Conservationist Blazes Trails in the Conejo Valley : Environment: Rorie Skei may be the most powerful woman working on open space issues in the region. Wearing many hats, she is capable of compromise as well as resolve.

Whisking along Westlake Boulevard, Rorie Skei peered out at the suburbs from the windows of her Suzuki Sidekick.

“When I was growing up, this was the Russell Ranch,” she said. “It was all oak savannas and rolling fields.”

She looked from one side of the street to the other, both lined with tract homes in barely varied shades of stuccoed beige dictated by Thousand Oaks.

“It seemed to happen so fast,” she marveled. “Like I went away to college in Berkeley and came back at Christmas and it was all built up. I know it took longer, but that’s what it seemed like.”

Controlling the engulfing effects of development on the Conejo Valley’s open space has occupied Skei for most of the 30 years since the Russell Ranch vanished into neat domesticity. With roles in four major eastern Ventura County organizations, she is now arguably the most powerful and widely respected woman working on environmental issues in the region.

As a division chief with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, Skei oversees the Rim of the Valley Corridor, which includes parks from the Simi Hills to Pasadena. In a constant effort to increase the conservancy’s holdings, she negotiates with developers, politicians and private landowners almost daily.

At 47, she has earned a reputation for being tough enough to bleed every conceivable acre of open space from developers, soft enough to fret about the plight of mountain lions and pragmatic enough to almost always succeed at the classic grade school adage: try to work well with others.

Along with her managerial position with the conservancy, she is a certified park ranger, trained to carry a shotgun while enforcing regulations in the conservancy’s 12,000 acres of parks encircling the Rim of the Valley.

But those are just her day jobs. She has so many other titles it practically takes a flow chart to keep her involvement with environmental projects straight.

Perhaps her most important volunteer role is as the public’s representative on the five-member board of the Conejo Open Space Conservation Agency, a joint powers group formed between Thousand Oaks and the Conejo Recreation and Park District in 1977. Since 1983, she has been its chairwoman.

COSCA owns and manages more than 12,000 acres in the Conejo Valley, which form a ring of untouched land around Thousand Oaks, providing a landscape of greens and browns fading naturally from the Simi Hills into the Santa Monica Mountains.

The agency is frequently credited with saving the region from the complete urbanization that has overtaken the San Fernando Valley, and Skei is widely considered to have been instrumental in its success.

“Rorie has worked as long and as hard as any single person I know in this community toward the goal of saving those things most of us consider important,” said Frances Prince, former mayor of Thousand Oaks and a mentor to Skei.

Skei is also assistant executive officer for the Eastern Ventura County Conservation Authority and the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority. As such, she works with Ventura County, the Conejo and Rancho Simi recreation and park districts, and the conservancy.

She is also busy developing an open space project in the Santa Clarita area and wildlife corridor projects in Whittier. In short, preserving open space is her life. And Skei is among the fortunate few who genuinely enjoy their work.

“I just love my job so much,” she said, sounding not the least bit sickly sweet. “It’s a cause and a job. I came into it because I was doing it for love. What a wonderful bonus that I even get a paycheck.”

Relatively speaking, getting the paycheck is a recent development. For nearly 15 years, Skei worked on open space issues as a volunteer.

Her involvement began when she was a graduate student living in Newbury Park with her husband, Mike. With her young son Evan slung into a knapsack, Skei set out to explore the path of the Arroyo Conejo in the mid-1970s for her master’s thesis.

At that time, the city was developing a study of the surrounding canyons, and Skei’s work caught the attention of park district General Manager Tex Ward, who still has a copy of that master’s thesis in his office. Skei began working as a volunteer with the Conejo Nature Preserve, a precursor to COSCA.

But her interest dates to her college days, when she studied environmental science at UC Berkeley, before transferring to UC Santa Barbara to take courses in botany, ecology and wildlife biology. With her master’s degree from Cal State Dominguez Hills, she quickly became known around Thousand Oaks as an authority on native plants.

“She will blow you away with her botany,” said Mike Berger, park district director and Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority chairman. “Sometimes I feel a little embarrassed, not knowing the names of the plants, when she is able to say them in English and in Latin.”

Skei paints botanical sketches of local plants and gives them away to mark special occasions. Berger has a drawing of a California poppy on his wall, Prince a rendition of Conejo buckwheat, Skei’s boss, Joseph T. Edmiston, a coast live oak. Former Supervisor Madge L. Schaefer said she has spent years looking for a lapel pin like one Skei wears, a tiny vase just big enough for one wildflower.

“It strikes me as symbolic of her,” Schaefer said. “Even a wildflower gets saved with a little bit of water with Rorie.”

In 1983, Prince appointed Skei to fill her spot as the Ventura County representative on the advisory board to the Santa Monica Mountains Comprehensive Planning Commission--which led to formation of the conservancy. In 1984, Skei was appointed to the conservancy board.

She left the board in 1990 to join the conservancy staff. Edmiston had been badgering her for years to work for him and, with Schaefer, her ally on the Board of Supervisors, soon to be replaced by Maria VanderKolk, Skei took him up on the offer.

“I didn’t want it to look as though I was leaving because I would have been kicked off the board,” Skei said, laughing. “But I probably would have been.”

Edmiston, who calls his hiring of Skei a “no-brainer,” said he admires her ability to push for what she wants without pushing people away.

“I can sometimes get things done, but I tend to leave bomb craters in my way,” he said. “Rorie tends to get things done and there are no ripples. Not a lot of wasted energy there.”

Working in a field where emotions are strong and often sharply divided, Skei initially found herself the subject of preconceptions by developers. Being a nature-loving environmentalist came with baggage.

“I think after the first few years I wasn’t pegged as a crazy,” she said.

Don Brackenbush, president of the Ahmanson Land Co., has spent hours negotiating with Skei over the Ahmanson Ranch project and said he has gained great respect for her.

“She is one of those unique people that really does try to make things work,” he said. “She’s realistic. For whatever reason, she is able to view the world from both the side of protecting the environment and understanding the realities of finance.”

Brackenbush said Skei and the conservancy took an aggressive approach toward gaining open space. “They wrested every bit of open space they could out of this project,” he said. “Rorie had the patience and the wit to sit down and listen to this and understand that I may have to accommodate a little growth in my thinking, but, boy, I better get a lot of open space with it.”

Eventually, the developers pledged to provide 10,000 acres of open space in exchange for permission to build 3,050 houses and two golf courses on the land southeast of Simi Valley.

But Skei’s willingness to negotiate with developers like Brackenbush angers some ardent environmentalists. Mary Weisbrock with Save Open Space accuses Skei of being a tool of developers.

“She goes to the tune of the conservancy,” Weisbrock said. “And they are out of tune right now with saving these mountains. They make deals and it destroys the land.”

But Brackenbush and others said they consider Skei a formidable opponent.

“She has a set of environmental standards she will live and die by,” Brackenbush said. “In no way is she going to roll over for the developer and simply accommodate a developer’s need.”

“She’s brilliant,” said Eric Taylor, senior vice president of VTN West Inc., who negotiated with COSCA over 1,200 acres of open space included in the proposed Dos Vientos development.

As for Skei, she takes the criticism of compromise in stride.

“We’ll be very pure, and we’ll have a very small park,” she said.

Standing in Wildwood Park, watching two hikers disappear down a path, Skei said that park demonstrates her philosophy of how to best work with developers.

“This is a prime example of compromise and creative thinking,” she said, pushing back strands of her long, honey-brown hair. “In the general plan, this mesa was always slated for development because it is flat. There were going to be at least 330 homes going all the way to Lizard Head Rock.”

Because the land was so well-loved by longtime residents, the park district and the conservancy arranged a three-way land swap with developers, and the Wildwood mesa was preserved.

“This is some of the best wildflower area around because of this volcanic terrain,” Skei said admiringly. “And it gets these foggy mists sometimes that make it look like Ireland.”

Skei notes with pleasure that the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce uses images of COSCA holdings in a promotional video.

“Even with this great model here, there are still people who will say that parkland takes money off the tax rolls,” she said. “Not true. The exact opposite. There is no chance that Ventura County has lost money because the Conejo has great open space.”

Edmiston calls Skei tough and firm, but says she can also be extremely charming. In 1989, they went to Washington to drop in on lawmakers and Department of Interior officials.

“I saw a whole new side to Rorie as a lobbyist then,” he said. “She was very effective. It was a pleasure to go around to the various offices. I guess living in the Conejo, you learn how to maneuver in Republican waters.”

As her responsibilities pile up, Skei said she has less time for tending to the native plants in her Newbury Park yard, and no time for hiking. She has meetings several nights a week, which take her away from her husband, son Evan, 21, and daughter Ingrid, 15.

“A lot of us who do this for a living, we talk about how we spend all our time sweating blood and arm-wrestling the developers to get these parks and then we don’t get a chance to hike and enjoy them,” she said.

But on her park ranger rotations--Edmiston believes that it is important for conservancy managers to be familiar with all aspects of park upkeep--Skei does get a chance to be out on the trails. She clearly relishes the full set of electronic gizmos in her Suzuki Sidekick, including police scanner and two-way radios, and surprisingly discovered that she liked learning to shoot.

“I did not expect to find it as interesting or as gratifying,” she said. “I had never fired a firearm before. I love being a good shot.”

And she obviously loves being involved with what is essentially a success story.

“All these dreams seemed like such a nice thing to shoot for,” she said, harking back to the early days of COSCA and the conservancy. “But I don’t think any of us thought we’d be able to get this far.”

Although admirers frequently mention her as a possible political candidate, Skei said there is plenty of work to be done as an advocate of open space advocate. Thousand Oaks has grown well, but there is always room--and desire--for more open space, she said.

“People have to have some sort of recreational outlet,” Skei said. “It’s important for the soul to have at least the visual respite. It’s soul-freeing, if I should be so sappy sounding.”