Assembly Votes for Extension of Conservancy

By a vote of 59 to 7, the state Assembly on Thursday passed and sent to the Senate a bill to extend the life of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the state agency that acquires parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains and the foothills surrounding the San Fernando Valley. “Fantastic,” said Carole Stevens, a member of the conservancy’s decison-making board, after hearing of the vote.

Assemblyman Gray Davis (D-Los Angeles), the bill’s co-author, who praised the conservancy as “the Lean Cuisine of state government,” said he was “very pleased” by the lopsided vote to keep the agency going another four years.

Senate OK Predicted

“I’m sure there are a number of ambushes lying in wait in the Senate,” Davis said. But he predicted that the bill will pass and that Gov. George Deukmejian will sign it.

Hearings on the bill before two Senate committees are expected next month.

The conservancy, created by the Legislature in 1979, has purchased or helped fund acquisition of about 2,700 acres of parkland, some of which it has turned over to other state and federal park agencies. The conservancy, which has a staff of nine, also provides grants to local park districts and private groups to develop trails and other recreation projects.

But it is scheduled to go out of business on July 1, 1986, unless extended by lawmakers. The Davis bill, co-authored by Assemblywoman Marian W. LaFollette (R-Northridge) and Assemblyman Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks), would continue the agency until July 1, 1990.

A similar extension bill was withdrawn last year by Davis after Deukmejian threatened to veto it, saying it was too early to decide the conservancy’s future.

Kevin Brett, assistant press secretary to Deukmejian, said the governor “has not taken a position on the bill” this time around.

But Davis said a top Deukmejian aide told him recently that the governor probably would support an extension but push for an amendment to require the conservancy to generate part of its own budget by buying and selling land. Under the self-financing proposal, similar to one advanced by the office of the legislative analyst, the conservancy would have to raise enough money to pay salaries and overhead costs, which come to about $600,000 a year, Davis said.

Brett confirmed that Davis and aides to the governor had discussed the issue but denied that the Administration has arrived at a position. “I will tell you . . . emphatically, no commitments have been made,” he said.

Davis said he would fight any attempts to make the conservancy partly self-financing.

“The conservancy cannot become self-financing without making a profit at the expense of someone else,” he said. “Either it makes a profit at the expense of other government agencies” when it sells them land “or it goes into the development business.”

That, Davis said, would be “totally inconsistent with its primary mission of preserving open space and parkland.”

Jeffrey Arthur, a consultant to the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Wildlife, one of the Senate panels that will consider the bill, said he is “not aware of any major concerns with that agency,” referring to the conservancy. “I think members of my committee for the most part are pretty comfortable with that program.”