Residents Fight to Save Heritage of Oak Trees in Santa Clarita Valley

In 1984, as the fast-growing Santa Clarita Valley surged ahead of all other Los Angeles County communities in the number of building permits issued, the area’s historic oak trees began to disappear.

Under its present ordinance governing removal of oak trees, the county has allowed developers to remove oaks so frequently to make room for housing tracts, shopping centers and parking lots that many residents and conservationists fear that there soon will be none left. Naturalists observed that many of the uprooted oaks were hundreds of years old.

“We’ve lost several giants,” said Mike Lyons of Saugus.

Helen Treend of the Oak Tree Coalition noted that in 1986 alone, county officials permitted the destruction of at least 1,000 oak trees in approving various developments. The county ordinance, said Treend, should be “one of preservation, not of destruction.”

2 Years in the Planning

Most members of the Santa Clarita Valley Planning Advisory Committee, a citizens’ group appointed by county Supervisor Mike Antonovich, agreed with Treend. For two years, they discussed proposing a new ordinance that would strengthen laws governing oak tree removal, said member Jeannette Sharar, a real estate broker and longtime oak tree preservationist.

Advisory committee members considered the present ordinance “a license to cut oak trees down,” said Clinton Ternstrom. As the Valley’s representative on the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission, Ternstrom attends the committee’s monthly meetings.

Ternstrom said what is needed is a protection ordinance such as the one presented last week to the planning commission by the citizens’ group.

No Heritage Oak Removal

The ordinance drafted by the advisory committee would not permit removal of “heritage oaks”--oaks that are at least 36 inches in diameter, many of them centuries old--except in instances of “compelling public need.” It would provide that uprooted trees be replaced with indigenous oak trees of comparable value and require a two-year monitoring period of the replacement oaks to make sure they survive.

The existing ordinance does not forbid uprooting of heritage oaks. It requires developers to plant two trees for every one removed, but only specifies that the trees be of the 15-gallon specimen size and does not spell out what kinds of replacement trees a developer must plant.

The replacement trees are “nothing more than saplings” that usually die quickly, Sharar said. The current law is lax about follow-up on the new trees to see that they survive.

May Apply Countywide

Although the proposal was intended only for the Santa Clarita Valley, regional planning commissioners said last week that they believed the new ordinance, if adopted, should apply countywide and ordered the planning staff to prepare a report.

Advisory committee member Lyons said the citizens’ group excluded the rest of the county to expedite action on the ordinance.

“We want to emphasize the immediacy of the problem,” he said. “Our concern was that many, many trees will be lost along with the character of the Santa Clarita Valley.”

The advisory committee’s submission of the proposed ordinance was expedited last November after the planning commission approved a developer’s application to uproot 337 oaks to build 101 homes on Calgrove Boulevard in Newhall.

Sharar and Ken Buchan, a naturalist and firefighter, organized a drive to save the oaks. They collected the $758 fee necessary to appeal the commission’s decision to the Board of Supervisors and gathered more than 1,600 signatures on petitions.

“Those people who signed the petitions were really representative of the entire Santa Clarita Valley,” said Sharar. “Some people who lived elsewhere in the Valley said that they drove down to see those oak trees. They’re an asset to the entire community.”

Revamp Ordered

Last month, the Board of Supervisors ordered the developer, Leisure Technology Inc. of Los Angeles, to redesign its project so that more oaks will be saved. Since then, the firm has reduced the number of oaks to be removed from 337 to 300. The firm’s Doug Kitchen pointed out that the company, even in the project’s original design, would have saved 445 oaks of the grove’s more than 800 trees.

Leisure Technology’s plan will be presented to the Board of Supervisors on May 6. The planning advisory committee voted 7 to 2 to support the redesigned project. Only Lyons and Sharar voted against it. Sharar said she believes more of the oaks can be saved.

The battle against Leisure Technology was not Sharar’s first to save oak trees. Two years ago, she fought to spare four large oak trees from the developer’s bulldozer near her former home on Valley Street in Newhall. She lost the fight.

“They were beautiful trees--hundreds of years old,” Sharar said. “It was an oak-studded oasis near my house.”

She also lost in a later effort to save 10 oak trees near her home.

Sharar has extensive files and records on the importance of oak trees in the Santa Clarita Valley’s history. In a collection of articles she compiled on the history of the area, Jerry Reynolds, curator of the Santa Clarita Historical Society, wrote that about 3,000 years ago, the “stalwart oaks” nicely adapted to the semi-desert area.

Oak trees provided a diet staple for the Alliklik Indians, who arrived in the Valley about the year 1200.

“Acorns were to the Allikliks what wheat is to us, rice to the Asians and corn to the Mexicans,” Reynolds wrote. “They learned to make the acorns edible by soaking out the bitter tannic acid, and they used stone pestles and slabs to grind the acorns into meal or mush.”

In the 1800s, Sharar said, oak trees were used as landmarks and actual points of measurement on land parcels.

For example, Reynolds said that in the granting of Rancho San Francisco, as the Santa Clarita Valley was then called, to Antonio del Valle in the mid-1800s, an oak on the hill opposite Piru Creek was used as one of the boundary markers. The oak in question was still alive in 1970 when it was destroyed by fire. Sharar said the charred stump still remains.

Gold was discovered under an oak tree in Live Oak Canyon--now Placerita Canyon--in 1842.

Francisco Lopez, a worker on the del Valle ranch, wrote:

“We stopped under some trees and tied the horses out to feed. Resting in the shade, I, with my sheath knife, dug up some wild onions, and in the dirt discovered a piece of gold, and, searching, further, found some more.”

Father Francisco Hermanelgeldo Garces, part of the de Anza expedition of 1776, and British explorers William Lewis Manly and John Rogers recorded their first sightings of the Santa Clarita Valley’s oaks.

“It was May, a beautiful time to enter the Santa Clarita Valley, with the spreading oaks, . . . “ Garces wrote.

In 1849, after crossing 250 miles of arid desert, Manly and Rogers said about the Santa Clarita Valley: “There before us was a beautiful meadow of a thousand acres, green as a thick carpet of grass could make it, and shaded with oaks, wide and branching and symmetrical, equal to those of an old English park. . . .

“Tears of joy ran down our faces at the sight.”

“So you see, we must preserve the oaks for future generations,” Sharar said.