Canyon Is the Prize in One Man’s Struggle : Environment: Developer sees luxury homes, school district sees a campus, city sees revenue and a park, but self-taught naturalist wants to keep Sandstone Canyon as it is.

Jan Dabney’s dream for Sandstone Canyon is Don Schad’s nightmare.

Wedged between the droning traffic of the Orange Freeway and tracts of neat suburban houses, Sandstone Canyon may seem a relatively unremarkable chunk of ravine and ridges.

But to Schad, it is Diamond Bar’s Grand Canyon.

Abundant plant and animal life, Schad says, tell the stories of natural wonder to those who would listen to the canyon’s bird songs, marvel at its wildflowers or walk under its giant oaks, some of them seedlings 400 years ago.

“There is no other place in the world just like this canyon,” said Schad, a 70-year-old self-taught naturalist and retired electrical contractor whose house overlooks one of Sandstone’s steep, wooded cliffs. “My nightmare is that it all will be destroyed.”

To Jan Dabney, the spokesman for two major developers, and to city and school officials, the 171-acre canyon represents a rare opportunity to create a dream: a $170-million, meticulously planned development.

They hope to build a junior high school, a 28-acre park with nature trails winding through oak and walnut woodlands, manicured ball fields, a 290,000-square-foot commercial area, and 200 single-family homes selling in the $500,000 range.

It is estimated that the commercial development alone would create anywhere from 464 to 1,160 new jobs in the city.

The potential economic benefits to Diamond Bar, population 55,000, are vast and in the long run, 48-year-old Dabney said, worth what would be a virtual remaking of the landscape.

“I think the legal term is ‘overriding considerations,’ ” he said of the trade-offs as he walked along the Sandstone hillsides and created a verbal picture of what one day might be there.

If approved by the Planning Commission and City Council, the proposal calls for the removal of close to 800 coast live oak trees, most of the oaks in Sandstone. The development would also mean filling the half-mile-long canyon with an 80-foot-deep layer of dirt, to be scraped from the surrounding ridges.

James DeStefano, the city’s community development director who has been overseeing creation of the South Pointe Master Plan, acknowledges that the project “clearly involves a reconfiguration of the canyon.”

“Significant amounts of vegetation will be removed and replaced,” he said. “We recognize that to some folks this is an oasis in suburbia. But we recognize we have a responsibility to look at the broader needs of the community and . . . believe the benefits outweigh the detriments.”

In the works for two years, the proposal has raised the ire of environmentalists and prompted questions from state and federal environmental officials.

Both the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Fish and Game have written letters expressing concerns about the draft of the project’s environmental study.

An official of the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service wrote that “the project site represents habitats that are rapidly disappearing in Southern California.”

A state Fish and Game official raised the issue that the study had not adequately addressed the potential impact on the California gnatcatcher--a tiny, rare songbird being considered for addition to the federal endangered species list-- and another sensitive species, the San Diego coast horned lizard.

Furthermore, the regional official, Fred Worthley, questioned the environmental report’s conclusion that the loss of the oak and walnut trees would not represent a significant impact on regional biological resources.

Cal Poly Pomona biological sciences professor Jack Bath, who has done studies on mountain lions for the last three years in the region, cites another concern: the potential impact on a small population of cougars that move regularly through the canyon on their way to places as far away as Anaheim Hills and Whittier Narrows.

“It’s an atrocity,” said Bath. “A single project like this could block the (cougar) pathway” and in effect, he said, cause the demise of the few mountain lions remaining in Diamond Bar.

As Don Schad scanned some of the 5,000 slides he has taken in Sandstone, he spoke of his heart-wrenching love affair with the canyon.

“In this canyon we have every (plant and animal) that’s in Diamond Bar, except one kind of wildflower. It’s been home to wildlife for thousands of years. The canyon itself is between 800,000 and 1.2 million years old.”

He held up an eight-pound petrified palm tree root that he said came from Sandstone and has been dated at 8 million to 10 million years old. The city’s environmental report noted that there is a “high degree of probability” fossils of whales, fish and plants would be found there and that they would be of high quality.

In recent years, until developers last year banned Schad from entering the canyon, Schad led nature walks of Scouts, schoolchildren and senior citizens.

“A lot of people don’t even know where Sandstone Canyon is, nor do they know the value of it,” he said, explaining why he has been able to marshal only limited local opposition to the project and hasn’t attracted any significant support from environmental groups outside Diamond Bar.

He does have one long shot, however, one that would help him realize his dream of creating a children’s wilderness museum and preserving the canyon forever.

The developers have told him he could buy the land for about $10 million, Schad said. “I wrote Ross Perot two months ago and asked him for the $10 million,” he said. So far, he has not received an answer. And to date, Schad’s Tonner Canyon Conservancy, a nonprofit group created last year to save the city’s canyons, has $396 in its account.

“This is a positively defined situation,” he said. “Either I buy the canyon or it’s destroyed.”

In recent months the controversy has found its way to a series of lengthy meetings before the Planning Commission. So far, the City Council has not formally considered the proposal.

The city’s mayor, Gary Miller, who describes his occupation as “land banker,” has announced he will abstain from the discussions.

Two years ago, for about two months, Miller owned 78 acres of the project land before selling to one of the current developers, R-N-P Development Inc., headed by Dwight Forrister, formerly of Whittier and now of Austin, Texas.

The other key players involved are Anaheim-based Arciero & Sons, a development company that owns about 40 acres, and the Walnut Valley Unified School District, which has 30 acres where the South Pointe Middle School now overlooks part of the canyon. The school, with 925 students, is housed in 46 portable buildings.

School officials say they need to remove a hillside’s worth of dirt and grade the property to build a $15-million facility needed to combat overcrowding. Current plans call for the dirt to be pushed down into the canyon.

“We’re sensitive about the environmental issues and are willing to put the dirt wherever it needs to be placed,” said Ronald Hockwalt, school superintendent.

In its negotiations, the city has arranged a land swap for a small amount of acreage it owns in the area, in exchange for a half-share in the 30-acre commercial site to be developed. The city has also negotiated to get the developers to commit to creating and giving over to public use the 28-acre parkland, including $4 million worth of recreational fields.

In many respects, Dabney said, the developers “realize their obligation to the community.”

That is why, he said, they agreed to allocate 28 acres of the project to parkland, including making some of it an untouched natural area. And, he said, that is why the developers agreed to the land swap to benefit the city and why the developers aren’t pressing their legal right, under the curren zoning laws, to build more than two times the number of housing units than is proposed.

“There is always a perceived bad guy in things like this,’ Dabney said. “But I don’t think you can point to anyone and say: ‘There’s the bad guy.’ We are all trying to do our best in the situation. Everyone has been asked to compromise.”

Both Dabney and Schad served, at different times, on an advisory committee that helped write the city’s General Plan, now being called into question as a result of a referendum drive and a court ruling last month.

Proponents of the referendum say the plan is insensitive to the environment.

City officials are in the midst of resolving questions about the General Plan but say this won’t directly affect work on the South Pointe proposal.

Planning Commission Chairman Bruce Flamenbam said the project raises difficult questions about the balance between development and open space in the city. “‘It kind of puts you in a position of being God, doesn’t it? What should we preserve? I’d like to preserve everything, but then where do we live?”

The formal debate is scheduled to resume March 22 at the Planning Commission’s next meeting.