Hammering Out a Truce in O.C.’s Gnatcatcher Wars : Environment: Wildlife activists, developers work together on a plan that could set aside 39,000 acres.

They first gathered quietly in Bell Canyon more than two years ago, these emissaries in a high-stakes mission to resolve the Orange County gnatcatcher wars.

Month after month, they met in a small wood-frame cabin in gnatcatcher country, armed with maps and a shared sense of urgency.

Landowners sat elbow-to-elbow at the table with environmentalists, wildlife biologists, state and federal officials. The Irvine Co. sent a representative, and so did the Endangered Habitats League.

The mission of this unlikely panel: to help build a plan striking a balance between the pressures of economic development and the preservation of rare wildlife such as the California gnatcatcher, the tiny songbird that helped spark a regional battle over endangered species laws.

Now, a plan could be unveiled by mid-November, one that would designate 39,000 acres in central and coastal Orange County as reserves for rare plants and animals.

The plan’s basic premise: Landowners would be allowed to build on property that is home to the gnatcatcher and other troubled species as long as other land is set aside in a reserve planned and managed to assure those species’ survival.

But even as the plan is readied for public review, no one can predict if it will usher in a peaceable kingdom in Orange County--or Phase II of the gnatcatcher wars. Already, some environmentalists are questioning if landowners have taken the lead role in planning, if science has fallen prey to politics.

“We’ve yet to see if the results live up to the promises,” said Dan Silver, coordinator of the Endangered Habitats League, which is made up of about 30 environmental groups.

Landowners too say the task is not easy.

“We’ve been supportive of this plan and this concept from Day One,” said Richard Broming, vice president of the Santa Margarita Co. “Getting there has been a painful process.”

This experiment is known in government circles as Natural Community Conservation Planning, or the “gnatcatcher plan” in shorthand. It is being forged by a multitude of consultants, landowners planners and government officials.

Two working groups have met at Starr Ranch to discuss the plan, including representatives of the Irvine and Santa Margarita companies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Fish and Game, other landowners and cities and several environmental groups.

The program was launched by Gov. Pete Wilson’s Administration in 1991. It gained national attention when Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt hailed the approach as a means to avoid “environmental and economic train wrecks,” the collisions that can occur in places such as Southern California, where endangered species and prime real estate overlap.

The Orange County program has received little public attention locally since planning began. But interest is expected to build when the first of the two county plans is made public this fall.

The stakes are high, indeed, in a region where pricey new red-tile-roofed housing developments take shape alongside swaths of the coastal sage scrub where the gnatcatchers dwell.

Fittingly, the National Audubon Society’s Starr Ranch wildlife sanctuary, where the working groups met, is home to 24 pairs of gnatcatchers. But the road to the ranch passes through a gated community, and panel members watched as new houses rose, lawns were planted and fences built.

A total of 161 species across California are listed by the federal government as endangered or threatened, more than in any other state except Hawaii.

In Orange County, at-risk species include the gnatcatcher, the arroyo toad and a tiny plant called the Laguna Beach live-forever, which is found in only six spots on Earth.

The county also contains some of the nation’s most sought-after real estate.

So it seems only fitting that Southern California should emerge as the laboratory for a new approach to protecting endangered species.

For landowners, the plan would seem to provide an escape from what they label the “bush by bush, beak by beak” permitting process of the Endangered Species Act. Landowners praise a central premise of the plan: moving away from a species-by-species approach to the act that they say burdens them with red tape.

“The beauty of this is you get some closure and certainty on the species issue,” said Laer Pearce, executive director of the Coalition for Habitat Conservation, made up of major Orange County landowners and developers.

For environmentalists, the plan offers the attraction of saving whole ecosystems, including thousands of acres of the coastal sage scrub where the gnatcatcher and other troubled species live. That allows for better biological planning than on a project-by-project, species-by-species approach, conservationists say.

In theory, this would appear to make the program the Camp David for environmental discord, the ultimate exercise in compromise.

But some conservationists and scientists are increasingly dubious that it deserves to be billed as a national model.

Several environmentalists who were part of the Starr Ranch meetings dispute the notion this was a consensus process, where they worked shoulder-to-shoulder with developers to craft a plan. In reality, environmentalists had a back-seat role, with landowners and consultants in the lead, they said.

While not condemning the program outright, they believe it cries out for more scientific review. And some who thought science would be the starting point for planning are now skeptical.

The real starting point appears to be, “This is what the developers want and how we work around that,” said Pete DeSimone of the National Audubon Society, a member of the working group.

Others too say they expected more involvement by scientists.

“There really has not been the independent scientific review that we were promised and really should be necessary. If there’s one big gripe, that’s it,” said Elisabeth Brown, president of Laguna Greenbelt and another working-group member.

Jonathan Atwood, the ornithologist most closely identified with efforts to have the gnatcatcher declared endangered, is one of six scientific advisers named to assist with the program’s process. But last week, Atwood could recall only two times that he was formally asked by state or federal agencies to give advice on a Southern California plan in the state project. He said he has no idea if he will be asked to review the Orange County central/coastal plan before it goes public.

Supporters spring to the defense of the process.

“This isn’t academe. This isn’t being funded by the National Science Foundation,” said Dennis Murphy, director of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology and a designer of the project’s approach. But “good science can be done. The kind of science necessary to make some pretty good land-use decisions can be done.”

The project is being helped along by “very capable biologists” with the state and federal wildlife agencies, said Pearce.

Those biologists “are hard negotiators who are standing up for the survival of the species,” Pearce said. “The calls by environmental groups for more science are common in things like this, and we see them as a delaying tactic.”

Now, the stakes may be higher than anyone suspected.

With the federal Endangered Species Act facing a precarious future in Congress, some hope the state project’s plans now being drawn up in Orange County and elsewhere in Southern California will emerge as much-needed proof that landowners and conservationists can reach accord within the confines of the act.

“Anyone who’s critical of this program should think twice, because this is a way to get de facto protection for unlisted species in an anti-environmental political atmosphere,” said Murphy, who chaired the project’s original scientific review panel.

The first plan focuses on the county’s central and coastal areas where the Irvine Co. has large holdings. The second plan, which deals with the southern region where the Santa Margarita Co. owns much of the land, is proving more troublesome than its northern counterpart and is months away from completion, officials say.

Key to creating the reserve is habitat conservation: assembling enough coastal sage scrub and related habitats that the gnatcatcher and its wildlife colleagues will survive.

Outside the reserve, participating landowners would be able to build without having to abide by the Endangered Species Act.

The number of plants and animals to be covered by the central/coastal plan is still under study by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state Department of Fish and Game. Current estimates range from 24 to 30, although officials report the number could climb.

“From the standpoint of a biologist, it’s very important that we have proper protection for the critters we sign off on,” said Gail Kobetich, field supervisor at the Fish and Wildlife office in Carlsbad.

Landowners and environmentalists alike are still hesitant to declare this experiment a success.

An Irvine Co. spokesman noted that a central/coastal agreement has not yet been struck. “Conceptually, we have been an early and optimistic participant in a process that we hope will work,” said spokesman Larry Thomas. “Conceptually, we think it has great merit. We have not yet reached an agreement with respect to our specific land. It has been a long, arduous process. . . . We are not through that process yet.”

Still, those with a stake in the plan--landowners and environmentalists alike--say it is too important a project to dismiss out-of-turn.

Endangered wildlife and development, they warn, are indisputable facts of life in Orange County. Somehow, soon, they say, a solution must be forged.

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Gnatcatcher Reserve

A new plan to save endangered plants and animals such as the gnatcatcher would create a 39,000-acre reserve in central and coastal Orange County. The plan is intended to preserve whole habitats while allowing for economic growth.