His Crusade Is to Save the Best of San Marcos--Its Open Land

About the time his daughter, Sonia, was learning to crawl and then to walk, Mike Slavinski turned nostalgic about his own childhood and about growing up in San Marcos.

Back then, in the 1960s, there were plenty of hills to scale and creeks to wade and trees to climb. By urban standards, San Marcos still has a goodly amount of flora and a bit of fauna today.

But, Slavinski wonders, will it be there when Sonia, now 14 months old, is able to explore the rocky hillsides and fish for crawdads in San Marcos Creek?

After all, San Marcos has been among the top 10 growth cities in California for a decade or so, and many of the bucolic delights that Slavinski savored as a youth have given way to tracts homes, commercial buildings and parking lots.

“About eight months ago I decided to do something about it,” Slavinski said. What he came up with was the San Marcos Land Conservancy, a nonprofit organization to provide one-stop service for preserving history and open space in the San Marcos area.

Although the organization cannot begin its work until receiving its state charter as a nonprofit organization in the coming months, Slavinski and a half dozen other San Marcos residents he recruited as his founding board of directors are at work already.

Slavinski, described by one of his recruits as “persistently persuasive,” went after the talents that he lacked or needed in greater quantity for the board.

“I initially targeted someone who was a manager and knew how organizations work. And I went after people who used their minds to think things through. And I needed someone who knew a little law,” he said.

He scored on all counts, netting two English professors, a telephone company executive, a law clerk soon to be a lawyer, a free-lance writer-editor and his own wife, Lynne, who is an accountant.

When Jerome Griswold, a San Diego State University English professor, was approached by Slavinski to join the infant conservancy, he tried to beg off, “because I was involved in too many other things.” But Slavinski got his man.

“That guy is so persuasive in a folksy way, it’s hard to say no,” Griswold said of the conservancy’s founder. “And the strange thing is that he’s got developers and ecologists going along with this.”

Slavinski explained that conservancies, or land trusts as they are often called, are suspect in some circles because they have been used as a vehicle to halt development by no-growthers. But the San Marcos conservancy will not be that.

“This is an apolitical, nonprofit effort aimed at only one thing, to preserve and protect some of the open space and threatened environments around here,” Slavinski said.

He said he has selected the future conservancy leaders with care, avoiding anyone who might use the organization for personal or company gain or “chain themselves to the fence” to publicize or protest development.

Griswold moved to San Marcos in 1980 and continues to be amazed at the mishmash of diversity within the city.

“It’s one of those strange cities that’s got a dairy in the middle of town and also some of the best eating places in the area out at Old California,” a restaurant row, Griswold said. “It’s a mix of expresso and manure.”

The conservancy plans first to map out the region and see what’s there and what’s worth saving. Then comes the hard part.

Without money or government grants and without power to force landowners to donate their property to the conservancy, its leaders must count on friendly persuasion and community spirit to preserve San Marcos’ past for the future.

Tom Wilson, a Pacific Bell executive, isn’t worried now about the conservancy’s success, but he was skeptical when Slavinski first approached him to join the board.

“I asked him, ‘What’s a land trust?’ and, when he explained, I thought to myself that it sounded like it was going to cost a lot of money,” Wilson said. After Slavinski’s sales pitch and a look at Fallbrook’s successful conservancy, Wilson was hooked.

Land trusts first caught on in the East when residents recognized that something of the old had to be preserved when new development arrived. Northern California joined the movement before the southern part of the state did, but the Southland is swiftly catching up. At least a dozen conservancies or land trusts have been started in San Diego County.

Walt and Karen Tucker started the Fallbrook conservancy about three years ago, Slavinski said, “with a half dozen people at first. Now its membership is about 350, and they have a 40-acre parcel they are restoring.”

It was a visit to the Fallbrook acreage for a tree-planting ceremony that hooked Wilson. “It was really a sight. Everyone, all types of people, were involved. Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, seniors, the Chamber of Commerce, businessmen, everyone,” Wilson said. “With Proposition 13 cutting down on taxes, governments don’t have the money to maintain public parks, and the Fallbrook park is like a private park that the whole community is involved in.”

Wilson’s dream is to accomplish and surpass what Fallbrook’s conservancy has done. But he concedes that he is impatient for the San Marcos group to get past the legal niceties of incorporation so that he can roll up his sleeves and get out there to do a little sweating and planting himself.

A local conservancy can acquire land in many ways, but the most common method is through donation.

Wilson figures there are people who, if assured that their land would remain as it is in perpetuity, would donate a part or all of it to a land trust in their wills. The family farmstead and the family name could live on through the conservancy, he pointed out, never to give way to urbanization or neglect.

Developers also see a benefit in the formation of a local conservancy, said Jim Simmons, a local developer.

State, federal and environmental agencies require preservation of sensitive lands or mitigation for its use, he said. Governmental agencies “have to have someone they can trust, some local, stable group that can keep an eye on things, to monitor the maintenance of the project because developers come and go.”

Builders “are going to be uneasy at first about forming such a relationship” with a conservancy, Simmons said, “but it is something that has to happen. Everybody has to get on board and make it a success.”

Slavinski said that, should the San Marcos conservancy, patterned after Fallbrook’s organization, ever dissolve, the property it had acquired would remain in its natural state, and another nonprofit trust or governmental agency would take over its care.

In reading up on the pitfalls of starting a movement designed to go on forever, Slavinski came across a rule of thumb that he has adopted as his motto for survival.

“All we need is three things: wealth, wisdom and workers,” he said. “Two out of three we have already.”