Carving Up Santa Cruz Island : Park Service, Oxnard Attorney Duel Over Use of Property

It’s been a tense and awkward marriage for the National Park Service and Oxnard attorney Francis Gherini--unlikely partners in a slice of paradise 20 miles off the coast of Ventura.

They both hold an undivided interest in the east end of Santa Cruz Island, an arrangement forged over the years as Gherini refused to sell his share of the family ranch.

That is to say, they co-own each rock, tree and bush.

The trouble is this odd couple of land barons have widely different ideas on how to manage the historic adobe ranch houses at Scorpion Anchorage and Smuggler’s Cove, or the 6,264 acres of undeveloped rolling hills in-between.

“The park service was authorized to obtain my property quite a few years ago,” said the Oxnard octogenarian, the lone holdout of the ranching family that owned the island for 110 years. “I’m waiting patiently for them to do so.”

Park officials are reviewing their third appraisal of the property, hoping it will finally meet Gherini’s price so they can snatch up the last link in the five-island national park.

Not only are they itching to complete Southern California’s first national park, they desperately want to fulfill their mission to restore the island’s natural habitat. That would begin with removing the peacocks, the wild horses, the rooting pigs and the thousands of feral sheep that have grazed so heavily they have accelerated the island’s erosion.

“There is virtually no vegetation left on the ranch,” said Tim Setnicka, assistant superintendent of the Channel Islands National Park. “The land is on intensive care and the health costs continue to mount up.”

Gherini’s great-grandfather, Justinian Caire, brought merino sheep to the island for their fine wool. And Gherini has shown no intention of eradicating them--as was done on the other 90% of the island, now an ecological preserve willed to the Nature Conservancy.

Instead, the sheep run free on the 10% of the island Gherini co-owns with the park service. He permits hunters to fly to the eastern end of the island so they can shoot trophy rams for their horns and yearling ewes for their meat. Bow and arrow hunters pay $500 for the thrill. Those toting rifles pay $1,000.

Under a license with Gherini, hunting guide Jaret Owens also lures other visitors onto the island to fish, hike, ride mountain bikes or paddle sea kayaks. Fees are much lower, beginning with $15 to step ashore.

“We are providing twice as much as what they’ll get with the park service,” Owens said. “They can have campfires and they don’t have to have a ranger following them around. The public is very happy with what we are doing.”

So is Gherini.

“He has been doing a very, very good job out there,” Gherini said. “The park service gets its share of the money from Jaret Owens too.”

As for the flock of sheep, Gherini scoffs at park officials’ worries about overgrazing.

“If they bought me out, they could get rid of the sheep in two weeks,” he said. “There has been a lot of talk, but I haven’t seen the color of anybody’s money yet.”

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Stepping ashore Santa Cruz Island is much like marching back in time to see how Southern California looked a century ago.

At Scorpion Ranch, there is a two-story adobe built in the late 1880s. A wooden ranch house was erected nearby, just after the turn of the century. There are no paved roads. No electricity. No phones. No TV.

Dirt paths leading from the ranch compound quickly disappear into the hills that stretch for miles--22 miles, actually, on the island that is four times the size of Manhattan.

On the eastern end of the island, sheep trails crisscross the hills now green with seasonal grasses. The number of animals has resurged since the end of the drought brought back their food supply.

In this exceptionally wet year, Santa Cruz Island has been hammered with 33 inches of rainfall--a deluge that has left its mark on the island.

Mudslides and rockslides scar the hillsides. Torrential flows have cut deep new channels in stream beds, washed out part of a retaining wall erected by Italian stone masons in 1892, and left much of Scorpion Ranch calf-deep in rocks, mud and debris.

Kate Faulkner, the national park’s chief biologist, blames the feral pigs and swelling sheep herd for much of the damage. Notorious for eating plants down to the nubs, the sheep have clear-cut much of the island’s native shrubbery.

With their extensive roots, shrubs hold soil much better than perennial grasses, she said. The webb of roots and soil act “like a sponge,” she said, absorbing more water and releasing it more slowly.

“When you have nothing to hold the water, it’s more like a drainpipe,” she said. “The water runs off, carrying a lot of sediment with it.”

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Owens, after two decades as a hunting guide on the island, does not take kindly to suggestions from park officials that he is not properly thinning the herd. Nor does he appreciate their lack of cooperation.

He is particularly incensed that the park service has declined to use its boat to ferry a backhoe to the island so he can dig a channel in Scorpion Creek to protect the ranch from more flooding.

Park officials told him he must first get the proper permits to alter the course of the stream bed. Without the permits, they said, helping him would make them a party to breaking federal law.

“They have created a horror of red tape for a hunting guide like me,” Owens said. “They are telling me I need a permit to move some dirt. We’ve always moved the dirt every year. But our equipment is worn out and we were asking for their cooperation to bring my friend’s equipment to the island.”

Meanwhile, park officials are aghast at what they see as the deterioration of the property they hope to make the hub of the national park.

They have big plans to renovate the historic buildings, restore the natural ecosystem, develop a system of hiking trails and make Santa Cruz the island that receives the most visitors.

“It’ll really be magnificent,” Setnicka said. “You will be able to hike all over to remote campsites. We need to acquire this property as quickly as we can.”

As conservationists, park officials do not like the ongoing hunting operation, which leaves broken arrows, shell casings and the beheaded carcasses of trophy rams. They are upset at the proliferation of helicopter tours of the island and would like to remove all exotic creatures, including the llama that Owens plans to bring to the island.

But co-owning the land as “tenants in common,” park officials cannot control Owens’ activities on the island without taking Gherini to court, Setnicka said. And, under the park’s founding legislation, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to force Gherini to sell through condemnation proceedings.

“It doesn’t make much sense to nit-pick and throw rocks at each other,” Setnicka said. “We have to keep our eyes on the target and resolve this as friends.”

The park service has sought the Gherini property since 1980, when the northern Channel Island was founded as a national park under a law sponsored by former Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino (R-Ventura).

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In the early 1990s, the federal government managed to buy the interests of Francis Gherini’s three siblings for roughly $4 million apiece. But the Oxnard attorney rejected the offer as too low, keeping his 25% interest in the 6,264-acre ranch and leaving the park service with 75%.

Park officials have continued negotiations in recent years, but are constrained by law from paying more than fair-market value. This month they are reviewing a third independent appraisal of the property.

Gherini said he has rejected the conclusions of earlier appraisers, questioning their methods. “There are 12 miles of ocean frontage. I’d like to know where they find a comparable property to that,” he said.

He declines to talk about how much he wants for the property, but has insisted he is merely holding out for a fair deal for himself and his heirs. When park officials next approach him, they will not have any money to put on the table. Despite requests, the Clinton Administration budget has not allotted any money for the park service to buy out Gherini this year or next.

And with the tight-fisted mood on Capitol Hill, there seems little chance of Congress coughing up millions of dollars to finance the divorce. “There was a time these funds were forthcoming,” said Michael Wootton, chief of staff for Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley). “It’s highly unlikely now.”