OPEN-SPACE WATCH : Mountain High

“This is the best day the Santa Monicas have had in a decade,” said one Los Angeles city councilman Tuesday following the vote by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors to release $29 million in voter-approved funds for acquisition and improvement of mountain parkland. His assessment indeed seems apt.

Beset by shrinking budgets, backlogs of parkland repairs and improvements and continuing controversy over the Calabasas property owned by Soka University but long desired by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the agency had regarded the bond measure as a godsend. Proposition A was passed by county voters last November.

Once approved, release of the money by the supervisors, who control its disbursement, quickly became enmeshed in disputes over exactly how the funds could be used.

For many months supervisors clashed over, for example, whether the conservancy had to permit the county to build roads through new parkland and under what conditions the funds could be used to acquire property through condemnation proceedings.

But Tuesday’s vote by the board to free the funds signals resolution of these issues, largely in favor of the park-going public.

Open-space purchases and parkland improvement on 16 sites--totaling hundreds of acres--will now go forward, mostly in the mountains dividing the San Fernando Valley from the Los Angeles Basin.

County voters will now see what a good deed they did last year, for themselves and future generations, when they passed Proposition A.