Santa Monica Park’s Boss, Veteran of Battle, Is Going to Gettysburg

The superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area who headed the park during a turbulent period of growth announced Friday he will leave to head another national park in Pennsylvania.

Daniel R. Kuehn said he is “very much looking forward” to becoming superintendent of the Gettysburg National Military Park on Oct. 9.

During Kuehn’s five years at the Santa Monica Mountains National Park, rising land prices and lean budgets hampered efforts to expand the park to what Congress had envisioned in 1977: a system of federal, state and local parks encompassing about two-thirds of the 150,000 acres of mountains from Ventura County to Griffith Park.

Nevertheless, federal park holdings increased from 4,000 to 13,000 acres under Kuehn, who was at the center of several controversies surrounding the park and its attempts to acquire additional land.

“There’s still a lot to be done,” Kuehn said. The park “will still be faced with . . . how to spend appropriations, because we know we’re not going to be able to get enough money.”

Congress has appropriated $79 million of the $155 million authorized in the park’s enabling legislation. This month, Congress agreed on an $11-million 1989 appropriation to expand the park, the largest amount in five years.

The $11 million means “the future looks bright” for the park, Kuehn said. The Reagan Administration had requested no 1989 funds for Santa Monica Mountains parkland.

Kuehn “has done an outstanding job considering all the roadblocks and constraints that have been put in his path,” said Rorie Skei, chairwoman of the board of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state agency that buys and administers land for the national park.

“Dan has been the point man for a lot of the conflict between the National Park Service’s goals and the Administration’s goals, which were not on the same wavelength,” Skei said.

The park’s 1988 land-acquisition budget of $1 million has been blamed on Kuehn’s ill-fated attempt to have the Park Service condemn 10 acres of Malibu property owned by George Murphy Dunne Jr., son of an influential Chicago politician. The appropriation was slashed at the last minute by Rep. Sidney R. Yates (D-Ill.), a Chicago congressman and political associate of Dunne’s father, George Dunne.

When Kuehn took over the park in 1983, James Watt was secretary of the Interior, and “the park was on the hit list,” said conservancy Executive Director Joseph T. Edmiston. The Dunne episode brought about a funding crisis, Edmiston said, along with congressional restrictions on the Park Service’s authority to condemn land.

“Kuehn managed to have the park survive and prosper through both of those things,” Edmiston said.

More recently, Kuehn’s enthusiastic support of a proposed land exchange with a developer--who proposed building a road through part of the park in Cheeseboro Canyon--drew criticism from some conservationists.

The Park Service’s $8-million purchase of Cheeseboro Canyon in 1985 was itself controversial. A government appraiser had warned that the price was too high, and the seller later was convicted of fraud in inflating the price. The Park Service said last week that it bought the land knowing that Los Angeles County had the right to build a road through the canyon floor.

Kuehn asked the county to abandon its plan, which he called “outrageous.”