In Land They Trust : Environment: Instead of lobbying government officials in an effort to limit development, an Ojai Valley group is investing its energies in a conservancy.

Phil Moncharsh pounds no spikes of protest into redwoods, convenes no street-corner demonstrations and holds no Earth First! membership.

But ask the 42-year-old attorney about land conservation and he takes on a certain revolutionary intensity. Sitting on a sun-dappled patio in his leafy Ojai back yard one recent day, he mapped out the plans of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy.

“We’ve had numerous, numerous inquiries from landowners. Significant landowners,” Moncharsh said. “And we have several discussions that we believe are in the final stages.”

If those arrangements are consummated in coming days, as Moncharsh expects, his nonprofit group will have a hand in permanently blocking development on more than 200 acres of valuable Ojai Valley land, a key move for a fledgling, currently cash-poor land conservation group. In a larger sense, many authorities say, that move may represent the latest step forward by a national movement that is on the march into Southern California.

Instead of standing before their planning commissioners and City Council members to plead for government limits on development, hundreds of Southern Californians have begun to invest their energies in land trusts and conservancies.

The organizations are built as private nonprofit agencies that buy land, accept donations and persuade property owners to consider the tax advantages of forswearing development. Often they end up selling the properties as parkland to government agencies and reinvesting the revenues in new properties.

If the American environmental movement were a costume parade, the trusts and conservancies would be the ones in the wing tips and power ties.

“Having a part of the movement that can get into boardrooms and talk financial statements is of enormous strategic value to the movement as a whole,” said Harvey Carlson, director of programs and operations for the Nature Conservancy in California.

“I have groomed this organization to present itself as a businesslike conservation service,” said Linda Krieger, executive director of the Land Trust for Santa Barbara County. “It is not an environmental organization. We do not oppose developments. We do not support candidates. . . . We simply present ourselves to landowners as an entity that can help achieve their objectives.”

The Nature Conservancy manages an estimated 400,000 acres of open space in California. Krieger’s ostensibly non-environmental organization has in five years completed 12 transactions that served to preserve nearly 2,400 acres of open space. And new trusts are forming in other communities with increasing regularity.

Philosophically, they are kin to the Nature Conservancy, considered to be the nation’s richest environmental group, which for almost 40 years has bought land and arranged conservation easements to protect thousands of acres nationwide that feature rare plants and animals.

But unlike the Nature Conservancy, which boasts about 1,000 paid staffers, a budget in the hundreds of millions and offices from coast to coast, many of the new conservancies are strictly local organizations, concentrating on a single county, a single geographical area, sometimes a single site.

“It’s the NIMBYs,” said Tom Martens, West Coast development and communications director for the Trust for Public Land, referring to the Not-In-My-Back-Yard sentiment ascribed to many affluent Californians.

“They hear about this, and they say, ‘Hey, that’s something I can actually do without being embarrassed,’ ” said Janet Diehl, project manager for the state Coastal Conservancy.

“We’ve hit a critical mass in a number of communities, and this is a citizen’s way of reacting, of taking action,” said Betty Wiechec, executive director of the Mountains Restoration Trust in Malibu. “What’s interesting is that it happened spontaneously all over.”

The Land Trust Alliance, an umbrella association in Washington, D.C., counts 850 non-public, local land trusts nationwide, with about half of them formed in the last 10 years and more than 100 of them formed since 1988. Together they protect an estimated 2 million acres from development.

In California, the alliance’s figures show, the number of non-public trusts and conservancies has risen from 59 two years ago to at least 75 now. And in Southern California, the tally has risen from 21 to 28.

Many of them are upstart organizations in circumstances like the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy’s--no property of their own, no staff and not much money. But many others, officials say, are on the brink of substantial progress.

On Oct. 6, those groups convened for the first time, under the title Southern California Land Trust Council, in Riverside. More than 50 people turned out, traded business cards and resolved to gather again in Rolling Hills Estates on Jan. 5.

“It was networking, sharing ideas, sharing techniques,” Moncharsh reported. “People are realizing that you can’t have unlimited perpetual growth.”

The land trust idea dates back more than 100 years in long-settled regions like New England. It received a big boost in 1964 with the creation of the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund. The program was designed to use millions of dollars in oil lease revenues to buy up parkland, much of it from private trusts and conservancies.

The trusts and conservancies made another key advance in 1976, when Congress revised the tax code to allow donation of land as a charitable tax deduction if the property was historically important, ecologically fragile, or would offer public recreational or educational opportunities.

Still, through most of the 1980s, the only high-profile, publicly accessible Southern California land trust property seemed to be Santa Catalina Island, 86% of which has been managed since 1972 by the Santa Catalina Island Conservancy.

In a region where growth is presumed inevitable and open space is seen as inexhaustible, Krieger theorized, it’s hard for many people to get excited about private-sector spending to preserve open space. But that, she and others agree, has changed.

* In Malibu, the 9-year-old Mountains Restoration Trust has this year sealed agreements with developers that are expected to retire 50 to 150 lots from potential development. The group, which operates a 650-acre nature preserve and owns another 700 acres of open space, began contacting landowners in April in a campaign to get easements for a monarch butterfly protection program.

* In Riverside, the Riverside Land Conservancy incorporated itself in February, 1989, drawing on a $10,000 endowment from the Trust for Public Land and taking control of a 305-acre conservation easement on Riverside’s Arlington Mountain, which serves as a hawk and eagle habitat. The Riverside group now is in discussions aimed at acquiring control of 15 acres of riparian woodland arroyo, which officials say is the first step in a bid to manage about 100 acres of open arroyo.

* In Montecito, the Land Trust for Santa Barbara worked with a landowner to arrange for his donation last year of a 44-acre conservation easement. The Santa Barbara group is now in negotiations aimed at buying 900 acres from six neighboring property owners along the northern Santa Barbara County coast.

* In Rolling Hills Estates, the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy, formed in June, 1988, has for more than a year been looking for ways to acquire a 53-acre, unimproved, largely barren coastline park owned by Los Angeles County. The conservancy already owns 20 acres on canyon land, donated by a private landowner.

* In San Diego County’s Anza Borrego Desert, the 23-year-old Anza Borrego Foundation has over the years acquired 14,000 privately held acres and passed them on to the 600,000-acre Anza Borrego State Park. According to Dave Van Cleve, Anza Borrego Desert State Park superintendent, the foundation has been considering hiring its first executive director to accelerate and broaden its land-acquisition activities.

The failure of Proposition 149 in this month’s state elections did dispirit many in the land trust movement. The measure would have earmarked $437 million in state bonds for acquisition of open space and to develop recreational programs. Other authorities acknowledge that the nation’s sputtering economy may hurt the cause as well, reducing donations to all nonprofit organizations.

But many remain optimistic. The way they see it, the ballot measure’s failure is one more confirmation that government shouldn’t be counted on alone to protect open space.

As for the faltering economy, suggested Bill Ailor, president of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy, a recession could hold down real estate prices and persuade would-be developers to consider other options for their properties.

If so, Ailor said, the anticipated economic hard times “may actually open a window of opportunity for some of us to do some things.”

Ventura County, with its wealth of farmland and anxiety in recent years over development, would seem a natural target for trusts and conservancies. Yet the leaders of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy are breaking--or rather, not breaking--new ground here.

Though other Ventura County groups have had similar ambitions, several local leaders said, the Ojai conservancy will be the first private land trust in the area to take control of property.

The group’s primary strategy, Moncharsh said, will probably be persuading landowners to accept conservation easements that block future building on a property. In that scenario, a property owner can reduce the appraisal value of his or her land by accepting the easement, thereby gaining an immediate income tax writeoff and also reducing the later bite of inheritance taxes.

That approach costs the conservancy far less than a purchase would, land trust authorities say, and could be particularly attractive in the Ojai Valley and elsewhere in Ventura County, where many landowners face increasing financial pressures to break up the family farmland.

This approach is expected to proceed without petition-circulating or placard-waving activities likely to draw little support from the Ojai group’s largely buttoned-down board. Of the 43 board members, Moncharsh said, “very few people would actually get out and walk picket lines.”

“These are business and professional people who work behind the scenes, who work with other business and professional people,” said Moncharsh.

Moncharsh, president of the board, is a business attorney with Rogers and Sheffield in Santa Barbara. A Jaguar and a Mercedes are parked in his driveway, next to the stack of newspapers for the recycler.

Still, the enthusiasm over land trusts and their actions is not universal.

In October, when Outside magazine set out to analyze the nation’s top 25 environmental groups, the editors called the Nature Conservancy leaders “milquetoasts,” and noted complaints that the conservancy “sells indulgences--or, more accurately, accepts huge corporate donations--so big companies such as Exxon and Alcoa can get to public relations heaven.”

And in this neighborhood, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has been mired in controversy for months over its role in a proposed land swap.

The Santa Monica Conservancy is actually a state agency, created to promote public access to the mountains. But it sometimes behaves like a private land trust, acquiring land and transferring it to the state and national park systems.

In April, the conservancy joined in a deal that, if consummated, will give the state 5,700 acres of canyon lands. In exchange, the government would give entertainer Bob Hope 59 acres of federal parklands, thereby allowing a 750-unit residential development on open land nearby. Backers of the deal say it is a unique opportunity; critics say conservancy Director Joseph T. Edmiston should never have agreed to give up parklands.

The Santa Monica Mountains controversy, Moncharsh said, is “a shining example” of why his group stays out of politics.

“I have had several landowners come to me and ask if we would consider supporting their project if it included a certain amount of open space. And I’ve told them that we don’t support, or oppose, any particular projects,” he said.

Edmiston replied, “Lotsa luck. . . . There are only so many one-way deals, and what you have to offer frequently is the ability to make trade-offs. And hopefully they’re judicious trade-offs.”

Linda Krieger of the Santa Barbara land trust agreed. “It’s better to get something than be a purist and get nothing,” she said. “Land trusts in the east have done those kinds of projects on a smaller scale for a long time.”

Edmiston and others also noted a pair of quandaries that private conservancies will need to confront in coming years.

While many conservancies are taking over lands that don’t offer public access, Edmiston said, there is an increasing need to provide open space that can be publicly used.

The second challenge, Edmiston said, is how to handle the insurance liability that may be posed when public access is available.

Moncharsh, faced with those issues, pointed to the Land Trust Alliance’s plans to act as a liability insurance clearinghouse for land trusts nationwide. Many insurance and access expenses, he said, can be covered by underwriting agreements from property donors.

Then there’s the group’s goal of having $25,000 in operating funds by year’s end, and its search for part-time clerical help. The board hopes to hire an executive director in the next two years.

“We’d better take care of business and prepare ourselves,” said Moncharsh, “or else we’re going to look like Simi Valley.”