Hold Your Nose and Enjoy the View

A few years ago, in another incarnation at this newspaper, it was my job to watch over the fate of nature’s many wonders. I covered the national parks, went where the wild goose went, spent a lot of time in places Steve McQueen would have loved. Which is to say, the middle of nowhere.

You might think this was a swell job. It wasn’t. Month after month in that job, comfortable fantasies got dashed. Charlie the Tuna turned out to be a dolphin-murderer. The family farmer had become a toxic maniac. There was no relief from it.

In any case, that was the time when I got my education about Bob Hope and the Santa Monicas. It fell into the same category with Charlie the Tuna.

A young woman called the office one day. She wanted to show me some maps. Her outfit, a land trust, was trying to buy chunks of the Santa Monicas before the developers got there. It was a race they were losing.

When I looked at the map, I noticed parcels all over the Santa Monicas that had the letters “B.H.” written inside the boundaries.

What’s that, I asked.

Bob Hope, she said. He’s the key person in the mountains. He owns the biggest chunks, the best stuff. But forget it. Hope was suspicious of land trust deals. Hope only talked to developers.

I stared at the map and tried to imagine owning whole canyons, entire mountains.

What would it take to get Hope to the table, I asked.

She shrugged. Some incredible deal, she said.

That was seven years ago. As you most likely know, Bob Hope is now at the table. And sure enough, it took an incredible deal to get him there.

Not merely an incredible deal, but a deal from the heart of darkness. A deal that leaves blood on everybody’s hands, most notably those trying to save the Santa Monicas. A deal so Faustian that it makes you want to look away.

What happened was this: In the midst of one of his biggest developments, Hope found himself caught in a neat trap. He wanted to convert one of his properties, the huge Jordan Ranch, into a golf course-cum-subdivision affair. But there was no easy access to the ranch unless--oh, irony--the National Park Service granted him an easement across a stretch of parkland.

Why would the Park Service want to do this? It wouldn’t. If it refuses, the value of Jordan Ranch would drop significantly and the Park Service, or a land trust, could maybe grab it for less than Hope’s price of $56 million.

Then Hope offers the deal. Stung by news stories that paint him as the Scrooge of the Santa Monicas, Hope sees a way to restore his avuncular image and have his way with the Jordan Ranch all at once.

He offers the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy 5,700 acres of land at three different sites. Two of the parcels would be transferred to the Park Service and the third would become a state park. The state would have to pony up $20 million for its site in the Santa Susana Mountains, but Conservancy officials say the price makes it a bargain.

In return, Hope gets his road into the Jordan Ranch. He turns the Park Service and the Conservancy into co-conspirators in the ruination of one of the few intact canyons in the Santa Monicas. He also does the same thing at one of the other sites, Corral Canyon, where he gives up some land and gets Park Service blessing to build houses on the rest.

An evil deal. Steve McQueen wouldn’t like it a bit. Even Alan Cranston, who looks a little strange trying to seize the high ground on any ethical question these days, says it stinks. No one escapes this deal with clean hands.

But a deal that we should take anyway.

We should take it because, who’s kidding whom, the Santa Monicas will never be a pure park. We lost that war a long time ago. The price of land now is so high in the mountains that no government can afford to buy the major pieces. It’s going to be a checkerboard out there and our only hope is to grab whatever squares we can, when we can. If that means a few dirty deals, so be it.

And we should take it because, in fact, we got lucky this time. That little piece of road was the leverage that brought a man to the table when he didn’t want to be there at all. We may not get that lucky again.

So let’s sign off on an evil deal. Let Hope have his golf course and his subdivisions and give us our squares of the checkerboard. Maybe later we can wash the blood of Jordan Ranch and Corral Canyon from our hands.

But if this deal goes through, please spare us the “Thank you, Mr. Hope” business. We paid for this one, and we paid pretty big.