Planners of Regional Park Could Learn From Experience in L.A.

The movers and shakers behind the proposed San Dieguito River Valley regional park are going to want to spend some time talking to Joe Edmiston. He’s been where they are going, and he can offer some advice.

Edmiston, if anyone, is the czar over the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, a 10-year-old state and federal project to link Griffith Park in Los Angeles with Point Mugu in Ventura County and three national parks in between, through trails and preserved wilderness through the Santa Monica Mountains, 140 miles north of San Diego.

That 55-mile-long project bears striking similarities to the 43-mile-long San Dieguito project, and local officials might want to consider it a role model that has 10 years’ experience under its belt. Edmiston thinks San Diegans don’t need to re-create the wheel, but rather can benefit from the lessons he learned in the Santa Monica Mountains. Some of the similarities:

- Both projects follow a geographic spine; one, a river valley, the other a ridgeline, from the coast to the inland.

- Both areas offer environmental treasures, both to wildlife and to man.

- Both are subjected to intense pressure from the developers to build expensive residential communities.

- Both feature not only large public landholdings already in hand, but hundreds of private property owners whose parcels are coveted for the public good but who have their own notions of what to do with their land.

The San Dieguito planners say they are in a race against time to preserve the valley as open space, a swath of land into the county’s mid-belly that will serve not only as a wildlife sanctuary but will extend a variety of day-use, hiking and scenic opportunities. Eventually, they hope, a greenbelt and trail system will link Del Mar to the Sutherland Reservoir and beyond to the foothills of Julian.

A linked park system from the beach to the Los Angeles Zoo was the hope in the Santa Monica Mountains, too, when planning for it started in 1977. And, on the eve of 1989, the job is only a third completed and is already five years behind schedule.

The task of planning and defining the park, identifying what parcels are most needed, getting the money to buy it and successfully negotiating with landowners--who at the same time are at government’s door asking permission to develop their land privately, is not unlike trying to complete a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle in an hour--and discovering your competition is holding some of the pieces.

Edmiston and others who have worked intimately on the Santa Monica Mountains project offer these suggestions to their counterparts in San Diego:

- Establish the mandate for the park, and create a separate, narrowly focused public agency--a partnership between the city and county of San Diego, perhaps--to create the park.

The original impetus for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area came from the state Legislature, which declared the region to be of statewide significance and established the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy as an independent state agency reporting to Sacramento. At first, its goals were to better regulate land uses within the park boundaries; eventually, the thrust evolved into actual property acquisition to more decisively protect the region from development. And, because it already had three parks within the region, the National Park Service participates in the project with federal funding to acquire still more land under its banner.

Edmiston says the San Diego project can succeed without the direct intervention by, or backing of, the state Legislature or Congress, although those funding sources will need to be tapped.

“You need someone, or something, with the independence and authority and single-mindedness to go out and do it without getting caught up in other mega-political issues or operating in a larger political context,” Edmiston said. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, for instance, had a staff of only 10--and an acquisitions budget of $70 million--$40 million of which already has been spent, and an additional injection of $30 million contained in a statewide bond issue approved in June.

Others suggest the need for a specific, individual figurehead--a respected politician, major landowner or other community leader--to shepherd the project as its champion, in order to rally support for it.

- Don’t rely on government land-use regulating agencies--such as the San Diego City Council or county Board of Supervisors--to aid in the park acquisition process by delaying developers’ requests to build on their property in order to coerce them to sell it cheaper to the park agency.

Santa Monica boosters were deflated by watching parcels coveted by them for the park eventually approved for development by land-use agencies, but little could be done to stop it, Edmiston said.

“You don’t want to let the Board of Supervisors off the hook too easily by allowing them to up-zone (increase the density) of property in the project area,” he said. “But, by law, you have to look at the guy’s development proposal and decide on its merits in context with the current zoning--and not on what you would rather have done with the property if it was yours.

“You’ll get citizens’ groups ragging the supervisors to turn down a particular development request so you can buy it for the park. Condemnation attorneys and developers’ attorneys love to hear that, because they know the decision can’t be made for that reason.”

The park can’t be developed through zoning decisions, Edmiston said. Success comes in cold-cash acquisitions.

- Identify the “keystone” properties in the river valley that are essential for the park’s success.

“Some of the big properties still haven’t been bought,” bemoaned Betty Wiechec, executive director of the Mountains Restoration Trust, a private, nonprofit organization helping to acquire property for the Santa Monica Mountains project.

“Don’t leave the best land for last because you never know when your money will dry up,” she said. “If you’re too scattered, you’ll have 5 acres here and there that you can’t even get to.”

Margot Feuer, who served nine years on the commission overseeing the park development, added:

“You need to establish a heart of the park, a major destination for the public so once they arrive there, it demonstrates that they are in a park. It’s a threshold property that introduces them to the park. We don’t have that in the Santa Monica Mountains.”

Several keystone properties in the Santa Monica Mountains were lost when the owners sold to developers for just a fraction more money than the conservancy thought it could afford, or win funding for.

- Given that lesson, be assertive and selfish when lobbying for private and public funds to make the project work, and be braced for a quixotic endeavor.

“Some of our problems came by not going after properties because we thought it would be impossible to get them, and then realizing later that we probably could have gotten the money from somewhere to buy it,” said Edmiston.

“Early on we tried to appear to be reasonable and too conservative and too willing to compromise, in order to establish our credibility. We wanted to be everybody’s friend. But we lost valuable acreage in the meantime,” he said.

Case in point, he said, was a particular ridgeline property that unexpectedly came on the market years after the project began, and which the conservancy--broke at the time--wanted to buy. “We went to Sacramento, made a good case and got the money. It was easier than we thought,” Edmiston said.

“Now, when I drive around the mountains, I see properties we lost because we didn’t want to appear outlandish by asking for too much. That might have been our single biggest mistake. We might have gotten those properties.”

- Knock down the walls of distrust between park supporters and property owners, convincing them of the benefit of cooperating with park planning.

“We never seemed to get cooperative planning (from residential developers),” said Feuer. “We needed that, so the owners of those properties would be able to live in a consistent manner with park values. We didn’t market it right, even though there’s no question that the park is an advantage to developers. They won’t admit that during their own planning and development stages, but then, when they advertise their units, they promote the park.”

Virtually everyone involved in the Santa Monica experience talks of the frustrations, of the horse race in trying to beat development to the punch, and of reconciling competing factors. There is, for instance, the chicken-and-the-egg dilemma of whether to buy large parcels, only to lose the opportunity to connect them later with trails because those properties are later developed privately, or whether to buy the links and hope to have enough money later to buy larger parcels.

“There simply weren’t enough days in the week to go after all the acquisitions we had to make,” said Feuer. “We were compromised by fragmented ownerships, of going not only after the several-hundred-acre parcels but the little 5- and 10-acre parcels. There’s such an urgency, to snatch parcels away from the bulldozers.” And to delay an acquisition of a particular parcel might make it prohibitively expensive years later.

The whole process, she warns, “will look like a nightmare. But, if the will is there and you have a group that is really dedicated to pursuing it, it certainly can happen,” she said.

Edmiston is philosophical about the completion of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, and what may be in store for the San Dieguito River Valley regional park.

He characterized the task--given the resources of private developers against the limits of government regulation and public funding--as not unlike a race between a Jaguar and a Volkswagen. “We’re the Volkswagen, but there’s still hope because one disadvantage for the developers is that the public’s perception of them isn’t wholly favorable,” he said.

“When I go back and ask for more money, I’m asked by legislators, ‘My God, aren’t you done yet?’

“Well, two things will make our park complete. The developers will develop and we will acquire, and at a certain point the two will meet. The desirable land will be acquired or developed. Those are the only two alternatives.

“We are pursuing acquisitions as fast as we can, and they’re developing as fast as they can.”

Growth of Mission Trails Regional Park West Fortuna Mountain Area 1973 East Fortuna Mountain Area 1973 Old Mission Dam Historical Site 1964 Cowles Mountain Area 1975 Mission Gorge Area Since 1976 Lake Murray Area 1976 Ownership of the parkland: City of San Diego, 2,982 acres: Joint city and county, 1,428 acres; San Diego County, 118 acres; San Diego Unified School District, 13 acres; San Diego State University, 491 acres; Federal, (estimate) 600 acres. Note: Maps shows park areas and dates acquired. Source: San Diego Park and Recreation Department