U.S. Budget Impasse Blocks Payments to Mountain Landowners

Martin Manrique bought his 10-acre spread in Zuma Canyon 23 years ago, figuring to make a killing on it by the time he wanted to retire.

Well, he wants to retire now from the upholstery business. But on Thursday he learned that he may not get the $260,000 he was counting on from a state park agency that agreed three years ago to buy the land. The deal is in danger of unraveling because of the continuing budget stalemate in Washington.

Further complicating things are huge medical bills for his daughter, who broke her elbow and wrist recently, and surgery he needs to correct dwindling sight in his 72-year-old eyes.

“I thought I’d be wealthy by now,” said the Westchester resident, who originally bought the parcel for $15,000. “Now I am barely coasting. It will be very bad for me if they don’t come through.”

Manrique has plenty of company in his anxiety about the money.

Ten other people who own property that borders or is surrounded by federal parkland in the Santa Monica Mountains are owed a total of $4.2 million, with the payments due between March and September of this year. Many of them are older people who, like Manrique, are depending on the money for retirement.

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, a state parkland acquisition agency, wanted the properties because they would supply land for nearly four miles of the scenic 70-mile Backbone Trail that stretches from Will Rogers State Historic Park in Pacific Palisades to Point Mugu in Ventura County.

The landowners sold their properties in a complicated deal to the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority in 1993 for 10% down and a note promising full payment plus 8% annual interest in 1996.

A spokesman for the authority said Thursday that the authority planned to pay off the debt with money it expected to receive from the National Park Service. The federal agency had promised to buy the properties this year from the authority.

But Congress, locked in a budget stalemate with President Clinton, has not yet appropriated money for the Department of the Interior, parent agency of the National Park Service.

That leaves the Park Service with no funds to carry through purchase of the Santa Monica Mountains properties, or $45 million worth of similar park acquisitions elsewhere in the nation.

“There isn’t anyone who’s aware of this situation who isn’t concerned about these retirees’ plight, and who isn’t trying to come to a solution,” said Arthur Eck, superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. “As soon as the appropriation is passed and money for these acquisitions is released, we will distribute it to these people.”

Joseph T. Edmiston, top official of the mountains authority, said he believes the federal government has the “moral and political responsibility” to come through with the money to buy the properties from Manrique and the others.

Edmiston said he had personally lobbied Rep. Anthony Beilenson (D-Woodland Hills) and Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in an effort to find emergency funding.

“We want to make sure the people in Washington know this money is not to acquire the backyards of rich Westsiders . . . but that it would be used for genuine hardship cases,” Edmiston said.

The impasse is half of a financial double whammy to hit the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. The conservancy and Las Virgenes Municipal Water District--the conservancy’s partner in a land deal--were ordered Wednesday by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury to pay $11.2 million to Village Properties, a home-building firm.

The firm had accused the two government agencies of conspiring to thwart its attempt to buy 492 hillside acres above a scenic reservoir near Westlake Village.

The award, the first ever against the conservancy, was hailed by a spokesman for the development firm as a precedent-setting victory for the rights of property owners over public agencies.

“I hope government agencies will now think twice before they trample on developers’ rights,” said Eric Rowen, an attorney until recently for Village Properties.

Conservancy officials vowed to ask a judge to reduce the jury’s award and appeal the summary judgment upon which it was based.