NEWS ANALYSIS : Developers Wary of Citing Price of Protection for Elusive Bird

Making the California gnatcatcher an endangered species could wreak havoc on the building industry, Orange County’s big developers and landowners maintain.

But pinning them down for details is about as easy as finding the elusive little birds in a patch of the scrub brush, their nesting habitat.

Some of the largest stands of coastal sage scrub--not surprisingly--are in areas owned by the county’s largest private landowners, UC Irvine biologist Fred M. Roberts Jr. said.

So it seems logical that the big landowners have the most to lose if the bird is declared endangered and development is prohibited on some of this scrub acreage.

And you might expect the largest of the landholders--the Irvine Co., the Mission Viejo Co. and the Santa Margarita Co.--to be leading the charge against the gnatcatcher.

But representatives of the Irvine Co., the county’s largest private landowner, maintain that the developer “doesn’t know” how many acres of scrub it owns.

At the Santa Margarita Co., developer of Rancho Santa Margarita, representatives simply “won’t say” how many acres of scrub are on the firm’s property.

The Mission Viejo Co. maintains that there is no scrub at all on its thousands of acres, although biologist Roberts said there was some until the company recently cleared it out. The company adamantly denies that and accuses Roberts of trying to use the gnatcatcher issue to stop development.

Irvine Co. Vice President Larry Thomas said: “The existence of scrub doesn’t automatically mean the existence of birds there. So to accurately assess the impact of the gnatcatcher is like shooting in the dark.

“We don’t want to overstate or understate its impact. We have some sensitivity on this.”

At Santa Margarita Co., spokeswoman Diane Gaynor at first said the scrub acreage the developer owns and the potential impact of the gnatcatcher on the company are “proprietary information.”

But later Thursday, the company reconsidered that response. Its representatives said the developer expects “no impacts” from the gnatcatcher on the big new town of Rancho Santa Margarita that it is building east of Mission Viejo.

Together the three companies control much of the open land in the southern half of Orange County. They are the remnants of huge Spanish land grants that survived from the 19th Century--when they were vast ranches--into the 20th Century, when they’ve become immensely valuable as land for whole new cities.

As such, the companies have a big stake in how and where the county develops.

So the Irvine Co. and the Santa Margarita Co. oppose designating the gnatcatcher as an endangered species--a decision the state Fish and Game Commission put off Thursday for 30 days--for fear that such a designation would put some of their land off limits to building and hold up construction of roads needed for access to their projects.

For the large landowners, the less said specifically about how much scrub acreage they own, the better. To do otherwise might furnish information to the environmentalists pushing for endangered status.

Instead, builders and landowners alike just let the Building Industry Assn. of Orange County (BIA)--the home builders’ lobbying group--take the lead.

The fight has been mostly over scientific issues because the Fish and Game Commission is not supposed to factor in economic privation in considering a species for endangered status. Potential harm to the economy, however, could be a powerful weapon in mobilizing public opinion.

But the BIA talks in only general terms about the birds’ supposed threat to the economy. And so far it has not documented that a real estate cataclysm would necessarily result from a year’s moratorium on building: In fact, the land market has been in the dumps for the last two years, so many projects are on hold anyway.

One example the industry does cite is the Stevens kangaroo rat in Riverside County. To pay for habitat for that endangered species, builders are assessed $1,900 per acre on tens of thousands of acres, BIA Executive Director Christine Reed said. At the typical seven homes to the acre, that adds about $270 to the cost of a house.

That is one of the group’s more potent arguments: Land is already hideously expensive in Orange County, and to take a lot more acreage off the market--or even to hold up its development in government red tape--will add to the cost of buying a house.

The group also says thousands of construction workers will lose their jobs.

On the scientific side, the BIA’s own biologists contend that while the gnatcatcher may well be endangered, there is plenty of coastal sage scrub already set aside.

Just 2% of the remaining scrub is scheduled to be torn out for development in the next 18 months, they also say.

That’s about as specific as the builders get. Even most individual home builders do not want to talk details. They say the issue is complicated enough, and it’s hard to tell what the financial impact will be.

“We just don’t know what land of ours might be involved,” said Donald D. Steffensen, executive vice president of the Lusk Co. in Irvine, one of Southern California’s largest home builders.

Steffensen also heads the BIA panel on endangered species.

Lusk owns land in all three counties inhabited by the gnatcatcher: Orange, Riverside and San Diego.

“We understand that any land that would support coastal scrub would be off limits,” he said.

But the company has not studied how listing the species might affect its holdings financially, Steffensen said.

In that respect, Lusk may not be much different from most other big builders, said Brea real estate consultant Alfred J. Gobar, who said he does not know of any builders who have actually commissioned studies on the financial impact of the bird on their companies.

To be fair, the landowners have already set aside a great deal of coastal scrub acreage. At the Irvine Co.’s 6,300-acre Newport Coast project on the hills between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach, 1,800 acres of coastal scrub have been set aside as open space, biologist Roberts estimated.

According to his estimates, at least 180 acres of scrub have been plowed under, leaving about 350 acres subject to development.

Santa Margarita Co. began grading land just last week at Las Flores, where it hopes to sell land for 2,500 new homes. One county official said that clearing was an attempt to get in under the wire before Thursday’s Fish and Game Commission session on the gnatcatcher. Las Flores is an extension of Rancho Santa Margarita.