Conservancy Leader Deftly Dealing for Parks, Despite Lean Times : Santa Monicas: Many praise Joseph T. Edmiston for helping to expand public lands. However, others criticize his methods.

First there were the sparse domestic budgets of the Reagan-Bush years. Then came the deficit-reduction fever of the Clinton Administration. It hasn’t been a picnic for those who would acquire public parkland, not even for a wheeler-dealer such as Joseph T. Edmiston.

But as the executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the state agency created in 1980 to acquire parkland in Ventura and Los Angeles counties, Edmiston has thrived.

Indeed, he has gained a reputation as an aggressive and innovative advocate for public parks. Even his detractors acknowledge his remarkable success at expanding parklands during more than a decade of tightfisted government spending and spiraling land prices.

In his 14 years at the helm, the agency has managed--often in jigsaw-puzzle fashion--to buy, swap for or procure by donation 20,000 acres of private land in the spectacular mountain corridor that stretches from Point Mugu in Ventura County to Griffith Park in Los Angeles County. That’s an area more than half the size of San Francisco.

When the task has demanded it, he has enlisted the support of powerful political allies, outsmarted fellow bureaucrats, struck deals with movie stars and real estate developers, and charmed community and environmental leaders.

“Joe’s record of accomplishment speaks for itself,” said Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City), a longtime ally who as a state legislator led the effort to establish the conservancy.

Others, however, hold a different view.

Edmiston is “more interested in personal power than in conservation,” declared Mary Weisbrock, whose group, Save Open Space, finds him too quick to compromise with developers.

Still others say he can be ruthless and vindictive with those who dare cross him.

Bearded, baritone-voiced and armed with a lightning wit, Edmiston’s powerful persona and zeal for making deals have made him, to friend and foe alike, virtually indistinguishable from the agency he heads.

“Joe Edmiston is the conservancy,” said Jerry Daniel, the agency’s board chairman. “Without Joe, I sincerely believe that the organization would crumble to pieces.”

Not surprisingly, Edmiston is the conservancy’s key player as the agency prepares to take on two potential make-or-break challenges this year.

In June, voters will decide the fate of a $2-billion statewide bond initiative that would generate about $132 million for the conservancy and its affiliates.

The bond measure, known by the acronym CALPAW, has taken on special importance in Thousand Oaks, where some local environmentalists are counting on fresh state money to save Broome Ranch from development.

A 640-acre parcel that sweeps from chaparral-cloaked cliffs to seasonal marshes, Broome Ranch serves as the gateway to an unbroken stretch of state and federal parkland reaching from Thousand Oaks to the Pacific Ocean.

Edmiston engineered a deal to purchase Broome Ranch for $4.2 million last summer. While the conservancy put up the cash, Edmiston counted on reimbursement from the National Park Service, the Thousand Oaks City Council and the Conejo Recreation and Park District.

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The council put up its share--$1 million--from the Thousand Oaks golf course fund. To recoup the investment, a majority of council members have said they would consider building a golf course on Broome Ranch.

Playing fees, they argued, would pay for the acquisition of Broome--and the maintenance of other city-owned parkland.

But the notion of an 18-hole course, with the attendant parking lot and pro shop, alarms many Thousand Oaks residents who want to keep Broome Ranch clean for hikers, bikers and horseback riders.

They have proposed a different means of funding Broome Ranch: the CALPAW measure, which Edmiston helped to draft.

While he has declined to comment on the city’s golf course proposal, Edmiston noted that CALPAW contains $3 million earmarked for open space in the Conejo Valley. That money could be used to pay for Broome Ranch.

In addition to specific allocations for open-space purchases, the CALPAW ballot measure would make the conservancy permanently eligible to receive money from the state’s General Fund. Thus, the June vote represents a potential boon for the conservancy.

But a second test threatens to be the agency’s bane. Opponents in the state Legislature are pushing proposals to rein in the agency.

Several lawmakers, led by state Sen. Cathie Wright (R-Simi Valley), object to the conservancy’s tactics, particularly its controversial attempt to use eminent domain to wrest 245 mountainous acres from Soka University near Calabasas.

They are considering legislation that would force the conservancy to reimburse state bond funds with the money it gets for transferring parkland to the federal government.

In the Broome Ranch deal, for example, Edmiston plans to sell about 150 acres of rugged hills to the National Park Service. While final appraisals are not complete, the conservancy will probably reap about $2 million.

All told, the conservancy has received $35 million from transferring about 5,000 acres to the National Park Service in little more than a decade.

Wright and other legislators have also hinted that they might try to restrict the conservancy’s ability to join with local governments in joint-power agencies.

One such group operates as the conservancy’s purchasing arm in eastern Ventura County. Representatives from the Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks park districts join conservancy officials in the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority. It was this body, in fact, that technically agreed to the Broome Ranch purchase.

Edmiston, 44, runs the show at the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority’s board meetings, which take place in a room so cramped that citizens who come to watch sometimes have to hang out in the hallway.

A self-proclaimed workaholic who wears a wrist calculator to figure per-acre land prices, Edmiston has wheeled and dealed all over the Santa Monica Mountains.

But his critics say his deal-making often comes at the environment’s expense.

“In many of his deals, the mountains are clearly the loser,” said Siegfried Othmer, a Sherman Oaks activist who accuses Edmiston of doing developers’ bidding.

As one example, Othmer cites the conservancy’s purchase last year of the 2,308-acre Jordan Ranch from entertainer Bob Hope. Part of a complicated land swap, it ranks as the conservancy’s single largest land acquisition ever.

Ultimately, the agency stands to acquire another 7,000 acres in the mountains owned by Hope and the Ahmanson Land Co.

But it cannot take title to that parkland, which spans Ventura and Los Angeles counties, until Ahmanson and its partners proceed with plans to develop a $1-billion mini-city for 8,600 residents in the Simi Hills.

In promoting the Hope land swap, Edmiston switched hats and acted as a lobbyist for the builders during hearings before regulatory agencies.

He makes no apologies.

“I talk to developers because they’re the ones who own the land,” he said. “If you aren’t willing to be pragmatic, you’re nowhere in (the parks procurement) business, which some people have a difficult time understanding.”

Edmiston is proud of the Bob Hope deal, commemorated by the deed to Jordan Ranch framed on his Malibu office wall. As befits a man who sees parkland preservation in strategic terms, his office bookshelves are crammed with volumes dealing with the tactics and strategy of warfare.

During an interview, he seemed to be conducting a military briefing, using a large aerial photo of the mountains to pinpoint hits and misses in his quest to add to the public domain.

Edmiston lives in Santa Monica with his wife, Pepper, and their seven children. His wife, the founder of a camp program for children, is the daughter of Beverly Hills Mayor Max Salter.

An only child, Edmiston grew up in East Los Angeles. His father, an engineer who invented a machine used in canning fruit, and his mother, whom he described as an “activist housewife,” shared a passion for the outdoors.

He was exposed to environmental politics as a teen-ager during conversations with a family friend, Horace Albright, who had been an early director of the National Park Service.

Albright had once escorted President Franklin D. Roosevelt through the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, arguing that a road proposed for the area would be a travesty. Roosevelt agreed and the road wasn’t built.

Edmiston never forgot the lesson.

Over the years he has often packed lawmakers and their staffs into four-wheel-drive vehicles and helicopters to make his case for property the conservancy wanted. One such tour showed off Broome Ranch’s stunning vistas to conservancy officials and local environmentalists.

Edmiston took his first job as a conservationist in the early 1970s, when he dropped out of West Los Angeles School of Law to accept a $500-a-month job as a Sierra Club lobbyist in Sacramento.

By 1977 he had caught the attention of then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who appointed him to the Santa Monica Mountains Comprehensive Planning Commission, the conservancy’s forerunner. In his current job, Edmiston earns $65,000 a year.

His agency receives little from the state--less than $150,000 this fiscal year.

Nor has it been able to count on much help from the federal government. For several years in the early 1980s, the Reagan Administration eliminated acquisition funds for local parks.

George Bush revived funding during his Administration, earmarking up to $13.2 million a year for land acquisition in the Santa Monicas. But President Clinton this year slashed that allocation to $4.5 million.

Over the years, the lion’s share of the conservancy’s money--nearly $100 million in all--has come from a series of voter-approved state and local bond measures.

Typically, the conservancy finances the purchase of a given piece of parkland, sells it to state parks or to the federal government, and uses the proceeds to obtain more land. It does so through a variety of innovative means, many of which Edmiston perfected.

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The agency often intervenes to snatch up land as it comes on the market, without waiting for the federal government to complete the often cumbersome process of appropriating money. Park enthusiasts say the practice has preserved thousands of acres from developers’ bulldozers.

Edmiston may get a chance to buy even more land if the June ballot measure passes. CALPAW would provide about $132 million for open-space acquisition and deposit much of that money with the conservancy and its affiliates.

The conservancy’s legislative problems may not be solved as easily.

Supporters insist that the agency’s troubles with lawmakers stem from the dispute over Tokyo-based Soka University’s property.

Parks enthusiasts have long coveted the 245-acre campus--on the site of the former King Gillette Ranch--as the ideal spot for a visitor center and park headquarters.

The conservancy, through one of its affiliated agencies, took the unprecedented step of instituting condemnation proceedings last year after the university rejected a bid to buy the property for more than $19 million.

The agency’s backers say they expect a full-scale assault in the Legislature this year from lawmakers sympathetic to Soka. The university, they say, is out to either abolish or cripple the conservancy.

Soka spokesman Jeff Ourvan denies that the university intends to harm the conservancy, although he does not disguise his ire at the agency and its executive director.

“Joe Edmiston fancies himself as the William Mulholland of the 1990s,” Ourvan said. “But where Mulholland brought water as an essential resource to Southern California, Edmiston’s mission is a park headquarters, which is hardly vital to people of the region.”

Edmiston, who realizes the months ahead may be the bumpiest yet for his agency, manages to project an appearance of calm.

Some associates, however, speculate he may have tired of the job and would welcome a change. He signaled as much last year, when he applied--unsuccessfully--to be director of the National Park Service.

Edmiston, uncomfortable discussing his personal ambitions, said he wishes he had gotten the park service post. He insists, however, that he is not looking to bail out of the conservancy as it enters a politically turbulent period. He says: “I love what I do.”

Times staff writer Stephanie Simon contributed to this story.