Fought for Prop. 70 : $776-Million Payoff Caps Activists’ Ultimate Crusade

Glenn Bailey was a high school senior with a burgeoning concern for the environment. Jan Hinkston was a conservationist exhorting listeners to lobby for more parkland in the San Fernando Valley.

They met 15 years ago in Sepulveda at a crowded meeting to discuss open space. After Hinkston’s impassioned speech, Bailey asked how he could join her environmental crusade.

“I thought, ‘Gosh, he was an enthusiastic young man and we really need somebody like that in our group,’ ” said Hinkston, who founded the Santa Susana Mountain Park Assn. in 1970.

Bailey and Hinkston have worked together ever since to preserve the Santa Susana Mountains and the Simi Hills, and to keep rural and mountainous land in the San Fernando Valley free of developers’ bulldozers.

Recently, they mobilized a grass-roots movement among Valley voters to help pass Proposition 70, a statewide parks bond initiative to raise $776 million for acquisition and restoration of parkland and protection of open space. The initiative won easily last Tuesday, with the support of 65% of the voters, or 3.4 million people.

Inspired Volunteers

Bailey and Hinkston inspired 300 Valley-based volunteers to gather signatures to qualify the initiative for the ballot and wrote portions of Proposition 70, concentrating their efforts on the West Valley’s open areas.

“We saw it as the only chance to get monies for the Rim of the Valley Corridor, and the only chance for the Santa Susanas,” said Bailey, 32.

“We sure worked like heck for it, right up to the last minute,” Hinkston said. “There was just nothing else to do: This area just has such wonderful attributes.”

Hinkston, 61, a kindergarten and first-grade teacher, has never cared much for the political process. She prefers leading monthly hikes in Chatsworth Park, where she lectures to hikers about history and wildlife and points out the topography and the 80- to 100-million-year-old rock formations of the nearby Simi Hills. She would rather discuss the habitat of golden eagles and the Santa Susana tarweed wildflower than political strategies.

“I only got involved as a necessity,” said Hinkston, who in 1973 wrote a book on the Santa Susanas called “Santa Susana: Over the Pass and Into the Past.” “I’m really not the aggressive type and this really just sort of runs against my grain.

“But we were looking at the bleakness of no possibilities of funding and we knew that developers were already beginning to chomp at the bit and buy up land like crazy,” she said. “The initiative met a crying need.”

Bailey, however, believes that “politics is the only way you can get things done.” The Encino resident not only threw himself into the parkland initiative, but into the political fray of the 5th Supervisorial District, running with eight other challengers against Supervisor Mike Antonovich. A reading program coordinator at Cal State Northridge, he came in fourth among the 10 candidates, getting nearly 10,000 votes.

Helped Force Runoff Election

“I had been, over the years, so frustrated by county government,” said Bailey, who ran on an anti-development, government reform platform. Although he did not come close to beating Antonovich, he was satisfied just to be part of the field of candidates that forced a runoff between Antonovich and Baxter Ward, he said.

Besides, seeing Proposition 70 sweep to victory became more important to Bailey than his showing in the supervisorial race.

He and Hinkston had spent the better part of the past three years getting the parkland initiative off the ground.

Both are convinced that their efforts “mean we did make a difference,” Hinkston said.

The two were invited to write parts of the parkland bond initiative by the Planning and Conservation League, the nonprofit lobbying group based in Sacramento that ran the campaign.

The portion of the initiative they wrote calls for $10 million for land acquisition in the Santa Susana Mountains for the preservation of “historic and scenic sites, hiking and equestrian trails or for wildlife habitat and migration routes.”

The Santa Susana Pass is a critical passageway for wildlife migrating between the San Gabriel Mountains and the Los Padres National Forest, Hinkston said.

She and Bailey also wrote a passage outlining that any of the $10 million not spent on the Santa Susanas be allocated to the Santa Monica Mountains, another critical point along the migration route.

Trail System

Their goal is to establish a continuous system of trails along the western portion of the Rim of the Valley from Simi Valley to O’Melveny Park, a city park in Granada Hills, Bailey said.

To that end, Bailey and Hinkston spent most of their spare time in the past two years seeking the support of homeowner organizations, historic societies and conservationist groups.

Bailey was hired by the Planning and Conservation League as the north Los Angeles County coordinator for the drive to place the initiative on the June ballot.

“He actually put in two hours for every hour we paid him,” said Jerry Meral, the league’s executive director.

Hinkston, whose interest in the Valley hillsides grew out of her training in art, said she volunteered most of her free time to work on the initiative.

“From early on, they were very active in mobilizing people out there and also great in getting endorsements,” Meral said. “There’s a huge bloc of voters in the Valley and getting the word out was really important.”

Volunteers collected 31,000 signatures from July to October of 1987, standing outside markets in the Valley, in parks, at 10K runs, chili cook-offs, the County Fair and in front of the Zoo.

“Wherever there was an event going on, we tried to set up a little table,” Hinkston said. Although they had hoped to gather 50,000 signatures, they stopped at 31,000, Bailey said. The statewide total was 750,000 signatures, well over the required 372,000, he said.

Bailey proudly said that the number of signatures collected by Valley volunteers exceeded that of most other areas in the state.

“We were a smaller group, but we had people working harder,” Bailey said.

“That’s why the Proposition 70 effort was such a positive effort,” Bailey said. “We didn’t have to rely on politicians with their special interest and campaign contributions. . . . We just did it ourselves.”

Times Staff Writer Tracey Kaplan contributed to this story.