Her Goal: Keeping Land for Preserve

In a small, nondescript office on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Betty Wiechec spends her days poring over topographical maps and real estate listings and chatting with landowners, trying to buy some of the most valuable real estate on the West Coast.

It has been a highly successful endeavor. Wiechec’s operation is now among the 10 largest landowners in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. But she is not your average real estate maven: her goal is to buy the land and preserve it as open space.

For the last seven years, she has fought on behalf of the nonprofit Mountains Restoration Trust to spare the pristine coastal mountain lands from development. But she is waging a colossal battle. Each month that passes, more million-dollar, high-tech chateaux rise on the steep canyon ridges. Where oak groves once stood, English Tudor mansions now rest.

“As long as we have people who want those kinds of estates, these mountain properties are threatened,” Wiechec said. “And in Los Angeles, there seems to be an endless supply of people who can buy $3-million homes.”

Has Dual Role

As executive director of the trust, an organization that buys land in the 27-mile-long Malibu coastal zone to keep it as open space, Wiechec’s job is to steer the rich toward other, “more appropriate” properties for their dream estates. Her role also requires her to persuade other affluent property owners in the western Santa Monica Mountains to donate their land or sell it to the trust, often at well below market value. Her main tool is to advise them of the difficulties involved in developing the mountain parcels.

And despite the ravenous appetite of the rich for exclusive mountain hideaways, Wiechec, a 43-year-old native of New York, has managed several times to trade the equivalent of trinkets for large land tracts.

Through her efforts, the trust has obtained more than 1,200 acres, almost all of it accessible to the public for varied recreational use. In addition, the trust manages the 650-acre Cold Creek Canyon preserve, an expanse of oak trees, chaparral, ferns, lilacs and wildlife near Mulholland Highway and Las Virgenes Road in the Calabasas area.

She also has purchased land for the National Park Service and has persuaded dozens of property owners in the coastal mountains to sign away their future development rights, all in the name of open space.

“We try and get the properties that are critical to making an integrated park and not turn the area into a series of biological islands where wildlife is isolated,” Wiechec said. “It’s very gratifying to say I own this or that parcel and know that it will remain as open space permanently. After we get it, the land may be open to the laws of nature but no longer to changes motivated by man.”

As the trust’s only full-time employee, Wiechec, a former film maker, has single-handedly done what money-laden officials from the state and federal parks system have been unable to do: purchase land that is considered critical to the goal of expanding a national park in the rapidly diminishing urban wilderness of Los Angeles County.

Where others plod, harnessed by bureaucratic red tape, Wiechec has managed to sprint, cutting half a dozen deals with only $100 down, including the 38-acre Topanga Lookout, which offers spectacular, panoramic views of three mountain ranges. Often, she just appeals to the landowners’ conservationist leanings, explaining the numerous tax benefits of donating the land.

In 1986, she persuaded a partnership involving 25 investors to sell to the trust a 160-acre parcel known as Hernandez Bowl in western Topanga Canyon for $400,000. The land was considered a crucial part of the wilderness area in the Santa Monica Mountains planned by the National Park Service. The general partner for the investors, Albert Winnikoff, estimated that they probably could have subdivided the land and sold it to developers for $10,000 per acre.

“We’re not philanthropists, but we felt, and Betty (Wiechec) helped to convince us, that it was the right thing to do,” said Winnikoff, a Malibu real estate broker. “I just really detest dealing with any government agency because they are so slow to move and often they’re looking just to expand their domain rather than to benefit the public good.

“But when someone like Betty comes by and buys these properties under market value, it becomes extremely beneficial for all of us. The net result is that we get a larger park for a lot less money and in a lot less time than the government agencies ever could have.”

There is almost no indication of the trust’s vast landholdings in Wiechec’s one-room office, save for the pile of tax bills that arrive each month. Wiechec estimates that the organization pays 110 tax bills each year, for a sum of approximately $35,000, or nearly one-third of the trust’s annual budget. The trust is not exempt from school taxes, flood control and mosquito abatement levies.

Wiechec concentrates primarily on small parcels that may have some geological problems or would be difficult, although not impossible, to subdivide. The trust purchased 102 separate lots in Las Flores Heights six years ago to protect the Las Flores watershed. That 200-acre parcel is slated to be given to the National Park Service sometime this year, as soon as the land transfer regulations are met.

Much like the other 750 land trusts throughout the country, the nonprofit firm receives most of its money from donations and grants from environmental groups and conservation agencies such as the Sierra Club, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the California Coastal Conservancy, which created the trust in 1981 to own and operate the Cold Creek Canyon Preserve. It is the only land trust working in the Santa Monica Mountains.

Jean Hocker, executive director of the Land Trust Exchange in Alexandria, Va., the organization that oversees the nation’s land trusts, said that the number of land conservation groups has jumped from 500 to 750 in the last three years. She said nearly 50% of the country’s land trusts have been formed in the last decade and today own or manage more than 2 million acres.

“I think they are forming at such a rapid rate because of the development pressures across the country and the sense of frustration and even anger by people who see what is happening to the land in their communities,” Hocker said.

Wiechec has managed all of the deals without the aid of a real estate license or a background in land acquisition. Her only training was provided by the organization’s five-member board of trustees and what the self-described “overnight activist” learned on the job.

“What’s a nice girl from the Bronx doing here in Malibu?” she asked. “Well, it started when I found out that the state park near my house was being considered as a future site for a tri-state motocross site with 2,000 bikes expected each week. I became involved fighting that project and then a whole series of others.

“We won the park fight. It’s now an oak preserve.”

Board Vice President Margot Feuer said Wiechec was picked over several more-experienced candidates because of her dedication to preserving the mountains and her inherent ability to deal with the vast number of individuals and agencies involved in the complicated land transactions.

“She showed the best potential and as it turned out, weren’t we right,” Feuer said. “She has developed an enormous competence in the job and I think her commitment to saving the mountains has been a big plus for her. She has become a tried and true professional.”

Despite the trust’s success, Wiechec said there is still a constant fight for money. This summer, the organization will hold a benefit concert at the Wiltern Theater. The Manhattan Transfer will headline the June 24 fund-raiser.

“Money is always a struggle,” Wiechec said. “It’s very difficult to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars when there are so many competing interests.

“But the time is becoming more critical. The development climate in Los Angeles is so aggressive and the price of land is going up so fast that it makes the job tougher and tougher. We just have a tremendous problem dealing with the number of zeroes involved in these land transactions.”

As she wound her way around the mountain roads recently, Wiechec pointed out the numerous dream homes that have sprung up like wildflowers among the chaparral. She said she can understand the allure of the hillside hideaways, but is bothered by the lack of concern among some property owners over what the developments will mean for the future of the mountains and the wildlife.

“We have golden eagles up here, but how long do you think they’ll stay as long as this keeps happening,” she said as she pointed to a sprawling ranch-style house above Saddle Peak Road.

“Once lots like these are created, it’s almost impossible to stop more development. What you see here now is what is going to happen in greater numbers in the future. I’m not a land grabber, but if we don’t do something to protect this open space, these mountains will be overrun with condos.”