Natural Selection : Environmental Nature Center May Be in Fight for Survival Because of County Financial Crisis

From the parking lot of Newport Harbor High School, the place looks like little more than a portable classroom. Tucked next to the school’s athletic field, surrounded by houses and apartments, it reveals little of its own true form.

Step through the gates of the Environmental Nature Center, however, and you enter another world.

Unfortunately, it is a world now threatened by Orange County’s economic crisis.

Here, hidden on 2.5 acres, a babbling brook winds lazily through 12 separate California habitats. A mixed evergreen forest thrives next to a gurgling muddy pond. Coastal sage scrub grows near a grove of giant redwoods. And everywhere, the effect is one of rustic forests and meadows far removed from the daily grind.

“It’s a way to spend the day and get away from the concrete jungle,” said Bo Glover, a naturalist and docent at the center, which is visited by about 10,000 people a year--most of them schoolchildren--and serves as home to raccoons, skunks, red-shouldered hawks, snakes, lizards, egrets and hummingbirds.

“There are very few places in Orange County,” he said, “where you can go to actually see the natural habitats that once existed.”

How much longer this one will exist is an open question. After several years of shrinking budgets, the nature center has been placed on a list of potential cuts unveiled last week by the Newport-Mesa Unified School District in response to the county’s financial crisis.

The school district owns the land and gives the center about $80,000 a year, which constitutes most of its funding.

“Without that money,” said Susan Clark, one of the center’s two full-time staffers, “we cannot function. We will close down.”

“It’s very painful,” Supt. Mac Bernd said. “The nature center is just one example of many things that I’m very sorry to have on that list, but these are extremely hard times, as everybody knows.”

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The nature center is one of about 50 items on a list of $11.7 million in potential cuts being considered by a budget advisory committee that consists of community members, administrators, teachers and classified employees.

The committee--expected to make its recommendations to school trustees later this month--is scheduled to conduct its second meeting on the matter tonight. The district stands to lose as much as $8.2 million in the financial crisis, staff members have said.

“My guess is that (the committee) is going to be looking at (cuts such as the nature center) that won’t increase class size,” school board member Judy Franco said.

Other items on the list of potential cuts include the end of heating for school swimming pools, reduction of classified staff, elimination of school busing and closure of two middle schools.

But some community activists believe the center need not be eliminated if administrators look at alternatives.

“I think the center ought to be saved and I think there are ways to make up (the money),” said Phil Sansone, a former Newport Beach mayor. “The superintendent and trustees should take some of the brunt (of the cuts) . . . I don’t see them doing anything that would hurt the administrators.”

Since its creation by a group of high school biology teachers and community activists in 1972, the Environmental Nature Center has been a popular adjunct to the district’s programs in environment and science.

Once the dumping ground for a school bus garage, the gully between the high school and a nearby residential area now serves as the site for dozens of elementary school field trips each week.

“What do you suppose this is?” Glover, recently asked a group of visiting third-graders as he pointed to the branch of an incense cedar tree. “It’s what your pencils are made of.”

In addition to an introductory tour called “Thanks for Plants,” visiting teachers can choose from a variety of guided walks that correspond to school study units focusing on topics such as water conservation, ecology, photosynthesis, Native American uses of plants and seasonal changes.

The tours--open to children from throughout Orange County--are supplemented by the exhibits in a trailer, which also serves as the center’s office. The facility is open to the general public, free of charge, six days a week from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

“Children in the classroom learn from books,” said administrator Debra Clarke.”They come here and it’s hands-on science.”

School district officials say they pay for the lease on the trailer, some staff salaries and upkeep of the grounds. The center, an independent nonprofit corporation, raises an additional $25,000 annually in grants and private contributions.

Mindful of a precipitous drop in contributions over the past three years because of hard economic times, Glover began working last summer on a project financed by $25,000 he borrowed from the bank.

The naturalist, a 27-year-old Pennsylvania transplant who started as a volunteer and now gets paid to lead tours, created the Environmental Nature Center magazine, a glossy color publication scheduled to debut later this month. Glover hopes the publication will eventually generate enough advertising revenue to help save the center.

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The quarterly magazine “will convey to the people of Orange County the importance of their natural resources,” Glover said. Included in the first issue--slated for mail distribution to about 30,000 Orange County homes--will be stories on the Upper Newport Bay Reserve, the Bolsa Chica Conservancy, the Environmental Nature Center and how animals cope with the cold.

But even Glover admits that creating a profitable magazine in today’s economic climate is an uphill battle.

“The publishing industry is extremely tough to crack,” he said. “What I have going for me is the nonexistence of a regional publication like this that can give people an idea of places to go to see how beautiful California is.”

Judging from the reactions of the third-graders, one of those places is definitely the former dump site next to the Newport Harbor High School football field.

“We do a lot of talking and writing about (the center)” said Nancy Farmer, a Costa Mesa elementary school teacher who brings her class here every year. “Losing it would be a tragedy.”

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Endangered Resource Operating on an ever-dwindling budget, the Environmental Nature Center may close because of potential budget cuts to the Newport- Mesa Unified School District, he center’s main funding source. A look at the center’s operating budget (which does not include the lease of a trailer and an administrator’s salary, paid for by the district): *

‘94-’95: $60,000* * Projected Source: Environmental Nature Center