9 Square Miles of Newhall Ranch to Be Donated

The developer of Newhall Ranch, a 25,000-home development proposed for the Santa Clarita Valley that would be the biggest in Los Angeles County history, is planning to deed nearly half of the ranch’s 12,000 acres to a conservation group.

The Newhall Land & Farming Co. said Monday that it would give 9 square miles, including a stretch of the Santa Clara River and an area in the Santa Susana Mountains known as the High Country, to the nonprofit Center for Natural Lands Management.

The company, which is currently working out planning details with Los Angeles County, will also provide a “several-million-dollar” endowment to fund perpetual management of the property--most of which is too steep to build on, said company spokeswoman Marlee Lauffer.

Sherry Teresa, executive director of the Sacramento-based environmental management organization, said most land donations today involve relatively small, unconnected tracts of land. In the Newhall donation, “we have almost 6,000 contiguous acres,” she said. “And it’s pretty good habitat.”

Additionally, the donation will open up to the public land that is currently privately held and off-limits to hikers, picnickers and other recreation-seekers, Teresa said. The two largest areas are 3,950 acres in the High Country area and 813 acres along a five-mile stretch of the river.

The transfer of the property, which will take place after the developers get the go-ahead from county officials for the housing project, could be complete by around 2000, she said.

While environmentalists welcomed the news that the acreage would be protected, they also criticized the deal as a publicity ploy. Public hearings on the development begin Wednesday, they noted, and most of the hilly, riverside land could not be developed anyway.

“The end result is that it ends up in the public trust, and that’s nice. But that land was not buildable anyway, and they wanted somebody to take it off their hands,” said Lynne Plambeck of SCOPE, the Santa Clarita Organization for Planning the Environment, which has been highly critical of the Newhall Ranch development.

“It is very much in their self-interest to do this. It was basically a liability before, and they would have to manage it for fire dangers and such.”

The company also recently announced its intention to donate to the Archeological Conservancy a tract of land on the Newhall Ranch property that was the site of the Asistencia de San Francisco Xavier, the first European settlement in north Los Angeles County.