be L.A. County’s newest nature preserve.

The purchase agreement for a critical parcel of land officially was set to expire Thursday -- and the conservancy met its goal of raising $4 million from 1,500 private donors, according to Barbara Dye, the conservancy’s executive director. The last piece of the funding pie: $1.5 million from the California Coastal Conservancy, which is set to vote on the proposal in late October.

“We’re there,” says Dye. “The community has really come together in support of this.” Dye also says the seller, who has a golf course proposal for this land on file with the city of Rancho Palos Verdes, has extended the closing until Dec. 29 to give the conservancy time to get its funding sources in place.

Late last year Rancho Palos Verdes agreed to buy 463 acres of unprotected open space from Orange County-based landowner and developer Barry Hon for slightly more than $17 million. About 420 acres of this land fall on the eastern half of Portuguese Bend -- a linchpin in the proposed 1,500-acre preserve to be managed by the conservancy, which over the years has helped secure several other smaller parcels of open space along the peninsula.

For years Portuguese Bend has been quietly simmering with golf course and housing proposals on what was once considered undevelopable land because of its unstable geology. While a building moratorium has been in place in much of the area, some parts recently have been deemed safe for development.

Most of the funding for what will be called the Portuguese Bend Nature Preserve has come from state and local agencies, including a crucial $10-million state grant passed by the state’s Wildlife Conservation Board on Aug. 25 and enabled by the 2002 voter-approved Proposition 50 that supports coastal and beach protection.

“This piece of property has had issues all along,” says Mike Walker, project manager for Hon. “A portion of it is an active landslide. This became a long-term project for us involving millions of dollars of technical engineering costs to determine what we could do with it.”

Walker says that though Hon’s company eventually found portions of the land could be developed, it decided to put its building plans on the shelf and sell it to the city for use as a nature preserve.

“Unfortunately this process has taken about four times longer than what we thought it would take,” Walker says. “But at this point I don’t see any way that this deal is going to fall apart. By the end of the year, the city will have acquired a very nice piece of property.”

The Hon sale will be added to 400 acres of protected parkland along the coast that includes Forrestal Canyon, Abalone Cove and other city-owned properties. Rancho Palos Verdes hopes to complete the preserve with an additional 200-acre, $9-million acquisition on the western end of Portuguese Bend from a group fronted by developer Jim York, who has a housing development proposal on file with the city. To date, there is no purchase agreement between York and the city.

“If we don’t preserve this land by acquiring it for public use as open space, there’s no question it will be developed,” says Rancho Palos Verdes Mayor Larry Clark. “If we’re successful, over 6 million people in the L.A. Basin will be within an hour of one of the largest open space coastal preserves between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Mexican border.”