Wheeling and Dealing With the Conservancy

Joe Edmiston continues his dog and pony show (“Director of Mountains Conservancy Holds Onto His Turf,” Jan. 10) while the public is forced to take extraordinary measures to counteract the conservancy’s deal in order to ensure protection for parklands and wildlife in the Santa Monicas. The public has found itself fighting the very agency established to do the job.

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy’s history in the upper Malibu Creek watershed tells the tale, starting with the Baldwin deal, which was so egregious that one county supervisor stated, “It is offensive to find the conservancy so deeply in bed with a developer.”

The conservancy under Mr. Edmiston’s leadership has crafted deal after deal in which the conservancy supports exemptions to the county General Plan or the coastal plan giving developers a greatly increased number of buildings in exchange for donations of land that usually could not have been developed anyway because of the geologic constraints. Usually these high-density developments are also sited in environmentally sensitive areas.

Public outrage prevented the conservancy’s “split-the-baby” deal in Palo Comado (Jordan Ranch), and a lawsuit filed by a nonprofit (Save Open Space) augmented by a loan from the Sierra Club stopped another one on Micor just east of Malibu Creek State Park. This one would have sacrificed the watercourse to development even though less than 5% of the riparian areas in the Santa Monicas are left.

There are a number of lawsuits to prevent the Ahmanson Ranch deal, which the conservancy has spent almost $30 million to facilitate although it means a city and golf courses with their polluting runoff adjacent to Las Virgenes Creek.

And recently the public prevented, so far , another Edmiston deal to put both Soka University and the Park Service together in the eastern Las Virgenes valley, a true worst-case scenario. Similar deals go on in other parts of the mountains.

Often this happens because instead of a farsighted policy for land protection, the conservancy is simply tallying up a short-term acreage score card. Instead of insisting that current laws be upheld and that development--and therefore land prices--be held down to currently allowed levels, the conservancy injudiciously takes what it can get now, with no thought of the environmental impacts of the deal, or of the implications such deals hold for future development plans or future land prices. The conservancy causes the standard in the Santa Monicas to become “up-zoning” beyond plan allowances with subsequent increased land values, both of which contribute to future impediments to open-space protection and acquisition.

The public manages in some cases and at great cost to prevent the conservancy from ruining the very lands it should be trying to protect. So we pay to support the runaway agency that has lost its direction, and then we pay to stop it, and in the long run we pay more than we should for less than we should get.

SUSAN GENELIN

Studio City