$52-Million Deal Seeks to Save Desert Land

In what would be the largest deal of its kind in state history, a Southern California conservation group is brokering a $52-million transaction designed to protect 430,000 acres of desert wilderness in and around Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave National Preserve.

Under the plan advanced by the Wildlands Conservancy, the land would be transferred from Catellus Development Corp., formerly the real estate arm of the Santa Fe Pacific Corp., to the National Park Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

In all, the nonprofit Wildlands Conservancy, based in Yucaipa, hopes to protect 742 square miles of desert, including land already purchased from Catellus and about 20,000 acres it hopes to buy from small property owners with holdings inside the boundaries of Joshua Tree.

Officially, company spokesmen stressed that the talks with the conservancy are still preliminary. “We will focus the time and effort necessary to evaluate the proposal. But until then we won’t have an official reaction,” said Catellus President Nelson Rising.

But privately, officials were more enthusiastic. “It’s a pretty good offer,” said one Catellus executive. But he and other company representatives cautioned that their talks with the conservancy were in the preliminary stages.

The talks are “headed in the right direction, but whether this is the exact deal we are going to do or the group we are going to do it with, we’re just not there,” the official said.

Catellus, the largest private owner of desert real estate in California, has prompted concerns among environmentalists and federal land managers because it has publicly declared its intention to commercially develop or sell its vast holdings. Earlier this year, the company began erecting “For Sale” signs on land it owns inside the Mojave Preserve.

The company has already sold land in the middle of wilderness areas in the desert to individual buyers who have built roads, gates and fences that restricted access to adjacent public lands, said Ed Hastey who heads the BLM’s California office.

“The pressure on these lands for private development is growing and conflicts are increasing,” Hastey said. The proposed land sale “would be a hell of a deal,” he added. “We have been trying to negotiate with Catellus for years, and we had kind of given up on it.”

According to David Myers, executive director of the conservancy, the conservancy would put up about $16 million provided by anonymous donors and look to the federal government to pay the remaining $36 million out of its parkland acquisition fund.

Although the government has not committed itself to the deal, officials of the National Park Service, long worried about development of private lands in California’s desert parks, hailed the conservancy’s proposal as a great idea.

“The Wildlands Conservancy effort is ambitious and dramatic. It will be a great day for the desert,” said a spokeswoman for John Reynolds, regional director of the National Park Service.

The conservancy has already bought and donated to the government about 25,000 acres of desert wilderness, most of it in Joshua Tree. The land was purchased from Catellus over the past three years for $3.2 million.

California Resources Secretary Douglas Wheeler said the amount of land to be set aside in the proposed transaction is unprecedented.

“If they are serious about this, it is a very big deal for California. For ecosystem management in the desert, it is key to consolidate these holdings,” Wheeler said.

“This is an absolutely marvelous deal for the California desert,” said Eldon Hughes, head of the Sierra Club’s California Desert Committee.

“It buys out the major private holdings that were left out of the California Desert Protection Act of 1994,” Hughes said. That act created the Mojave Preserve and expanded Joshua Tree and Death Valley National Parks and created 69 wilderness areas on surrounding BLM lands.

If it goes through, said Hughes, the acquisition will provide sanctuary for the threatened desert tortoise. Currently much of the tortoise’s habitat is subject to development.

For the transaction to go through as it is proposed, Catellus would have to agree to a per-acre price that is one-half to one-third of the value its own appraisers put on the land a few years ago, said Myers.

Myers said Catellus would have to weigh the benefits of a large sale all at once against the prospect of selling the land piecemeal in what historically has been a slow market for remote desert real estate. In all, Catellus owns about 790,000 acres of desert land.

“The absorption rate, typically, on remote land in the Mojave is about 8,000 acres a year,” Myers said.

In the meantime, Myers said he is confident of being able to put together the funds to make the deal work. “We’re going to get the government support we need,’ he said. “We’re good at this.”

It is not an idle boast. Meyers was instrumental in forming the group that in the early 1980s persuaded officials to establish Chino Hills State Park in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The parkland eventually cost more than $60 million, the largest price ever paid by the state for a park.

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Desert Holdings

Catellus Development Corp. is considering selling 430,000 acres of desert wilderness to a land conservancy. The federal government would be given the land to protect as wilderness. The deal would include 86,000 acres within the Mojave National Preserve, 40,000 acres within Joshua Tree National Park, and pockets of land around the parks, shown below.