Countywide : Baptist Foundation Gets $6-Million Gift

The Orange County Southern Baptist Foundation has been given 60 acres in the Santa Clarita Valley valued at $6 million and it hopes to use the windfall to acquire much-needed church sites for its Orange County congregations.

Gerald W. Squyres, pastor of Huntington Beach Baptist Church and president of the foundation, said the gift was made by a real estate investor who lives in Northern California and wishes to remain anonymous.

Squyres said the benefactor is a Catholic who was introduced to the foundation by an Orange County friend. The friend was grateful to a Southern Baptist pastor in Aliso Viejo who had helped him through a personal crisis.

Squyres said he began talking to the real estate investor in mid-December and hastened to complete the transaction only half an hour before the Los Angeles County recorder’s office closed on the last day of the year.

“Apparently (the benefactor) had a tax consideration and wanted it done by the end of the year,” Squyres said. The donor had appraised the property at $6 million, he said.

Real estate records show the land belonged to Roy Zattiero of Napa. However, foundation officials declined to confirm or deny Zattiero as the donor.

Though Squyres said he is delighted by the gift, he said he intends to swap or sell the donated property to obtain Orange County land for church building sites.

As a last resort, he said, the foundation might enter a joint venture to develop the hilly Los Angeles County property, which is near a residential tract under development, and use the proceeds to buy Orange County land.

The Orange County Southern Baptist Foundation, based in Brea, assists new and growing congregations in acquiring property for church buildings and helps congregations without churches with the cost of renting temporary quarters. The foundation gives money to the Orange County Southern Baptist Assn., the mission arm of the denomination, which establishes new congregations and churches.

Squyres said the 60-acre gift will go only a small way in fulfilling the demand on the foundation to help provide new church sites in Orange County, which has 84 Southern Baptist congregations. Forty-nine of these have permanent meeting facilities.

“A lot of our churches are serving two congregations, and other congregations are renting commercial buildings such as warehouses and vacant stores or school gymnasiums,” Squyres said.

Money doesn’t go very far in buying building sites in Orange County’s expensive real estate market, he said, adding: “If we could find undeveloped land (here) for $500,000 an acre, we would be very fortunate.”

Squyres said the foundation is especially interested in finding building sites “in south Orange County because it is such a rapidly growing area.” He said the denomination has 21,000 members in Orange County and is continuing to grow, so land for new churches “is going to be an ever increasing need.”