AGOURA : Babbitt Decries Plan to Transfer Federal Parks

The nation’s highest-ranking environmental official Friday declared staunch opposition to a move to de-federalize urban national parks--particularly the Santa Monica Mountains, where more than than $150 million has been used to create a park preserve that stretches from eastern Ventura County to Griffith Park in Los Angeles.

“As long as I am alive and breathing as the secretary of the interior, they are not going to do this on my watch,” declared Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in his first public comment on a Republican proposal to transfer many National Park Service holdings to state or local governments.

Calling the national parks “critically important windows into the natural world for the vast majority of urban kids,” he urged President Clinton to expand federal acquisition of open urban space.

“We don’t have enough parkland in the United States of America. I am not going to give up one acre. None.”

Babbitt made his stand Friday as he accepted the deed to a 314-acre addition to the Paramount Ranch national park area in the Agoura hills.

The parcel, directly north of 436 acres of the Paramount Ranch, which is already a part of the national urban parks, sold to the National Park Service Friday for $8 million. The ranch was the site for years of the popular Renaissance Pleasure Faire and was threatened for decades by development.

On Friday, Babbitt said the recent de-nationalization move “is just plain bad medicine.”

He called on representatives of a variety of public and private conservation and environmental groups gathered for the ceremony to work together to oppose congressional efforts to curtail federal land ownership.

“We’re in this fight to stay,” he said.

Over the past 15 years, Congress has appropriated more than $150 million that has been used to buy about 21,000 acres for the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

But appropriations have fallen significantly in recent years for expansion of the urban park to a proposed 35,000 acres.

Rep. Anthony Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) this week asked Congress to provide $4.3 million to $8 million for continued expansion.

Conservationists fear that the sprawling park would be among the first to be targeted for removal from federal ownership.

Babbitt said the Santa Monica Mountains area is one of the nation’s most significant parklands because of its close proximity to Los Angeles.

In a unique move, the parcel was acquired in 1991 by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state parks agency, which purchased the bank note to the property held by a developer, then foreclosed on the loan. Officials said the deal may have been the first use of foreclosure to create a public preserve.