Developer Planning Wildlife Corridors Near Simi Valley : Project: Firm expects to spend $3 million to ensure safe passageways for mule deer, coyotes, foxes, bobcats and badgers.

Bill Gilmore loves wildlife--but whether it is worth $3 million of his company’s money is another matter.

That’s how much the land development firm that Gilmore works for expects to spend to ensure that mule deer, coyotes, gray foxes, bobcats and other creatures of the chaparral can slink to and from a 640-acre parcel of open space in the midst of Whiteface, a luxury development proposed for the foothills north of Simi Valley.

The money would pay for wildlife corridors, or passages where animals could travel unmolested within Whiteface. The proposed list of creature comforts includes underpasses beneath roads; fences to channel animals into the underpasses and away from road surfaces; landscaping to approximate natural habitat; and monitoring equipment--perhaps motion detectors--to see if animals actually use the passageways.

Some areas deemed critical to wildlife movement would be left undisturbed.

Whiteface’s developer, HMDI Inc., is planning the corridors at the insistence of the city of Simi Valley, which ordered the firm to pay for an extensive study of wildlife in the Whiteface area. The wildlife measures were what HMDI’s consultants, the Envicom Corp. of Agoura Hills, came up with.

The $3-million estimated price tag, Gilmore said, is more than his firm would be required to pay the Simi Valley Unified School District in development fees for the 364 homes it proposes to build in the project’s first phase. The entire development, to be built by HMDI and another company, is planned to include 1,500 homes and three golf courses.

“We’re worrying about a coyote, but there’s nobody worrying about our kids,” Gilmore said.

But those who do worry about coyotes, as well as the other links in the food chain, say the proposed Whiteface corridors are a model of how new development in east Ventura County should accommodate wildlife.

“That money benefits the ecosystem for 100 square miles around them,” said Paul Edelman, an ecologist for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and one of the biggest local advocates of wildlife corridors.

Edelman said corridors--swaths of undeveloped land that link together larger expanses of open space--are essential for the survival of wildlife in east Ventura County and the San Fernando Valley.

Without them, some wildlife biologists say, continued development threatens to isolate important habitat in the Santa Susana Mountains, Simi Hills and Santa Monica Mountains.

Some wildlife biologists foresee extinction for certain species if corridors aren’t maintained. Not all scientists agree. One conservation biologist, Dan Simberloff of Florida State University, said corridors are generally a waste of money, whose benefits have never been scientifically proven.

“I’m a critic of unabashed enthusiasm for untested ideas,” Simberloff said.

Local labor leaders also deplore the concern over corridors, saying the issue is another example of environmental overkill that delays projects and costs jobs.

But, as HMDI discovered in Simi Valley, many planners and environmentalists are enthusiastic about wildlife corridors.

“They are indeed a hot topic, due to the continued fragmentation of the Santa Monica Mountains,” said state biologist Suzanne Goode.

City and county planners are increasingly requiring developers to include corridors in their projects.

And public agencies are spending millions of dollars to buy private lands, motivated in large part by the desire to preserve corridors.

“The realization of the value of biological diversity is just now beginning to hit certain members of the community,” said biologist Carl Wishner of Envicom Corp.

Wishner’s colleague at Envicom, Katherine Patey, takes a gloomier view of corridors. A wildlife corridor, she said, is merely what’s left of once-vacant land after development has swallowed the rest.

It may be hard to believe wildlife is threatened in Ventura County, with its thousands of acres of chaparral, oak savannah, meadows and other undeveloped land, not counting the massive Los Padres National Forest that cuts across the county’s northern tier.

Even in suburban Thousand Oaks, a security guard occasionally spots a pair of mountain lions in an isolated canyon on Lang Ranch, about a mile from Westlake Boulevard. Bobcats are frequent visitors to some homes that abut open space. Area resident John Turturro said he recently spotted a golden eagle perched in a willow tree outside The Oaks mall.

But Edelman and wildlife experts say these large expanses of habitat are being cut off--encircled and isolated by streets, houses, shopping centers. Development also produces “edge effects” such as lights, noise, and even house pets, that disturb wild animals far beyond a project’s boundaries.

Once an area is cut off, wildlife biologists say, genetics takes over. Isolation leads to inbreeding, which weakens the gene pool and can cause a species to die off.

Even in large areas such as the Santa Susana Mountains and the Simi Hills, isolation could lead to the depletion of mountain lions and badgers within 200 years, according to Michael Soule of UC Santa Cruz, a conservation biologist who is a leading proponent of wildlife corridors.

But Simberloff, the Florida State biologist, is skeptical. He said the popularity of corridors is based more on emotion than reason.

“I know how to stop wildlife habitat degradation tomorrow. So do you. Stop development,” Simberloff said.

But because that is impossible, he added, biologists have embraced the concept of corridors as a seemingly easy way to solve the vexing biological problems caused by development.

“It took off because it makes sense. It sounds like animals should move through corridors. It made people think there was an answer that might be feasible,” Simberloff said. “Stopping development in California may not be feasible, but building corridors may be.”

He said a proven and more practical alternative is to require developers to set aside large blocks of land as open space.

A recent paper published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also took a jaundiced view of the benefits claimed by corridor supporters.

“Corridors are an appealing Band-Aid remedy for wildlife management in landscapes that have already been fragmented by substantial development of natural resources,” said the paper, published by the agency’s National Ecology Research Center in Fort Collins, Colo. “Corridors may yet prove insignificant to the conservation of many wildlife species.”

Edelman shrugs off skeptics by saying that development is occurring so rapidly that environmentalists can’t wait for all of the scientific evidence to come in.

“You can’t prove anything, so you have to be conservative. There’s so much at stake,” Edelman said.

In Ventura County and western Los Angeles County, Edelman envisions permanent links that would allow animals to roam from the Pacific Ocean to the nearby Los Padres and Angeles National forests.

Getting from one to the other isn’t easy. Animals must cross as many as three major land masses: the Santa Monica Mountains, Simi Hills and Santa Susana Mountains.

Each is separated by one of the most effective human barriers to wildlife movement: the freeway.

The handful of freeway crossings that animals can use were built for other reasons, long before wildlife corridors became an issue.

One of these accidental crossings is a 15-foot-high concrete underpass at Santa Susana Pass, beneath the Simi Valley Freeway.

Originally built for the convenience of film crews at Corriganville, a former Western movie set, the tunnel is a key wildlife crossing between the Santa Susanas and Simi Hills.

Edelman spent a year studying animal tracks in the tunnel for a study he did of regional wildlife corridors. He recently revisited the tunnel, which is invisible from the roadway down a steep, overgrown embankment.

“Here’s a raccoon. That’s a coyote,” he said, peering at indentations, hardened in dried mud beneath a spray-painted picture of a large marijuana cigarette and other graffiti.

In a layer of silt near one entrance, Edelman pointed out other faint impressions left by a passing baby bobcat, an opossum and a wood rat.

Edelman promotes the idea of a similar tunnel under the Ventura Freeway at Crummer Canyon, just east of the Ventura County line. But the cost could be about $5 million, according to an estimate Edelman received from a California Department of Transportation engineer.

“Things have been connected purely by chance, and society has woken up when there’s still a chance,” he said.

Edelman said the Corriganville tunnel demonstrates that a crossing can attract wildlife.

“I look at it like the ‘Field of Dreams’ scenario,” he said. “If you build the field they’ll come. If you create the habitat the animals will use it.”

Edelman’s agency, the conservancy, has made a multimillion-dollar commitment to wildlife corridors.

The state agency buys land that is later sold to parks agencies. Rorie Skei of the conservancy said creation of corridors “is one of the more important criteria” when the conservancy decides what property to purchase.

The desire to preserve a corridor between the Simi Hills and Santa Monica Mountains was one of the primary motivations behind the conservancy’s proposed purchase of 7,437 acres on the Jordan Ranch from entertainer Bob Hope. The $19.5-million purchase, which was tied to the controversial Ahmanson Ranch development, stalled after negotiators and Hope failed to come to terms on the deal.

Preserving a key wildlife corridor was a primary motivation for the city of Simi Valley and the Rancho Simi Park and Recreation District, which spent more than $1 million to buy Corriganville, which lies on one side of the Simi Valley Freeway underpass.

The city of Thousand Oaks and the conservancy last year joined in a $1.7-million purchase of a 231-acre canyon just south of the Ventura Freeway. The city now wants to buy a larger adjacent property known as the Conejo Ridge. Preserving a wildlife corridor was a primary consideration in both decisions, said Philip Gatch, the city’s director of planning and community development.

Ventura County ordinances require developers to account for wildlife corridors, although those considerations can be overridden if other concerns are deemed more important.

“It’s always a trade-off,” said Bruce Smith, manager of the General Plan section of the county Planning Department. “You say, ‘well, you have to have jobs.’ Well, to get jobs you have to build buildings. Where are you going to build buildings? On vacant lands. Where are those lands? Someone’s habitat.”

Robert Guillen, executive secretary of the Ventura County Building and Construction Trades Council, thinks the balance is weighted too much toward the environment and not enough toward jobs.

Guillen, who represents 7,000 union workers in the county, said wildlife corridors are one example of environmental regulations that cost jobs by delaying projects.

“Planners have been listening to one side--the environmental analysis. When they hear from us is when one of those projects is in front of them,” Guillen said. “The coalitions for all this green stuff, they hit ‘em right away, which we don’t.”

Edelman makes no apologies.

“There’s no other place in the world where you have an ecosystem so rich in natural predators that mingles with an urban area,” he said. “Right smack up to the San Diego Freeway, right up to the 23 and the 101, you have prime habitat for the badger, bobcat or the mountain lion.”

Even city dwellers can benefit from having wilderness around them, said Michael Soule, a leader in the corridor movement.

“I think people have a yearning for an experience of wildness outside of their own bodies,” Soule said. “Even if they never see a mountain lion or a coyote in their lives, just to hear the howl of a coyote at night or see the tracks of a bobcat on a trail is a valued experience.”