Future Debated for Vast Piece of Open Space

It is the last large chunk of privately owned, undeveloped and unplanned land in Orange County, an island showing what Southern California looked like before malls and freeways.

It is home to the nation’s largest population of a threatened songbird--the coastal California gnatcatcher--as well as a bevy of other plants and animals that dwell in few other places on Earth.

“It’s the last largely untrammeled expanse of coastal Southern California. There’s nothing like it. It’s that important,” said conservation biology expert Dennis Murphy.

The future of this massive expanse--from the beaches of San Clemente north to the Cleveland National Forest and east to Camp Pendleton--is to be decided in coming months in an ecological give-and-take on a massive scale involving the Rancho Mission Viejo company, government regulators, scientists and environmentalists. In short: The plan being crafted will decide what land within the 131,000-acre region can be developed and what can be earmarked as natural preserve.

“I would describe it as critical to the future environment of Orange County,” said research biologist Pete Bloom. “This is it. What you see is what you get.”

Despite such high stakes, surprisingly little public debate has occurred in the four years of sometimes tense, sometimes stalled talks over preserve planning in south Orange County.

All that promises to change. A public meeting Thursday night in San Clemente will kick off what appears to be a reinvigorated effort to craft a compromise. Planners face an ambitious schedule over the next year: a draft preserve plan by late July, full-scale environmental review starting in late autumn 1998, final approval next year.

If all goes as planned, as much as 48,000 acres will be divvied into preserves and open space and other land deemed eligible for future development sites.

Hanging in the balance are building plans in one of the fastest-growing regions of Southern California as well as the future health of a long list of plants and animals, including species of birds, toads, turtles and lilies. But many potential land mines lay ahead:

* The possible extension of the Foothill toll road directly through some of the most ecologically sensitive portions of potential preserve land.

* A widening division among those environmentalists who endorse such habitat-saving plans and those who view them with suspicion. Some environmentalists praise the plan as a pragmatic approach to saving endangered species while others say it concedes far too much to developers.

* Increasing pressures for lines to be drawn and decisions made as a building boom gathers steam in southern Orange County. Unlike the first conservation plan in Orange County’s central and coastal areas approved during the tail end of the recession in 1996, the current plan is being prepared during a surging housing market.

Five conceptual plans offer a glimpse of compromises ahead. The plan with the richest allotment of preserve land and other open space--48,022 acres in all--offers what Laguna Beach environmental leader Elisabeth Brown dubs the “died-gone-to-heaven-and-come-back-green scenario.”

At the other extreme is a 41,233-acre plan of reserve and open space that would permit possible development in parts of a large swath of near-pristine wilderness east of San Clemente owned by Rancho Mission Viejo LLC.

Rancho Mission Viejo owns nearly 30,000 acres of the 131,000 acres now being studied. Another 36,000 acres is in Cleveland National Forest, and much of the remaining land is either privately owned or existing parks.

The preserve effort is part of an experiment led by U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Gov. Pete Wilson to balance wildlife demands with developers’ needs.

The so-called Natural Community Conservation Planning program has drawn widespread national attention as a way to make the 1973 Endangered Species Act more palatable for landowners by avoiding what they denounce as bureaucratic “bush-by-bush, beak-by-beak” enforcement by federal regulators.

Instead, environmentally sensitive land is to be saved in blocs theoretically large enough to ensure survival of rare plants and animals. In return, federal and state regulators free participating landowners from tough endangered species laws on lands within the planning region but outside the reserve blocs, saving them development time and money.

“It brings something that both sides want,” said Murphy, a research professor at University of Nevada at Reno who has been involved in Natural Community Conservation Planning policymaking. “It’s the best way to take care of the species and the most efficient way to deal with regulation.”

He calls Orange County an ideal spot for such plans, since so much remaining land is contiguous and held by a few large landowners.

In the county’s only such conservation plan--approved amid national attention in 1996--the Irvine Co. helped spearhead the creation of a patchwork totaling 37,000 acres of preserve land in central and coastal Orange County.

Two other large-scale pioneering projects have been completed in San Diego County, and more plans are being crafted in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Looking ahead, state officials talk of launching similar projects in the Ventura County area and around Monterey.

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But the so-called “southern subregion” of Orange County presents new opportunities and risks.

For one thing, so much of this land is undeveloped that conservation planners talk optimistically of a “blank slate” where habitat may be saved for such animal rarities as the gnatcatcher songbird, arroyo toad, Southwestern pond turtle and rare plants like many-stemmed dudelya, intermediate mariposa lily and Southern tar plant.

Still, the slate is not entirely clean. The prospect of slicing the land with the Foothill South toll road has some environmentalists and scientists wondering how endangered habitat can survive when flanked by bulldozed hillsides and whizzing cars.

Officially, two routes are being considered for the toll road, the “CP” alignment closer to Camp Pendleton, and the “BX” alignment farther west. The CP route is favored by leaders at the Transportation Corridor Agencies, the public group that would build the road, but it has been denounced vehemently by a number of environmentalists.

Most maps for the proposed preserve show only the CP alignment, prompting concern from officials of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is still studying the toll road’s potential environmental effects. In fact, planners are moving ahead with designing the preserve although no final decision has been made where--or even if--to build the road.

After critics faulted similar conservation plans for what they called insufficient scientific review, eight scientific advisors were named to assist in the South County plan. Their future role in reserve design remains uncertain. The advisors compiled a report, still in draft form, offering guidelines for designing the preserve and conserving plants and animals. But there are no formal plans for the scientists to reconvene to review the pending design.

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Planning For Preservation

An ambitious effort aimed at avoiding collisions between development and environmental interests could shape the future of a 131,000-acre area in South Orange County some conservationists call “the lost wilderness.” Tens of thousands of acres may be preserved to shield rare plants and animals. Landowners would be granted new certainty under state and federal law when building outside preserve boundaries. Here are two of five rough-draft plans that would preserve the fewest and most acres.