Foundation Gives $175 Million to Save California Open Space

In one of the most expansive efforts ever to preserve California’s precious--but threatened--open space, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation will give $175 million to protect the state’s wildlife habitat, watersheds and spectacular vistas.

The foundation has targeted the Central Coast, Central Valley and Sierra Nevada for a five-year effort to preserve about 250,000 acres through the purchase of water and development rights and in some instances land.

The project rivals bequests by the Rockefeller family early in this century that helped to establish or expand national parks in the Virgin Islands, Wyoming and Maine, say environmentalists, who have not seen such largess since.

“It is, so far as we can tell, the largest gift of its kind ever made by a philanthropy for this purpose in California, and one of the largest for this purpose ever made in the United States,” Doug Wheeler, California’s secretary for resources, said Tuesday.

Melanie Griffin, director of land protection programs for the Sierra Club, said the timing of the grant is particularly significant.

“For the past couple of years we’ve seen continuing legislative threats to forest lands and wetlands,” Griffin said. “This kind of initiative is particularly important in light of the ongoing congressional attacks on our public lands.”

Jean Hocker, president of the Land Trust Alliance in Washington, called the grant “a tremendous investment and a tremendous statement on the part of the Packard Foundation about the value of preserving open land.”

In fact, one of the goals of the Packard effort is to spur greater giving to conservation efforts, said Jeanne Sedgwick, the foundation’s conservation program director.

“Twenty-five years ago, there were quite a few private foundations that allocated resources to buy land,” Sedgwick said. “It’s no longer in vogue among private foundations. But it’s something we think is so core and so central to the quality of life. We’re hoping to bring this back in the forefront of other private philanthropies.”

Established in 1964 by Hewlett-Packard Co. co-founder David Packard and his wife, Lucile Salter Packard, the foundation has long focused on conservation efforts, in addition to science, the arts, education and children’s issues.

Valued at nearly $9 billion, it is the third largest philanthropic foundation in the country, behind the Eli Lilly and Ford foundations. In 1997, the Los Altos-based Packard Foundation gave more than $200 million in grant awards.

The effort to preserve open space in California is the particular brainchild of three foundation board members--Julie Packard, the director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium; Nancy Burnett, who also serves on the board of the Big Sur Land Trust, and Robert Stephens, Julie Packard’s husband. Nancy Burnett and Julie Packard are David and Lucile Packard’s daughters.

“We started here because California’s biological richness is unique and important--not just regionally and nationally, but globally,” Sedgwick said Tuesday. “California shows up on all the maps of the most biologically rich and most threatened spots in the world. . . . Population growth is mind-numbing.”

But narrowing their focus over the past year to the Central Coast, Central Valley and Sierra Nevada was a difficult process. The key again was population growth and its effects on the environment.

“Population growth in the three areas is around double the population growth rates in the rest of the state over the next five years,” Sedgwick said. “They’re loaded with fabulous scenic and biological resources, and they’re more threatened.”

The $175 million probably will buy very little actual land. Instead, the foundation will work with land trusts and agricultural organizations throughout the regions to target areas that are the most vulnerable--but where money can do the most good.

In the Sierra, the foundation probably will target two or three crucial watershed areas--regions that are critical to the state’s water supply. It will help other groups to buy water and development rights from private--but willing--landowners who will continue to own the property in question.

The Packard money also will go toward underwriting watershed planning and management in the Sierra and possibly toward creating a regional institution to do conservation work using national and local resources.

Unlike many environmental groups that focus on managing and protecting publicly owned lands, the Packard Foundation plans to emphasize conservation efforts on private lands, including agricultural property.

It recently gave money to underwrite the Nature Conservancy’s purchase of development rights to a large cattle ranch in Lassen County near Redding. In the next 10 to 15 years, urban sprawl will begin to threaten the ranch--and will drive up the land values.

By buying the development rights now, the Nature Conservancy ensured that the open space will be protected in the future and that ranchers will be able to stay in farming. To Sedgwick, that’s a win-win situation.

“This property was loaded with rich, biologically important habitat. It’s one of the signature landscapes of California,” she said. “The plan is to get ahead of the development curve before land values get so high that the conservation community won’t be able to do anything.”

Northern Monterey County’s Elkhorn Slough, the second largest estuary in the state, also will be targeted by the conservation initiative.

The area is thick with marshy grasses and wildflowers and in winter a wide variety of shorebirds call it home. The endangered brown pelican and the California least tern also thrive there.

Although parts of the slough are a nature sanctuary, the area is being rapidly encroached upon by development. With the help of the Packard Foundation, the Big Sur Land Trust just closed a $2.4-million deal to buy the site of a planned 20-unit subdivision to protect a critical drainage area into the slough.

“It was a very important acquisition to avoid it being developed,” said Zad Leavy, general manager and general counsel for the Big Sur Land Trust, an organization that hopes to administer future Packard grant money in the area.

Leavy said that “for the last year they’ve indicated they wanted to put this kind of money into coastal protection, mostly in the Central Coast.”

Consider: Over the past 20 years, the Big Sur Land Trust has preserved 15,000 acres at a value of about $50 million. “So just think about what you could do if you spent $175 million in five years,” Leavy said.

Michael Mantell, consultant with the California Environmental Trust and a consultant to the Packard Foundation, said: “The hope is that these efforts will be done in such important and strategic areas that they will have a ripple effect . . . and bring more dollars to bear.”

Times staff writer Mary Curtius contributed to this story.