Park Critic Profited in Land Deals : Real estate: Ty Sisson has earned millions of dollars by selling properties in the Santa Monica Mountains to the National Park Service.

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 fighting creation of the park, which is a unit of the national park system.

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.

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

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

First, Sisson and his wife, Dolores, a licensed real estate agent, have collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees and commissions from 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 his family have made millions of dollars from sales of their own mountain holdings, acquired through savvy purchases 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.

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

The irony isn’t 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 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 the same as others who bought land 20 years ago and sold it to the Park Service. They all made lots of money, he said.

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

Sisson “actually becomes something of a pest” when he “has parcels that he’s ready to sell,” said David E. Gackenbach, recreation area superintendent.

“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 acquire land. “He has been strategic in his land acquisitions. . . . 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 has exploited the wide perception that in “any conflict between the little guy and Big Government, the little guy is probably right.”

Park Service records show the Sissons, acting as agents for other landowners, have been involved in about 25 sales to the park for more than $5.4 million. In those transactions, Ty Sisson served as a consultant and his wife as real estate agent for fees of up to 10% of the sale price.

But some officials question what Sisson does for his clients, pointing out that the Park Service always pays the value set by an independent appraiser.

“The appraisal’s the price we can pay . . . regardless of how much yelling and screaming he may do,” Gackenbach said. “I think his clients are paying for a service that is not really necessary.”

Sisson said he presents “the client’s property in the most favorable manner,” taking the appraiser on the property and insisting that he review all comparable sales Sisson thinks pertinent. Evidently, some of his qualities that annoy park officials endear Sisson to clients.

Lawrence J. Konrath, for example, hired Sisson both times 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.

Konrath said that when he told Sisson, 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.”

Sisson endured a nasty scandal in the late 1970s, when he was the focus of investigations into illegal subdividing.

At issue was the practice of “four-by-fouring,” whereby landowners created large subdivisions without planning reviews or costly improvements like roads and sewers.

At the time, subdivisions of fewer than five lots were virtually unregulated, which is what made the scheme attractive. Typically, practitioners would divide large tracts into four parcels and deed them to relatives or associates through paper transactions, not true sales. The paper owners repeated the process by splitting the lots again, and so on until large subdivisions were created without necessary approvals.

Officials called Sisson a four-by-fourer extraordinaire, saying he had illegally split hundreds of acres of land into scores of mountain 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 fraudulent scheme to evade subdivision laws. And in a separate action, Los Angeles County planning officials issued notices of violation, saying many of Sisson’s lot splits were illegal.

Without admitting guilt, Sisson settled with the state in 1981 for $10,000, court records show.

More important, he got the county to back down, thanks to help from an unexpected quarter: In affidavits, former high-ranking officials of the county Planning Department said officials in charge of subdivisions had known four-by-fouring was common and never considered it illegal.

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

“It was a nightmare,” he said of his legal battle.

Still, Sisson emerged in fine shape. In the end, county officials issued certificates of compliance, declaring his lots legal.

And that proved crucial years later, when Sisson got ready to sell his land along Kanan Dume Road.

The 52 acres, 4 1/4 miles north of Pacific Coast Highway, straddles an important link on the Backbone Trail, which eventually will be an unbroken, 65-mile footpath across the spine of the mountains from Pacific Palisades to Ventura County.

The Sissons in the early ‘70s had four-by-foured the land into 17 tracts. And because the lots later were declared legal, the Park Service had no choice but to appraise them as separate parcels--rather than in bulk--assuring a premium price. Even so, it took Sisson a while to get his price.

The Park Service first commissioned appraisals of several of the Sisson parcels in 1989. But these appraisals valued the lots at just more than half of the ultimate price. Sisson rejected the appraisals, saying they undervalued his lands.

About the same time, the Park Service contracted with a second appraiser to examine the rest of the 17 tracts. Sisson, however, refused to let the second appraiser inspect his property. Because Park Service rules require appraisers to make a visual inspection, Sisson’s refusal to deal with the second appraiser forced the agency to cancel his contract.

Sisson said he had seen other work by the second appraiser, Craig A. Peeples of Malibu, “and I just felt very uncomfortable.”

Peeples said he believes Sisson blocked him from appraising the land because “he thought I might not come in high enough. . . . I had a feeling he likes to prequalify the appraisers.” Sisson was able to veto the choice of Peeples “because we’re stuck,” said Ed Haberlin, chief of land resources for the Park Service’s western regional office.

“We can’t appraise the property without inspection.” Sisson “knows the process by which the government acquires land,” said Haberlin, and “uses it to his advantage.

“Sometimes you feel like one hand is tied behind your back,” he said.

The Park Service waited nearly a year and commissioned a new set of appraisals, this time hiring one of three appraisers Sisson said he would accept. The third appraiser came up with the $5.435 million the Sissons got last year.

Haberlin denied that the Park Service had gone “appraisal shopping. . . . We don’t go rushing out and make another appraisal that matches up with the landowner’s concept of value,” Haberlin said.

But, Haberlin said, changing market conditions and passage of time may justify new appraisals, as were done in this case.

“It seems like an awful lot of money to pay,” Haberlin acknowledged. But he said the final appraisals were adequately supported by data on comparable sales in the Malibu area.

The Sisson tracts are within the state’s coastal zone boundaries, which could affect development potential, and hence their market value. However, the final appraisals did not mention the coastal zone, an omission 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, the appraiser may still have considered this in arriving at the value.

When not busy last year on his own behalf, Sisson was pushing a grievance for clients. These “willing sellers,” as he called them, purportedly could not build their dream homes nor sell to others once the park had marked their lands for acquisition. Yet the park failed to buy and let them get on with their lives.

Park officials, however, said many willing sellers became willing only when the economy took a nose-dive and the government became their only hope for a profitable sale.

Their attitude seemed 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.’ ”

Park officials also said they never stopped anyone from building or selling. Many tracts once listed for acquisition “have been developed,” Gackenbach said. “There’s houses sitting on them right now.”

Sisson says it’s not so simple. The government, he says, has hopscotched through the mountains, buying some tracts but passing over others. The owners, who counted on sharing the high cost of roads and utilities, suddenly lack neighbors with whom to share. They retain the right, but lose the means, to use their land, he says.

The volatile dispute, simmering on and off for years, reflects the financial adversity in which the park was born. Much is made of the fact that Congress provides the park more money for land than any other unit of the park system. But few other parks are so far from completion. And annual appropriations, averaging about $8 million per year, have not been equal to the task of building 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 developed or have grown so expensive they may never be acquired. As a result, park officials have practiced triage, using scarce funds to rescue the most splendid tracts. Lands that are less critical or not immediately threatened have stayed on the waiting list.

Sisson set out to change all that. Last summer and fall, he orchestrated a campaign to curb park officials’ authority to pursue the lands they consider most crucial. He tried to get Congress to require the Park Service to buy from willing sellers first as a condition of federal funding.

Sisson got clients to send outraged letters to Congress. And he got Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana to introduce a resolution before the Board of Supervisors supporting congressional language restricting the use of funds. He even 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 Dana’s resolution. And Congress in October gave the park $13.8 million for land without tying the hands of the Park Service.

Still, Sisson’s gambit was successful. Feeling the pressure, the mountains conservancy, by arrangement with the Park Service, has begun to appraise some willing sellers’ lands in hopes 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 he’d rather 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. “Fairness and property rights have to come into play at some point,” he said. But “when you’re dealing with bureaucrats and bureaucracies and time goes by, who knows what’s going to happen?”