Sylvan Fade

Four years after a 62-acre swath of Featherly Regional Park was turned over to a private management company, the parkland is overgrown with weeds and pocked with gopher holes, with stumps where stately native trees stood and benches and buildings termite-ridden and falling apart, an environmental consultant says.

“Featherly has deteriorated since privatization primarily because of limited staffing, lack of operating funds, and inadequate and improper maintenance,” Tom Larson, president of Integrated Urban Forestry Inc., said in the report.

The park’s native vegetation, he added, is at risk.

The report prepared for the Orange County Employees Assn. by the Laguna Hills-based consultant will be used tonight when the county’s Harbors, Beaches and Parks Commission considers whether to recommend quashing the contract with the campground management firm.

The consultant’s report on the park, which hugs the still-wild banks of the Santa Ana River, follows years of criticism by county parks inspectors and high-level officials that the park is poorly managed.

More than 20 inspections since early 1995 have cited significant environmental and maintenance problems on the tract, including 70 native trees that inspectors say are dead or dying and hundreds of state-protected plants that were reportedly removed without permits.

This section of the park includes one of the few places in the county where the river has not been turned into a concrete channel. It is the only privately managed campground in the county’s 33,000-acre park system and was leased by the county as a cost-cutting measure in 1993.

Since then, it has been closely watched by government officials and environmentalists, who are divided over whether private enterprise should be given care of sensitive parkland resources.

“I think I have a pretty good idea how to manage a park, and this isn’t the way it’s done,” said Tim Miller, manager of Harbors, Beaches and Parks for the county.

“I know that park pretty well,” he said. “I know what it was before, and I know what it has become today. You can’t replace the 70 trees that are gone. You can’t replace the pruning of old oak trees that was done without our approval. You can’t replace the habitat that was taken out. It’s all gone forever.”

Vernon St. Clair, a partner in the Torrance-based management company, says the part of the 700-acre county-owned park that his company maintains has never looked better, and points out that the privatization has saved the county more than $450,000 a year in operating expenses and earned it more than $65,000 in revenue.

Under the contract with Canyon RV Park, the county reaps a percentage of what the company earns from selling camping and vehicle permits, running vending machines and renting equipment to campers.

“The things that they’re pointing out are like faucets not working, mostly nit-picking things. Weeds. Dead grass. They had complaints about trees dying, but the county didn’t plant them properly. That’s why they died,” St. Clair said.

“All of the issues that they’ve always come up with have always been dealt with,” he said. “Our intent is to maintain the park in the best of standards, to keep it a clean, safe, desirable place for people to come to, and it is so.”

Commissioners may recommend against renewing the county’s contract with St. Clair Investments and Mobile Modular Development Corp., which operates the park as Canyon RV Park. The company’s current five-year lease expires June 30, 1998, with an option for 30 years more.

Underlying the commissioners’ debate will be the question of whether putting public lands into private hands works. Proponents of such privatization argue that parks bureaucracies are bloated and that the public has the right to reap revenue from its lands.

But those who oppose privatization say private park operators lack incentive to protect the environment.

“The crucial issue in making the transfer from the public to the private sector is really one of incentive. If you do want a private firm to manage the park, how can you give them incentives to take care of things in the same way as the public employees do?” said Adrian Moore, director of economic studies at the Reason Public Policy Institute, a privatization think tank.

“What it seems to come down to here,” he said, “is the operator is trying to get the most people to come to the park. The county is trying to preserve the plant life, and those two goals don’t necessarily coincide.”

The 58-page report was commissioned by the county employees association, the union that represents the 15 county workers who were transferred to jobs at other parks when Featherly was privatized. The union has been a staunch opponent of removing management of the park from county control.

The inspections done by the county over a two-year period and three warning letters sent to the management company by top parks officials mirror the report’s findings.

Beginning with a November 1996 letter from then Harbors, Beaches and Parks Director Robert Fisher, who wrote that park conditions were “unacceptable,” the inspections cite a variety of maintenance concerns at the park, including unclean and poorly functioning restrooms, a malfunctioning septic system, overgrown grass, faulty wiring and playgrounds in need of repair.

In addition, the management company was cited this year by the Orange County Fire Authority for allowing trash and brush to become fire hazards, and by the state Department of Fish and Game for removing native plants from the banks of the Santa Ana River without a permit, Miller said.

But over the last few months, county parks officials say, conditions at the park have improved.

When commissioners toured the site last week, they saw workers laying new sod over areas that had been left to wither. Some termite-ridden and decaying picnic tables and benches had been newly painted and repaired. Bathrooms, which the environmental consultant had cited as unkempt, were outfitted with new sinks and toilet seats.

But nearby, old tires lay in the riverbed. Concrete blocks stood like tombstones on the banks of the river. A young tree was dying.

Commissioners say they fear for the long-term well-being of the park.

“It looks like in the last month they have knocked themselves out to try to cover up the damage that’s been done in the past four years, it was so obviously a last-minute attempt,” said Don Bankhead, who chairs the commission.

“I can tell you I wasn’t really happy with the general condition of the park when you compare it to the condition of our other parks. . . . I think it’s important that the facility be maintained . . . and unfortunately I didn’t feel that was being done.”