Help Wanted : Orange County Hopes Volunteers Will Run Free Parkland

To a financially strapped county, even the offer of free land carries too high a price.

By now, hikers, equestrians and mountain bikers could be enjoying 1,100 acres of wilderness offered to the county by a developer last year--except that parks officials cannot spare the rangers needed to patrol and maintain the land, known as Chiquita Ridge/Tijeras Creek.

“We just don’t have the manpower,” said regional parks supervisor Tim Miller, who estimated that the preserve just south of Rancho Santa Margarita would cost $45,000 annually to oversee. “We know we’re not going to get the [additional ranger] positions approved.”

Orange County is pinning its hopes on one large untapped resource: the hundreds of thousands of recreation enthusiasts who use regional parks every year. Parks officials are looking for a group of environmentalists or a corporation willing to act as a kind of foster parent for the park.

Known as the Adopt a Park program, “it’s similar to Adopt a Highway,” Miller said. “People would either provide money, supplies or volunteer labor.”

The plan has worked for 1,000 acres of wilderness adjoining Chiquita Ridge/Tijeras Creek. A group of equestrians named the Saddleback Riders agreed to maintain the park’s six miles of trails and patrol the Arroyo Trabuco every weekend during the summer, which enabled the park to open July 1.

Chiquita Ridge/Tijeras Creek also needs such a caretaker. County officials hope that they can find a group or corporation to support the site indefinitely.

“Volunteers are becoming a very important part of keeping our system open,” said Robert Fisher, director of the county Harbors, Beaches and Parks Department, which oversees the county’s 30,000 acres of regional parks. But it is hoped, he said, that this “won’t be a perpetual program.”

Last year, the Santa Margarita Co. offered two wilderness areas--Chiquita Ridge and Tijeras Creek--to the county to fulfill the state’s open space requirements for Rancho Santa Margarita and the just-started Las Flores development.

Chiquita Ridge contains broad stretches of grasslands and rolling hills, while Tijeras Creek is a heavily wooded refuge for birds and wildlife.

“This is absolutely beautiful land,” Miller said. “I’ve hiked all through there, and it has bobcat, coyote and even an occasional mountain lion.”

Trail veterans say Chiquita Ridge/Tijeras Creek would form an essential link to a countywide system of trails.

Alice Sorenson, a member of the Orange County Trail Advisory Committee, said, “We would have just a huge area available to us suddenly for riding and walking. My dream is that someday I could ride my horse from my home in Irvine to work” in Santa Ana.

The county originally hoped to combine Chiquita Ridge/Tijeras Creek with Arroyo Trabuco and add both to O’Neill Regional Park, creating the third largest county-run regional park in Orange County. But then the county declared bankruptcy and all expansion plans were frozen.

If anything, the county’s Harbor, Beaches and Parks Department is looking at grimmer times. One proposal being considered by the Board of Supervisors would divert up to $20 million in tax revenue from the department.

But Adopt a Park offers the park system a way around its financial hardship, county officials said.

“Without the Saddleback Riders, there’s no way we were going to open the Arroyo Trabuco,” Miller said. “We’d love to find another group like them.”

Fisher said county officials have approached that group, which will discuss the idea at its next meeting.

Sorenson said the county should be able to find what it is looking for from any number of environmental groups.

“We have an army of volunteers eager to do this kind of work,” Sorenson said. “All the county has to do is ask.”