Park’s Critic Makes Fortune on Land Sales : Santa Monica Mountains: Unable to block creation of the national recreation area, Ty Sisson is now earning millions selling parcels to the government.

Ty Sisson hoped there would never be a Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. As a director of Concerned Citizens for Property Rights in the late 1970s, he joined other landowners in unsuccessfully lobbying Congress to block creation of the park, which is a unit of the National Park Service.

When the park became a fact of life, however, Sisson adapted. He became an advocate for “little guy” landowners, who said park bureaucrats had left them in limbo, taking forever to buy them out.

But while still a prominent critic, Sisson has made a fortune from the park, amassing millions of dollars through transactions with the Park Service, according to agency records.

Sisson, 52, has profited from the park in two ways, records show.

First, Sisson and his wife, Dolores, a licensed real estate agent, have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and commissions by representing sellers of land to the park. While his wife has handled the sales, Sisson has marketed himself to clients as a land-use expert who can extract a good price for their land.

Moreover, Sisson and members of his family have cashed in millions of dollars worth of their own holdings that were acquired through astute land speculation in the 1960s and ‘70s. The Park Service has paid the Sissons $6.3 million for part of their lands and is expected to buy about 20 more tracts in coming years, according to agency figures.

In the biggest transaction, the Park Service last year paid about $5.4 million for 52 acres along Kanan Dume Road that Sisson said he purchased for “next to nothing.”

The irony hasn’t been lost on park supporters.

“ ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, make money off ‘em,’ I guess is the ultimate conclusion,” said David Brown, chairman of the Sierra Club’s Santa Monica Mountains Task Force.

“That’s disgusting,” said another conservationist, speaking of Sisson’s recent windfall on the condition of anonymity. “I go to Washington to lobby” for funds for the mountain park, “and it’s not so Ty Sisson can sell 50 acres for 5 million bucks.”

Has the park “been good for me?” Sisson mused recently. “I can say that it hasn’t hurt me. . . . Whenever they have gotten around to buy the properties . . . I feel that I’ve been treated fairly.”

But Sisson said his situation is no different from that of others who have sold land to the Park Service that they bought 20 years ago. They have all made a lot of money, he said.

Then too, Sisson said he might have made as much or more in a private sale had there never been a park.

Sisson, who lives on exclusive Westlake Island in Westlake Village, is described by park officials as shrewd, aggressive and a constant thorn in their sides.

“He’s been really vocal and overly persistent when he has parcels that he’s ready to sell,” said David E. Gackenbach, superintendent of the national recreation area. Sisson, he said, “actually becomes something of a pest.”

“He’s one of the most influential people in the Santa Monica Mountains,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state agency that helps the Park Service buy mountain land. “He has been strategic in his land acquisitions,” Edmiston said. “He knows exactly where we’re going to go.”

Among landowners, “Ty’s reputation is: ‘If you align yourself with Ty, Ty will find the best possible way to get the park to buy your land,’ ” Edmiston said. He said Sisson’s influence is due partly to the wide perception that in “any conflict between the little guy and Big Government, the little guy is probably right.”

As representatives of other landowners, Ty and Dolores Sisson have been involved in about 25 sales to the Park Service for more than $5.4 million, according to agency figures. In those transactions, Ty Sisson served as a consultant and his wife as real estate agent for a combined fee of up to 10% of the sale price.

“What I’d say Ty provides for them is the advocacy and just being a squeaky wheel,” said Betty Wiechec, executive director of the Mountains Restoration Trust, a nonprofit land trust based in Malibu. “They band together and he squeaks for all of them.”

Some park officials have questioned what service he provides. They pointed out that the Park Service pays only appraised value for land, making it impossible for Sisson to negotiate a higher price.

“The appraisal’s the price we can pay . . . regardless of how much yelling and screaming he may do,” said Gackenbach, the recreation area superintendent. “I think his clients are paying for a service that is not really necessary because the federal government would offer them--with or without him--the same price.”

However, some of the qualities that annoy park officials evidently endear Sisson to clients. Lawrence J. Konrath, for example, hired Sisson both times that he sold land to the park. The second time, Konrath said, he did not call Sisson until the park’s appraiser hinted at his estimate of value.

According to Konrath, when he told Sisson the figure, Sisson replied: “I can do much better for you than that.”

“Believe me, he did,” Konrath said.

“What I wound up getting was considerably higher than the appraiser was talking about,” Konrath said.

Sisson said he presents “the client’s property in the most favorable manner” and insists that the appraiser go with him on the property and review data he thinks pertinent. “I make sure the Park Service and the appraisers treat the property owners fairly,” he said.

Sisson endured a nasty scandal in the late 1970s, when he was the focus of a dispute over illegal subdividing of mountain land.

At issue was a practice known as “four-by-fouring,” whereby landowners created large subdivisions without planning reviews or investing in costly improvements like roads and sewers.

At the time, subdivisions of fewer than five lots were virtually unregulated, which is what gave the scheme appeal. Typically, the practitioners would divide large tracts into four parcels and deed them to relatives or associates through paper transactions, not actual arms-length sales. The paper owners repeated the process by splitting the lots into four more pieces--and so on until large subdivisions were created without approvals that otherwise would have been necessary.

Officials called Sisson a four-by-fourer extraordinaire, saying he used the technique to split hundreds of acres of mountain land into scores of illegal lots.

The state attorney general, representing the California Department of Real Estate, filed a civil lawsuit against Sisson and several family members and associates in 1978, accusing them of engineering a complex scheme to evade subdivision laws.

And in a separate action, Los Angeles County planning officials issued notices of violation, contending that many of the lot splits were illegal.

Without admitting guilt, Sisson settled the state lawsuit in 1981 for $10,000, according to records on file in Los Angeles Superior Court.

More important, Sisson got the county to back down, thanks to help from an unexpected quarter. He obtained electrifying testimony from two former top county planning officials. In affidavits, the men said they and other officials in the Planning Department’s subdivision branch had known four-by-fouring was common and never considered it illegal.

Sisson claimed that county officials actually had instructed him in the four-by-fouring art.

“It was a nightmare,” he said recently of his legal battle. It was like following a cop’s advice “and then he gives you a ticket,” he said.

Still, Sisson came out of it in good shape. In the end, county officials issued certificates of compliance so that he could get building permits for his lots.

And that proved crucial years later, when the Park Service got ready to buy the 52 acres along Kanan Dume Road, which Sisson had split in his four-by-fouring days.

The land, 4 1/4 miles north of Pacific Coast Highway, includes part of the route of the Backbone Trail, which will eventually be a 65-mile footpath through the recreation area from Pacific Palisades to Ventura County. In the 1970s, the Sissons had split the land into 17 small, contiguous parcels.

Since those tracts were declared legal lots, the Park Service had no choice but to appraise them as 17 separate tracts--rather than as a bulk parcel--assuring a premium price. The agency ended up paying between $240,000 and $425,000 for each of the lots.

Even so, it took Sisson some time to get his price.

Appraisals commissioned by the Park Service in 1989 found the lots to be worth only about 60% of what the agency eventually paid. Sisson rejected the appraisals, saying they contained inaccuracies and undervalued his lands.

The Park Service waited about a year and hired a new appraiser to do a new set of appraisals--which established the ultimate purchase price of $5.435 million.

Ed Haberlin, chief of land resources for the Park Service’s western regional office, said the agency had not gone “appraisal shopping. . . . We don’t go rushing out and make another appraisal that matches up with the landowner’s concept of value.”

Nonetheless, Haberlin said, changing market conditions and the passage of time may justify a new appraisal, as was done in that case.

The Sisson tracts are within the state’s coastal zone boundaries, a factor that could affect their development potential, and hence their estimated worth. However, the new appraisals did not mention the coastal zone--an omission that Haberlin said he became aware of only when a reporter asked about it.

“I would have hoped it would have been in the report,” said Haberlin. However, he said, it still may have been considered by the appraiser in arriving at the value.

When not busy last year on his own behalf, Sisson was going to bat for a group of landowners with a common grievance. These “willing sellers” say the park has strung them along by listing their lands for purchase while never buying them.

They claimed that with the shadow of the feds hanging over them, they could neither build their dream homes nor sell their land to others. After many years, they said, the park had failed to buy them out and help them get on with their lives.

Park officials have neglected the willing sellers, Sisson complained, focusing instead “on their park agenda, whatever that may be.”

According to park officials, however, many of the willing sellers weren’t willing until the economy took a nose-dive and the only source of profit was a government check.

The attitude of the willing sellers seems to be: “ ‘Don’t buy land when the market is strong, because you’re interfering with the right of these property owners to sell it,’ ” Edmiston said. “ ‘But when the market is weak, by all means go in and buy our land because we don’t have anybody else to sell it to,’ ” he said.

Not that the park has kept anyone from going ahead with development or sale of their lands. “I can point to a number . . . of properties in the mountains that have been on our acquisition lists that have been developed,” Gackenbach said. “There’s houses sitting on them right now.”

But it’s not that simple, Sisson says. The government, he contends, has hopscotched through the mountains, buying some tracts but passing over others, which become increasingly isolated from other private lands. The owners, who had counted on sharing with neighbors the cost of roads and utilities, suddenly lack neighbors with whom to share. They retain the right, but lose the means, to use their properties, Sisson says.

The dispute, raging on and off for years, reflects the financial adversity into which the recreation area was born. Much is made of the fact that Congress in many years gives the Santa Monica Mountains park more money for land than any other unit of the Park Service. But few other parks are so far from completion. And congressional appropriations--which have averaged about $8 million per year--have not been equal to the task of creating a park from some of the priciest raw land in the country.

Since the recreation area was established in 1978, the Park Service has amassed about 17,500 acres--halfway to the goal of 35,000 acres in federal ownership. Many key parcels have been lost to development or are now so expensive that they may never be acquired. Park officials have practiced triage, using scarce funds to rescue the most splendid lands. In the process, lands of lower priority or that are not imperiled by development remain on the waiting list.

Sisson set out to change all that. Last summer and fall, he orchestrated a campaign to curb the right of park officials to set acquisition priorities. He got clients who had expected to be bought out last year to write outraged letters to key members of Congress. The letters asked lawmakers to require that the Park Service, as a condition of further funding, buy out willing sellers first.

Sisson also got Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana to introduce a resolution asking Congress to impose that restriction on funding. And he arranged for Charles Cushman, the firebrand leader of the National Inholders Assn., an influential property rights group, to meet with a group of willing sellers--a few of whom picketed Park Service offices in Agoura Hills the following day.

The supervisors didn’t pass the Dana resolution. And when Congress in October approved another $13.8 million for the park, it declined to tie the Park Service’s hands.

Still, the gambit was successful. In response to the pressure, the mountains conservancy, by arrangement with the Park Service, has begun to appraise some willing sellers’ lands with the aim of buying them soon.

“The policy ought to be what is good for the general public, and not necessarily what’s good for the individual landowner,” said Edmiston, the conservancy head. But it’s a battle that from now on he’d just as soon avoid.

“We were able to prevent Congress from putting that kind of Draconian language in there,” Edmiston said. “But unless we dealt with the concerns of Ty’s landowners, we would be faced with continued pressure.”

Sisson said he will wait and see what happens next. “When you’re dealing with bureaucrats and bureaucracies and time goes by,” he asked, “who knows what’s going to happen?”

But “fairness and property rights have to come into play at some point.”