Conservancy Buys Wilson Canyon for $3.9 Million : Environment: The purchase secures 246 acres above Sylmar as parkland, ending four years of talks. Area is critical to planned trail system.

Capping four years of negotiations, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has signed an agreement to purchase 246 mountainous acres above Sylmar as parkland, officials announced Saturday.

The conservancy has agreed to pay $3.9 million to a developer and several private owners for Wilson Canyon, a rugged area of finger-like canyons and year-round streams north of Olive View Medical Center.

The land is considered a critical part of the proposed Rim of the Valley trail system.

The purchase, to be funded by Proposition A park funds approved by the voters in 1992, will be the agency’s first in the northeast Valley.

At a news conference Saturday to announce the agreement, an ebullient Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sylmar) told a crowd of horseback riders, hang gliders, Girl Scouts and anti-graffiti activists that the success of the four-year battle showed “there is open space in the northeast Valley that is worth purchasing as much as in the Santa Monica Mountains.”

Katz has been pushing for purchase of the land since community groups launched a protest seven years ago against a proposal by the developer Cantwell-Anderson to build 500 houses on the land.

The final agreement gives the owners $1.5 million less than the appraised value of $5.4 million, said Tim Cantwell, principal of Cantwell-Anderson.

But Cantwell said the decision of his firm and the other owners to take the loss was motivated by the current real estate market and a “clear understanding of what the community wants.”

After gauging the community opposition, Cantwell said, he decided “that the best solution was to put this into public open space.”

Cantwell said the owners had initially reached an agreement to sell to the Trust for Public Land for $6.6 million, but that fell through because no funds were available.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors revived the deal last April, approving the use of Proposition A funds for the purchase.

A tentative agreement was reached in February, Cantwell said. Negotiations then dragged on as the parties worked out complicated details of rights of way for the maintenance of county debris basins on the property.

Summing up the grueling negotiations, Katz said he got involved when his wife came home from a horseback ride fretting over the threat of development in the canyon, which connects the urban San Fernando Valley with Angeles National Forest.

“It was a case of saving open space and saving my marriage,” joked Katz, whose wife, Gini Barrett, is president of the Los Angeles City Animal Regulation Commission.

The deal then took so long, the once-slender lawmaker said, that his “Save Wilson Canyon” T-shirt--altered with a marker pen Saturday to say “Saved”--isn’t as loose as it used to be.

The sale represents the end of a far longer saga for 11 Lockheed engineers who bought 145 acres of the land in the 1960s and were foiled in numerous attempts over the years to divest it.

William Lawry, secretary-treasurer of the group called Trela Land and Farming, said the buyers initially hoped to turn it over quickly to the Lutheran Church, which was shopping for a college campus.

Unfortunately for the buyers, Lawry said, someone donated land to the church for the campus in Moorpark. Hopes to turn the land into a cemetery or landfill also never materialized.

Today, he said, five of the original owners have died.

Lawry said he was not very sympathetic to the development opponents but eventually adopted a philosophical view.

Instead of selling out just to leave something to his children, he said, he is setting aside parkland for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren.