Coastal Panel Acts to Save Farmland

In a flurry of activity favoring Ventura County, the state Coastal Conservancy moved Thursday to provide $725,000 to local programs that would save farmland from development, repair eroded stream banks and restore wildlife habitat near Santa Paula and Moorpark.

At a meeting in San Diego, conservancy directors agreed to apply for a $350,000 grant on behalf of the Ventura County Agricultural Land Trust, a nonprofit agency formed in 1992 to preserve prime farmland threatened by the expansion of cities.

That state farmland grant--or a separate $750,000 federal grant the conservancy solicited last fall--would represent the first money the land trust has raised to purchase development rights on local farms to help keep the agricultural industry viable.

About 1,000 acres of farmland are lost annually to development in Ventura County.

Peter Brand, head of the Coastal Conservancy’s farmland preservation efforts, said he is optimistic the Ventura County trust will receive at least one of the two grants--$350,000 in state money or $750,000 from the federal Agriculture Department--and perhaps both.

“We’re very confident and hopeful the $750,000 will be approved,” Brand said. “We really don’t know yet about the $350,000.”

Word on the federal grant should come in April, and the grant from a special state environmental enhancement fund is expected to be awarded by July.

Development rights on a 135-acre south Ventura farm could be the agricultural trust’s first acquisition, said county planner Gene Kjellberg, a director of the land trust. Negotiations for purchase of the so-called Arundell-Triangle Farm, just south of the Ventura Freeway near Ventura Harbor, are ongoing, he said.

The farm--well-known because it was a prime site for a proposed Cal State University campus in the 1980s--is adjacent to urban development and would serve as a buffer against future growth into the greenbelt that separates Ventura from Oxnard, he said.

“It’s very definitely a significant step,” Kjellberg said of the grant applications. “I can’t say there have been any assurances. But I can say we’ve had support from Congressman [Elton] Gallegly [R-Simi Valley], Assemblyman Brooks Firestone [R-Los Olivos] and Sen. Jack O’Connell [D-Santa Barbara].”

Both grants, totaling $1.1 million, or $8,148 an acre, would be needed to pay for development rights on the farm and even that might not be enough to cover full costs, he said. Local farmland is valued at $12,000 to $15,000 if purchased outright, he said, and proximity to cities increases that value.

The land trust might buy the Arundell-Triangle property outright, not just its development rights, then sell the right to work the land to a farmer, Kjellberg said. Purchase of development rights only is also a possibility, he said.

The conservancy’s Brand said about 40,000 agricultural acres have been preserved statewide by buying the right to develop the land from farmers.

“But there’s not a single acre of farmland in Ventura County that’s permanently protected under an agricultural conservation easement,” Brand said. “People interested in the long-term health of [county] agriculture would not be as concerned if there was.”

The Coastal Conservancy, a state agency created to preserve and enhance natural resources, on Thursday also recognized Ventura County’s severe erosion problem by agreeing to spend $300,000 to stabilize sandy stream banks in lower Grimes Canyon west of Moorpark.

About 1.2 million tons of soil washes away each year in the Calleguas Creek Watershed, a 30-mile-long area that stretches from the hills above Moorpark, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks and Camarillo to the Pacific Ocean at Point Mugu, Brand said.

“The most important thing about this project is that it will show the way for farmers and ranchers to restore their own property,” Brand said. “Because in many of the canyons of the Calleguas Creek Watershed, the orchards themselves are falling into the streams because of erosion.”

And in the first substantial project to emerge from a four-year effort to plan the future of the 100-mile-long Santa Clara River, conservancy directors agreed to spend $75,000 to design two projects that would shore up riverbanks and restore the river’s dwindling habitat for birds, plants and animals.

About $50,000 would be spent to draft a plan to shore up the river bank naturally with boulders and willows along three ranches near Santa Paula that were badly damaged in the 1995 floods.

“I am thrilled,” said Michael Kraslow, a Camarillo physician whose historic ranch near Santa Paula was reduced by seven acres through erosion two years ago. “I was the hardest hit. I lost 400 to 500 lemon trees. And the river still threatens my access road, a cottage and a barn.”

The riverbank protection would consist of natural vegetation, not rip-rap or concrete, so wildlife could flourish even as farmers are protected from erosion, officials said.

About $25,000 of the same grant would be spent to design what is essentially a 150-acre habitant bank north of Santa Paula, where penalties paid by farmers and businesses to replace destroyed habitat could be spent to create a new wetland, said the conservancy’s Santa Clara River project manager, Reed Holderman.

“This is the first of our Santa Clara demonstration projects,” said Holderman, a leader in the years-long planning for the river’s future. “We will buy the property and set up the bank. And people who have adversely affected the habitant can come into the bank and pay their compensation.”

That saves the property owners from having to set up their own wildlife habitats and wend their way through layers of government bureaucracy, he said.