A Landmark Event for Great Outdoors

Plans to create a chain of wilderness lands from Whittier to San Diego passed a major milestone this week, as Gov. Pete Wilson and state lawmakers agreed to spend $1 million to help buy 695 acres of mountain lion habitat in a rugged northeastern Orange County canyon.

The funding is a tiny piece of the $10 million to $14 million environmentalists estimate they need to buy the land in Coal Canyon from the developers who own it today. But at a press conference Wednesday in the amber-colored canyon, leaders of the citizens groups and lawmakers called the state funding a key first step.

“It is a good-faith effort to make the developers understand that there is a desire and a commitment from the state to buy this land,” said Assemblyman Fred Aguiar (R-Chino Hills). “It is the first million that is the hardest to get.”

The funding, included in the state budget signed by Wilson on Monday, is the first commitment of state money to buy the canyon land, which lies in Anaheim and Yorba Linda between the 472,000-acre Cleveland National Forest to the south and the 12,000-acre Chino Hills State Park to the north.

“A million dollars is a lot of money for one project, so this is a major first step, but it is also just a first step,” said Ken Colombini, spokesman for the California Department of Parks and Recreation. “This is hopefully the beginning of something where we can all work together and raise money from other sources.”

A statewide coalition of environmental groups has battled for 11 years to prevent development in the canyon, where biologists and state parks officials say mountain lions, cougars, bobcats, coyotes and deer cross at night from one vast wilderness to another. The effort is part of a push by the groups to connect five separate open space preserves in the Whittier Hills to the Cleveland National Forest, which encompasses much of the Santa Ana Mountains.

“In order for these hills to stay alive, they need to be connected to each other,” said Geary Hund, an ecologist with the state park system.

“There’s literally a river of life at stake here,” Hund said. “We know if we don’t save it, that species will become extinct.”

The Coal Canyon land would provide a missing link between a current 37,000-acre preserve in central-coastal Orange County and lands north of the Riverside Freeway, said Claire Schlotterbeck, president of Hills for Everyone, a nonprofit group.

Environmentalists had lobbied unsuccessfully last year for including Coal Canyon in the preserve. And while reserve planners saw the Coal Canyon land as a critical link, they were unable to add it to the preserve because of financial and planning constraints, said environmentalist Dan Silver of the Endangered Habitats League, who participated in the preserve planning process.

“It was left as kind of a white hole,” Silver said.

Plans to build in the canyon have long been in the works. Hon Development Co. of Laguna Hills, the firm that owns 663 acres of the Coal Canyon tract, won approval from Anaheim city leaders in 1992 to build 1,550 homes on the property.

As part of the approval, the development company eliminated plans to build 18 million-dollar homes on another 1,000 acres in the canyon. It sold that land to the state for $4 million, after environmentalists said the project would destroy one of the last Tecate cypress forests in the western United States. That land is now a reserve.

A spokesman for Hon Development said Wednesday that the company is now in escrow to sell the land to another developer. But the spokesman said the firm would be willing to sell the land to the environmentalists if they matched the offer.

“The property is for sale and a number of people are looking at it, including the environmentalists,” said Hon Vice President Mike Walker. “We’d be happy to talk with them further.”

Another developer, Fontana-based Mancha Co., owns a separate 32-acre parcel in the canyon. Officials with the company could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

Environmentalists fighting to prevent development in the canyon said they are in discussions with several charitable foundations as well as the state parks department.

For years, hikers and mountain bikers have crisscrossed Coal Canyon, which lies in northeast Orange County on both sides of the Riverside Freeway. At night the canyon is filled with deer and mountain lions, foxes and coyotes, who cross under the freeway and into the surrounding hills, wildlife ecologist Paul Beier said.

Other animals that make Coal Canyon home include the California gnatcatcher and the Braunton’s milk-vetch, a mauve-colored herb. Both are on the federal government’s list of endangered species.

But while outcry from a Brea-based activist group prevented construction of a shooting range in the canyon a decade ago, and has kept the land undeveloped since, the hills are still used for motorcycle racing. And as the population of Orange County has grown, new subdivisions have been built ever closer to the canyon.

“This is the last link without development on it to connect these parks. This is all that’s left,” Schlotterbeck said.

“We’re at a choke point if we want to keep this for our grandchildren, which is what parks are all about.”

The $1-million state allocation comes from the Natural Resources Infrastructure Fund, created this year as the method to spend money from Proposition 117, which mandates $30 million in state funding each year to buy wildlife habitats. The initiative was passed by California voters in 1990.

Times staff writer Deborah Schoch contributed to this report.

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Missing Link

695 acres of Coal Canyon land will connect parks