The Canyons’ Fate Is Up to the Voters : There’s a Way to Save Them--Do We Have the Will?

Last November, more than 7,000 marchers turned out to protest development planned for one of Orange County’s visual treasures, Laguna Canyon. It was an emotional and impressive show of support. But everyone went home, and six months later, dollar signs are taking center stage. Will voters in Orange County make the exacting commitment to pay to protect threatened canyons?

While that question is before the public, and as the clock ticks, a number of interesting approaches are being considered as ways to package the purchasing of open space.

Before a single vote has been cast, environmentalists, developers and public officials have been combing polling data to determine the depth of public sentiment. Laguna Canyon is particularly instructive. The Irvine Co., which has county approval to proceed with a large housing project, but which lacks the good will of the community to proceed with full-scale development, shrewdly agreed to help finance a survey to see how willing county residents would be to buy canyon land.

This shared polling was a signal of how complicated the fate of the canyons is. For developers, the sale of land to the public might offer a way out of controversy, or a reason to say, “We tried to help,” and to start building. For the environmentalists, there was the hope that the public would sign on to the idea of buying land, to set it aside.

Developers, environmentalists and the county now concur that while a slight majority of county residents favor such a purchase of open space, support falls far short of the two-thirds majority that would be needed to pass an open space bond measure. So in Laguna Beach this week, the City Council will take up its own plan to purchase part of the canyon, and then consider whether to put it before the voters.

However that turns out, the idea of an Orange County land trust may be the wave of the future because it offers something for everyone. Land trusts offer flexibility for the common purchase and maintenance of open space. Lauren Ficaro, an environmentalist who has thought about how this concept might work, suggests that, for example, voters in Orange might have money allocated in a special countywide district for a greenbelt along the Santa Ana River at the same time they helped friends of canyons set their land aside.

Creating such broad-based districts would be costly and require public education at a time when the bulldozers may already be at the ready. But it may not be too late, either, if the public will think about how much it’s worth to save precious land for future generations.

Thus, in the end, the fate of the canyons rests with the voters. Michael Phillips, director of the Laguna Canyon Conservancy, has the decision in perspective: “People in Orange County are going to have to come to grips with the choice that either they buy land or give it up to development. . . .” It all comes down to money.