Park Service Strikes Deal for Rancho Estates

Adding another square to a patchwork quilt of public parkland, the U.S. Park Service and other government agencies have finally acquired Rancho Estates, a 38-acre wilderness expanse in the Santa Monica Mountains that its owner once planned to develop.

After bringing in bulldozers to begin grading the property last year, owner Tom Steers shifted course and agreed to a price well below the land’s appraised value of $1.7 million.

The $970,000 deal announced Monday, a compromise between Steers and federal, state, county, and city agencies that pooled resources to buy the land, will preserve the rippled hillsides adjacent to the northwest corner of Topanga State Park.

“Money isn’t everything,” Steers said as conservationists clustered around him after a press conference on the deal.

Steers, 69, said he fell in love with the rugged hills in 1953 after he returned from the Korean War. Thousands of years ago, the land was home to the Chumash; more recently, it provided a haven where Steers wooed his wife and took his four children camping. For 40 years he planned to develop the land and retire there, but he said development proved to be too impractical and time-consuming.

“This land belongs to nature,” Steers said. “It belongs to God, and it belongs to those inhabitants . . . who will take care of it.”

Accessible only by the unpaved section of Mulholland Drive, the Steers property is considered a vital link between Topanga State Park and Mulholland Gateway Park to the northwest. Any development, such as the four ranch homes Steers had previously planned to build, “would have driven a wedge between two existing park areas,” said Arthur Eck, superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

The purchase was announced at Rancho Estates by Rep. Brad Sherman, a freshman Democrat entering the final lap of his reelection campaign, in a moment of political back-slapping suffused with the soft sunlight of a mountain morning. Politicians in shiny suits mingled in the dried grass with park rangers in fir-colored uniforms and conservationists in sweatshirts, all toasting the acquisition before a backdrop of blue-green hills.

“I had yet to be sworn in before community activists told me that the most important thing the federal government could do is to buy that hill behind me,” Sherman said, acknowledging the role of grass-roots groups who had fought for decades to preserve the area.

One activist, Sue Nelson, recalled fending off plans to build a freeway bypass, an expressway, and various developments on the land since she got involved in 1967. Now chairwoman of the Friends of the Santa Monica Mountains Parks and Seashore, Nelson said she was thrilled to hear about the preservation deal.

“I started crying when I heard,” she said. “It’s been so many years.”

Last year, Steers offered the land to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy for about $2.5 million, a prohibitively high price for the state agency. Conservancy officials held out, and with the help of Sherman, county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski and the national Park Service, they eventually negotiated a lower price. The Park Service, which will assume the title to the land, will pay about 40% of the property’s cost, officials said. Another 40% will come from the county through its Proposition A parks bond, and the city of Los Angeles will contribute $170,000 in park acquisition funds.

The Park Service plans to build a trail through the Steers land connecting Mulholland Gateway Park and the Garapito Canyon Trail in Topanga State Park, which joins the 70-mile Backbone Trail less than a mile to the south. “Please take care of it,” Steers said as his stewardship of Rancho Estates drew to a close.

But he wasn’t quite ready to let go. Zeroing in on a scrap of trash littering the grass, he added: “And I want that coffee cup picked up before we leave.”