Songbird Truce Rattled by a Bump in the Road : Environment: Concerns over plans for O.C.’s Foothill tollway strain alliance of conservationists, developers.

Construction crews have toiled for years in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, forging a highway destined to run nearly 30 miles southeast toward the sea.

Now, builders are gearing up for the next segment of the Foothill tollway, one that will take it across a sage scrub-specked landscape in southern Orange County.

But this upcoming three-mile stretch east of Mission Viejo--an innocuous snippet of purple ribbon on the route map--is creating a furor among some environmentalists.

The reason: The route would cut through an area called Chiquita Canyon, home to one of the county’s largest populations of the rare songbird known as the California gnatcatcher.

And therein lies the problem that is riling wildlife advocates, dividing scientists, frustrating tollway planners and embarking the federal government on a fast-track study of the canyon.

With road-building due to start in January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is to decide within a few weeks whether the gnatcatcher can coexist successfully with the tollway and a proposed golf course nearby. While the decision is not expected to halt the road, it could cause delays and influence what other projects take shape in the canyon area.

In Southern California, where development skirmishes are frequent, the debate swirling around Chiquita Canyon has special symbolism.

The imagery alone is compelling--a highway costing $360 million to build, hailed by supporters as a lifeline for economic growth, is pitted against one of the best-known feathered members of the federal endangered species list.

Besides, this canyon clash wasn’t supposed to happen.

After the gnatcatcher wars of the early 1990s, a truce was declared under which government agencies, developers and conservationists began working cooperatively to engineer a broad new approach to the Endangered Species Act. The fight over Chiquita Canyon offers a telling glimpse at just how arduous and contentious that much-applauded effort can become. How that fight is resolved, said people on all sides of the issue, could signal how successfully the truce is working.

“Will we be able to resolve this cooperatively, or will we all land up in court again?” said Dan Silver, coordinator of the Endangered Habitats League and an environmentalist active in the new planning effort. “The whole program is on the line, from our point of view, over Chiquita,” Silver said.

Others warn that canyon champions have too narrow a focus, that drawing “a line in the sage scrub” at Chiquita Canyon might backfire.

People should not forget that the canyon’s owner, the Santa Margarita Co., is talking about committing 21,000 acres--or 75% of its open land--to the new habitat conservation program, said Dennis Murphy, director of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology and a longtime program supporter.

“Is the area important? Yes, it’s important,” Murphy said. But is it worth jeopardizing the program? “Not on your life.”

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To explain his concerns over Chiquita Canyon, environmentalist Pete DeSimone leaves behind the studies and gnatcatcher counts and drives into the foothills. On a quiet stretch of Oso Parkway, he stops to let visitors absorb the view.

Where others might see only a shallow valley flanked by brownish vegetation, DeSimone sees imperiled habitat.

“This is prime coastal sage scrub on these slopes,” DeSimone said, pointing. “This is just chock-full of gnatcatchers and cactus wrens.”

The prospect of bulldozers in Chiquita Canyon has struck a raw nerve among environmentalists such as DeSimone, who manages the National Audubon Society’s Starr Ranch sanctuary nearby. Those environmentalists contend the canyon should be a centerpiece of the new planning effort--called the Natural Community Conservation Planning Program, or NCCP--because of the rich population of gnatcatchers it contains. The canyon area, says Silver, contains one of the most important gnatcatcher populations in the world.

Ironically, the furor reached a boil just as Orange County’s first draft NCCP plan, proposing a 39,000-acre wildlife reserve for the county’s central and coastal areas, was released Dec. 13. It is being applauded by supporters as proof that government agencies, landowners and environmentalists can strike a balance between growth and endangered species.

But work on a second plan, for a 42,000-acre reserve in the county’s southern area, is lagging behind schedule and laced with controversy.

The delay has caused headaches at the Transportation Corridor Agencies, which hopes to begin work next month on the three-mile segment in the Chiquita Canyon area. So the agency this fall asked the federal government to review the project under the Endangered Species Act. That move caused environmentalists to bristle, since the type of review being conducted does not provide for formal public input--and because federal officials have agreed to complete it on a speeded-up timetable.

“When we’re looking at one of the most important pieces of property left to be developed in Orange County, how can we say we’re speeding this process up?” said Scott E. Thomas of Mission Viejo, a local conservationist.

Steve Letterly, the tollway agency’s director of environmental services, said his organization remains committed to participating in the NCCP regional plan, which he calls “an excellent concept to plan for habitat preservation on a regional basis.” But he added, “The unfortunate part is that there are different expectations by various groups.”

The agency is under pressure to build the tollway segment by its scheduled 1999 completion date to meet fast-growing traffic demands in the region, Letterly said.

He rejected as impractical the suggestion of some critics that the tollway route be moved to Antonio Parkway. The parkway sits close to new development that would have to be removed, he said. “It probably would make the road impossible to build.”

For more than a year, he added, his agency has worked closely with the Fish and Wildlife Service. He ticked off a list of design changes--deleting an interchange, adding a wildlife crossing, moving a toll booth, and plans to plant coastal sage scrub and to lessen the impact of lights. He believes the road as designed would not jeopardize the gnatcatcher’s future.

And tollway bulldozers do not delve into sensitive habitat unannounced, he said. Before grading begins, trained biologists flush the land so that birds disperse.

“You do everything possible not to hurt or injure those birds,” Letterly said.

Further worrying critics is talk of a golf course within the canyon area. Plans at first called for a 36-hole golf course and 200 homes. But amid negotiations, the golf course has shrunk in size and the homes are gone--a sign, some say, that the spirit of compromise is alive and well.

The current plan calls for conserving the 1,274-acre canyon area, except for three uses: the tollway right-of-way, a possible reservoir and a golf course development area not larger than 240 acres. To allow NCCP planning to proceed, the Santa Margarita Co. would hold off developing the golf course for a year, company spokeswoman Diane Gaynor said.

The tollway agency has agreed to negotiate with Santa Margarita Co. about buying the undeveloped acreage to be included in the future reserve.

But while some critics accept the road as inevitable, they see no place for a golf course in the canyon. Said Silver: “We’re not fighting all development, but we’ve got to, on balance, protect the core biological areas.”

He added, “This is a place where people can understand what the world used to look like, what Orange County used to look like.”

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The birds of Chiquita Canyon are creating a stir, not only among local environmentalists, but in the scientific community as well.

About 100 pairs of gnatcatchers live in the canyon area, according to Fish and Wildlife biologist James Burns. He and others refer to this as a “core population,” a strong community that is expected to produce new birds for other areas of the region. The gnatcatcher is listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Fish and Wildlife officials expect that a total of 35 pairs would be disrupted or displaced by the road and effects such as noise, Burns said. A study for the tollway agency counts only six to 12 bird sightings on the land to be affected, with another 20 sightings in the area.

A recent flurry of letters reveals that even the experts are divided over canyon development.

Kicking off the debate, a letter from Murphy and a colleague reported that the effects of development could be softened by careful management--and that areas of the canyon “not proposed for development should be targeted for rehabilitation.”

That letter sparked a spirited response--signed by 30 biologists and other experts--calling for “rigorous, independent, and formal scientific review of the South Orange County NCCP.” Their letter described Chiquita Canyon as a “potential crown jewel” of the planned reserve system.

After touring the canyon in early December, some scientists remained concerned. In a letter to federal officials, gnatcatcher expert Jonathan Atwood called a golf course “inappropriate in what is clearly one of the most biologically valuable portions of the subregion.” Protecting and restoring the upper Chiquita Canyon area, he wrote, “would go a long ways toward regional recovery of the gnatcatcher.”

So all those with a stake in this tug-of-war are awaiting the review by Fish and Wildlife, initially expected last Friday but delayed by the Washington budget showdown, possibly until early January. “I’m optimistic, though as far as I know of, there’s no solution on the table,” said Steve Johnson, who directs conservation science at the Nature Conservancy’s California regional office and has been active in the NCCP process.

“What I see happening is that people are working hard to solve it,” Johnson said. “To me, that’s heartening.”