Officials Hope New Brush Clearance Law Curbs Park Damage

Park officials are hoping a new policy on brush clearance in the Santa Monica Mountains will reduce damage to parkland from vegetation being stripped to protect private homes from fires.

The new policy, adopted by the interagency Santa Monica Mountains Enforcement Task Force, responds to complaints from state and federal park officials, who said fire protection rules in Los Angeles County had made them reluctant despoilers of lands they acquired to preserve in a natural state.

County fire officials require that tall weeds and brush within 200 feet of structures in fire-prone areas be cleared--denuding up to three acres per house. Since residences are often built within 50 or 100 feet of mountain parks, much of the impact falls on these public lands, which are managed by the National Park Service and state Department of Parks and Recreation.

To add insult to injury, park officials say, their financially strapped agencies are forced to pay for the work they didn’t want to do in the first place, because the fire regulation applies to the owners of the land.

The new policy is the work of the enforcement task force, which includes representatives of about a dozen federal, state and Los Angeles and Ventura county land-use, environmental and law enforcement agencies involved in the Santa Monicas.

Under discussion for more than a year, the new policy requires those seeking building permits next to parkland to consult with county fire and park agency representatives.

According to the policy, if the building plan would result in brush clearance on parkland, “the applicant shall re-site the proposed structure sufficiently distant from the boundary” to avoid this.

If this is not possible due to the size of the lot or other physical constraints, “the owner of the structure to be protected” must pay for brush clearance, the policy says.

“If somebody owns a parcel large enough that they could set (the house) back 200 feet, why not let’s do that?” said Jim Sheppard, assistant county fire chief. If that can’t be done, at least the weed abatement will be paid for by the private owner, Sheppard said.

“This is very important to the National Park Service and state parks as well,” said Ernest Quintana, chief ranger for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, a unit of the Park Service.

The task force had considered asking the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to enact the policy as an ordinance, but decided that might trigger opposition from development interests.

Instead, the task force decided to give the policy a two-year trial and seek to make it law if it proves unenforceable.

“If it achieves the results that we hope, . . . then I’ll be very happy with it,” Quintana said.

But the policy addresses only new construction, and Quintana acknowledged that it will not shift the cost of protecting existing residences from park agencies to private owners. “That’s still a problem,” he said.

Park Service officials said last year that to protect private residences, they were spending about $10,000 a year to strip roughly 40 acres of parkland at about 40 scattered sites.

The state parks department said it was spending more than $35,000 annually to clear about 500 acres at dozens of sites in the mountains, many at the edge of Topanga State Park.

“We don’t propose that people’s property be placed in harm’s way,” said Dan Preece, state parks chief for the Santa Monicas. “But we would like to see the impacts of fuel reduction kept at a minimum in the parks.”

The park agencies also have extensive holdings in the Ventura County portion of the Santa Monicas, but officials say the problem has been minimal there.