Park Agencies Take Key Role in Business of Development : Environment: Conservationists are divided over the tactic of trading building rights in order to obtain important open areas.

Park agencies in the Santa Monica Mountains once were bystanders in the development wars. They bought land when they had money. Otherwise, they watched from the sidelines as housing tracts chewed up ridgelines and valleys, leaving little open space.

What the public got in return for project approvals was “goat country”--the nearly vertical lands developers were glad to be rid of.

Convinced that land-use regulators weren’t looking out for the needs of parks, park officials recently began fending for themselves.

The new activism first surfaced with the still-pending mega-deal that proposes to trade development rights for thousands of acres of parkland, including the vast holdings of comedian Bob Hope in the Santa Monicas, Simi Hills and Santa Susana Mountains.

Now such deals are becoming more common as two park agencies--the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the National Park Service--emerge as key players in the development game. In several recent cases, the two agencies negotiated directly with developers to obtain key park or habitat areas. Then, in exchange for the donation of these lands, park officials agreed to remain neutral or even support building projects in environmentally sensitive areas.

For the agencies, the attraction is free parkland, and a chance to moderate a project’s worst effects. For developers, the goal is to have conservationists riding shotgun as they travel through the regulatory process.

In effect, developers are being told: “Here is the open space hoop that you need to jump through,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. “If you can’t make it, we’re your enemy.”

But the tactic has divided conservationists, with some questioning whether park agencies should lend their support and prestige to projects that degrade the mountains. These critics say park officials should use their expertise to objectively review development proposals, a role they cannot perform when they become developers’ allies.

Others see nothing wrong with horse trading, but say park officials do not drive a hard enough bargain and abet the destruction of pristine lands in their pursuit of more acreage. And some claim the strategy ultimately could weaken, not strengthen, land-use regulation.

“When a park agency puts its Good Housekeeping seal of approval on a development . . . then there’s incredible pressure on even well-intended planning agencies to just go along,” said Madelyn Glickfeld, a member of the California Coastal Commission and an ex-officio member of the Mountains Conservancy board.

A third agency involved in preserving the Santa Monicas, the California Department of Parks and Recreation, hews to the more traditional path of analyzing development proposals.

The department--whose mountain preserves include Malibu Creek and Topanga state parks--prepares detailed comments on major projects, rather than bargaining on their design.

“Our role . . . is to point out our concerns and our technical observations,” said Dan Preece, head of the department’s Santa Monica Mountains district. “I can’t ever recall a time when we attempted to balance the positive things about a project with the negative. We don’t feel that’s our role.”

Said parks department district planner Neil Braunstein: “It’s one thing to support the concept of the open space dedication. It’s another thing entirely to support the development as a whole.”

Edmiston said the strategy is paying off. “We are getting more and better land by a combination of buying and working with developers than we were by buying alone.”

The biggest such deal, now awaiting action by Ventura County officials, would allow two big developers to build about 3,000 homes, two golf courses and a hotel and commercial complex on the scenic Ahmanson Ranch at the eastern edge of the county. In return, developers would donate and sell, for $29.5 million, more than 10,000 acres of mountain land, most of it owned by Hope.

But even this deal has its detractors, who say that park officials whose job is preserving natural areas should not countenance such intensive development.

And according to critics, two more recent cases also illustrate the contradiction of park agencies cutting such deals.

One involves Rancho Malibu, a luxury homes project in Encinal Canyon that ran into trouble last year before the state Coastal Commission. Over strenuous objections from the developers, the Anden Group and VMS Realty Partners, the commission staff urged that the project be reduced from 55 to 34 homes or else be rejected.

“The commission has approved no project in the Santa Monica Mountains which approaches the magnitude of this project’s grading,” Chuck Damm, district director for the Coastal Commission, said at a hearing last July.

Fewer homes, he said, would mean less grading, more open space, and less visual intrusion on nearby parklands.

As operator of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area and owner of substantial holdings in nearby Trancas and Zuma canyons, the National Park Service naturally would prefer fewer houses, not more, and more open space, not less.

But the project that went before the Coastal Commission was already smaller than the original plan and the Park Service had been promised that 160 acres, most of the property, would be dedicated as parkland. And so the Park Service refused to back the scaled-down project recommended by the Coastal Commission staff.

“The National Park Service neither supports nor opposes development projects,” Nancy Arkin, chief of planning for the National Recreation Area, said at the hearing. Then, as the Park Service already had done in letters to the commission, Arkin went on to praise the “cooperative way” the developers had “worked with the National Park Service . . . to reduce the impacts to the cultural and natural resources.”

Arkin’s testimony and the letters were seen as endorsements of the project, despite the disclaimer. And the commission, which usually adopts the recommendations of its staff, this time rejected them and voted 6 to 4 to approve 55 houses.

“We were recommending no development on what was called the eastern ridge,” Damm recalled. Removing the homes there “would have added that much more acreage to the open space,” he said.

“If the Park Service . . . had supported our staff recommendation, it would have been helpful.”

David E. Gackenbach, superintendent of the National Recreation Area, denied any deal with the developers.

Asked why the Park Service did not back the commission staff, Gackenbach said he thought the scaled-down project would have scattered homes over more acreage, reducing the open space. However, interviews and records show this was not the case.

A consultant for the developers said there was a deal, and the Park Service was holding up its end.

The consultant, Michael B. Rosenfeld, whose father, Eugene Rosenfeld, is president of Anden, said the developers had changed their plans to meet park officials’ goals. “I personally do not believe that it would be ethical” for the Park Service to “redefine their goals” based on the tougher stance taken by the commission staff, Rosenfeld said.

Glickfeld, one of the commissioners who voted against the project, agreed with Rosenfeld’s position that the Park Service cut a deal.

“When someone gives you everything you ask for, but it happens to be less than the regulatory system might require later on . . . you don’t go back on your word,” she said.

“I think that’s what was going on here,” said Glickfeld, adding that she thought the Park Service had “guessed wholly wrong” and set its sights too low.

The project was thrown into limbo last month when the coastal panel--facing an environmental lawsuit challenging the approval--voted to reconsider the project.

The second case involved a big housing project of Micor Ventures Inc., a firm Michael Rosenfeld owns.

Approved in April by the Calabasas City Council--and reapproved in June in response to a separate environmental lawsuit--the Micor project was designed with help from the Mountains Conservancy and has been repeatedly praised by the Park Service.

Some 639 acres--more than two-thirds of the project site east of Las Virgenes Road--are to be deeded to the public. The dedicated land can continue to function as a wildlife corridor between habitat areas to the north and south of the Micor tract.

The conservancy also asked Micor, and Micor agreed, to position the 250 homes out of sight of Las Virgenes Road.

Still, opponents say the 7.6 million cubic yards of grading required for the project--enough to fill about a half-million dump trucks--will radically transform the developed area.

The project will also destroy the parcel’s eastern canyon, which opponents say is its single richest habitat area. Moreover, they complain that 250 homes is triple the number allowed by the previous zoning.

The conservancy cut a deal for parkland and then turned “their back on the destruction that’s done on the remainder of the parcel,” complained Juliette Anthony, a conservationist.

Edmiston acknowledged the project will have negative effects. “We don’t . . . say this development is going to blend into the natural environment and the little deer will walk between houses,” he said.

“The issue is, in every situation, what is the realm of the possible?” If you can’t buy the land, “you sometimes have to make a decision about what is the most important value on the property to protect,” Edmiston said.

Park Service dealings with Micor also have raised eyebrows, in part because Rosenfeld and Gackenbach are occasional golf buddies.

A review of Park Service and state Department of Parks and Recreation files shows that Gackenbach deleted or toned down formal comments on the Micor project that members of his staff prepared for his signature.

Last August, a Gackenbach letter to Calabasas city officials expressed appreciation for “the extra efforts of Micor to adjust and readjust the project” to meet agency goals. Some park officials later privately voiced concern, questioning why Gackenbach would speak approvingly of the project before a report on its environmental impacts was complete.

Moreover, records show that Gackenbach later overruled his staff in deciding not to criticize two of the project’s more controversial features--the large amount of grading and the number of homes.

At one point, Park Service staff calculated that the earth to be graded by the project would fill Dodger Stadium several times, according to records in state park department files. But when the Park Service issued comments to the city of Calabasas, there was no mention of grading.

An explanation appeared in Park Service files reviewed under the Freedom of Information Act.

An unsigned staff note dated last Feb. 17 said “David G told me . . . we (NPS) will not bring up the grading issue on the Micor project any more than we did on the Anden project.

“Paraphrasing: It doesn’t matter how much grading there is as long as it is done well,” the note continued.

“The professional opinions” of Gackenbach’s staff “were not considered to be important,” said Tim Thomas, a biologist who recently left the Park Service for a job with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

“We were specifically told we would not comment on grading issues or density,” Thomas said. Gackenbach “knows very well those two issues could cause problems, so don’t bring them up.”

But Gackenbach said his actions were meant to help Micor, and he did not believe it was pertinent to comment on grading.

And while acknowledging he and Rosenfeld have played golf “a few times,” Gackenbach said that “has no bearing on how we decided on projects . . . I think everybody can separate personal and business matters.”

With Micor or other projects, he said, “one has to determine what are the valuable things you really want and . . . try to prioritize those.”

The conservancy and parks services together have acquired about 35,000 acres of parkland through purchases and donations during the last decade and officials said they will stand on their record.

Said Gackenbach: “I’ll put my record as superintendent here up against” the critics, “because we’re getting things done and they ain’t.”

Edmiston said people naturally second-guess deals with developers.

“In any given case, people are going to say, ‘If I were in your shoes, boy, I’d have done better,’ ” Edmiston said. “In any given situation, they might be right.”

He said that although the conservancy doesn’t bat 1.000, it gets more than its share of hits.

“I’d say we’re in the high .300s or low .400s, which . . . for any baseball player is Hall of Fame.”