CALIFORNIA ELECTIONS: GOVERNOR : Wilson Injects Environment Back Into His Campaign

Sen. Pete Wilson proposed Monday broadening California’s environmental protection efforts to include the state’s dwindling rivers and streams.

Standing near the mouth of the Santa Maria River at Nipomo Dunes, the Republican candidate for governor said he would support the creation of a California riparian conservancy through which government, private interests and volunteers would work to maintain and restore vegetation, fish and wildlife habitats and other amenities.

Only about 1% of California’s original riparian woodlands survive today, Wilson said. This generation has a responsibility to future Californians to preserve such natural features, he said. “We must make good on what we know we ought to do,” he added.

In delivering his proposal, Wilson injected the environment back into his gubernatorial contest with Democrat Dianne Feinstein on the day after their first televised debate--an hourlong session in which the environment was virtually ignored.

Wilson is seeking to capture the environmental high ground from Feinstein after her success in winning endorsements of the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters. Wilson and Feinstein have competed vigorously for the groups’ backing. Wilson has the support of Friends of the River, with whom he worked closely in sponsoring wild-and-scenic-river designation for some California mountain streams.

His riparian proposal came during the groundbreaking of a visitor center at the 3,417-acre Nipomo Dunes Preserve on the coast bordering Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties. The center will be named in honor of the late Assemblyman Eric Seastrand (R-Salinas), who worked for preservation of the dunes area.

The dunes site once was considered for a nuclear power plant. After environmentalists protested, Pacific Gas & Electric Co. relocated the plant to Diablo Canyon.

The Nature Conservancy, a private, nonprofit conservation organization, is attempting to unite all major landowners in the Nipomo Dunes complex to preserve the natural setting and the endangered species there. Corporations, private landowners, local governments, the state and the Air Force are part of the coalition.

Wilson said the riparian preservation organization would be similar to the Lake Tahoe, Santa Monica Mountains and California Coastal conservancies. A new conservancy for the preservation of wetlands was recently created by state law.

State money is matched with other sources to buy land threatened with development. The Nature Conservancy often cooperates in such ventures by buying land and transferring it to public agencies that administer it.

After the ceremony, Wilson addressed a fund-raising luncheon in San Luis Obispo held for Seastrand’s widow, Andrea, who is running for the Assembly seat held by her husband until his death from cancer last June.

Later, Wilson inspected part of the eight-mile Kern River Parkway in Bakersfield, where the Nature Conservancy, the Bakersfield City Council and the Kern River Foundation have worked in recent years to plant 1,300 trees and to build a bike path.

There, Wilson was asked by a reporter about his efforts to block Sen. Alan Cranston’s (D-Calif.) California Desert Protection Act.

Wilson said he shares Cranston’s goal of protecting the California desert but added that Cranston wants to set aside too much of the 12.5-million-acre region as wilderness off limits to four-wheel-drive vehicles.

“I don’t want to see the desert protected from the people, I want to protect it for the people,” Wilson said.