A Possible Last Stand for Central Coast Oaks

A young steer looked up curiously from the mud of a rutted lane that wound past august oak groves and undulating pastureland.

Except for the white Range Rover the animal was staring at, the scene had barely changed since mission days, a landscape beautiful not for its drama, but for its spare simplicity.

It is country that has been claimed by Chumash Indians, Spanish missionaries, Mexican and Anglo ranchers--and now by the man in the sport utility vehicle, who may alter it more profoundly than any of his predecessors.

He is Rob Rossi, an architect and developer who is buying the 13,800-acre Santa Margarita Ranch. Although he has yet to unveil specific plans, his entry into the picture has revived a development fight that has swirled around this historic slice of the Central Coast for years.

Questions about the future of the 2-century-old San Luis Obispo County ranch--whether it should be preserved, how much should be developed--are the same ones facing much of this region, which is squirming under growth pressures, terrified of becoming like Southern California.

“The whole Central Coast is so critical,” said Harriet Burgess, president of the American Land Conservancy. “It’s kind of on the brink of a change in character. If some of these big developments go forward, it would be a different landscape.”

The Hearst Corp.’s plans to build a large oceanfront resort complex on part of the vast Hearst Ranch at San Simeon stirred heated opposition two years ago, resulting in a Coastal Commission vote that sent the proposal back for substantial trimming.

The inland Santa Margarita Ranch, a pristine, jagged-edged 22 square miles, is not nearly as well-known or as large as the Hearst property. But the emotions it stirs are no less passionate.

“There’s something about this landscape that breaks your heart in half,” said Sarah Christie, an environmental activist and leader of the effort to preserve the ranch. “Those coffee-colored hills and those deep green oaks.”

Stretching east from U.S. 101 and surrounding the modest little community of Santa Margarita, the ranch was originally part of the much larger asistencia of the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, founded in 1772.

Field crops and later livestock were raised to feed the mission settlement and provide hides. In 1841, when the missions were secularized, the Mexican government granted 17,735 acres just north of the Cuesta Grade to Joaquin Estrada, who turned the ranch into a cattle operation.

According to historian Daniel Krieger, a Cal Poly San Luis Obispo professor, Estrada built a lavish home on the property, held rodeos that attracted hundreds of people and even staged bull-and-bear fights.

Estrada’s extravagance caught up with him, and he was forced to sell the ranch in the 1860s for roughly $2.50 an acre. Subsequent owners sold off chunks of it. But much of the property was later reassembled, and Krieger describes the ranch as one of the largest relatively intact Mexican land grant tracts left in the state.

Ruins of an old mission church lie on the property, along with 200-year-old adobe rooms encircled by a 19th-century ranch house that is still home to the ranch manager.

Rossi, a silver-haired Midwesterner, came to the Central Coast in 1970 to attend Cal Poly and stayed. He first viewed the ranch as an architectural student, when he sketched some of the old buildings.

“I thought it was a beautiful place,” recalled Rossi as he steered his vehicle through the eight-mile-long ranch, classical music playing softly in the background.

He has worked from Santa Barbara to Monterey and has left his stamp on San Luis Obispo County with commercial renovations and developments that have generally been well-received.

He is courtly and low-key, defying the stereotype of the callous developer. Indeed, that is one of the reasons he managed to obtain a purchase option on the ranch, which was not formally on the market.

“We were approached by large development corporations out of Southern California, and that would be heresy up there. That’s why Rossi was an appealing buyer,” explained Les Greenberg, who represents the Robertsons, an oil-rich Texas family that bought the ranch in 1975 and learned all too well how locals view outside developers.

After years of skirmishes over their plans to develop the ranch, the Robertsons in 1995 finally struck a compromise deal with the county allowing construction of 550 homes, a golf course, guest ranch and equestrian center on 1,800 acres.

About 8,400 acres was to be permanently set aside for agriculture. The remaining land was to be farmed for 40 years under a state act that allows property tax reductions in exchange for keeping acreage in agriculture.

But the Robertson family matriarch is now in her mid-70s and is no longer interested in tying up assets in long-term projects. The development plans have lain dormant and the county agreement was challenged by a lawsuit filed by environmentalists last year.

News of the ranch’s pending sale has added fuel to the old controversies. The Robertsons’ willingness to sell has changed the equation, preservationists argue.

Before, limiting development seemed the most they could do. Now they are pushing to stop any development on the ranch through land trusts and conservation easements.

The preservationists have put together a coalition of county environmental groups to “shake the money trees,” as Christie put it. Core group members, many of whom live in or near Santa Margarita, meet on Sundays to plot strategy, opening the sessions with a rendition of “This Land Is Your Land.”

Members of the local Chumash Indians council, whose ancestors hunted and lived in the region for 10,000 years, have joined the crusade, saying development would disturb remains and village sites rich in artifacts.

It has become an odd sort of dance, with preservationists essentially asking Rossi to stop being what he is--a developer--and either pull out of the sale or buy the land and turn right around and sell it to land trusts.

Rossi, for his part, is giving the preservationists a twirl or two. He is going ahead with the purchase but is also happily talking to land trust representatives and taking them on tours of the property.

“Is it too late to do conservation on large portions of this property? It’s not too late at all,” he said.

He remains vague about his development plans, declining to say whether he will fully pursue the project outlined in the Robertsons’ agreement with the county. At the moment, he insists the only certainty is that he will plant grapes and possibly some olives on about 3,000 acres. He has already signed contracts with vintners.

That would be a substantial addition to the county’s expanding vineyard plantings, which have begun to trouble environmentalists. But even here Rossi is trying to head off criticism, promising no oaks will be removed for the vines and that they will be planted only in parts of the ranch that have previously been cultivated.

County Supervisor Mike Ryan, whose district includes the ranch, said he believes that Rossi will go ahead with the development but in the meantime has nothing to lose by talking to conservation groups. The county agreement calls for thousands of acres to remain undeveloped--so if Rossi gets conservation easements, so much the better.

If nothing comes of the land trust talks, Rossi can still say he was open to discussion. “He keeps neutralizing [opposition] quite well,” Ryan said.

The supervisor supports the development plan, pointing out that it was the result of mediation and was approved by the area’s advisory council, an elected group of north county residents.

“Now,” Ryan said, people who went along with the compromise are “stepping back and saying the only thing that matters is the environment--and it’s not.”

To opponents, it’s not just the environment that’s at stake, it’s a way of life.

Santa Margarita is utterly without pretension, an unincorporated town of 1,200, where kids ride their horses bareback down the street and chickens peck in yards. There are no stoplights on California 58, the main drag, and it takes less than two minutes to drive from one end of town to the other.

Under the county plan, the ranch development would have to include 50 “affordable” units, but no one expects the rest of the housing to match the character of Santa Margarita. “It will be us versus them,” predicted resident Julie Clark, a development opponent.

No land trust has publicly come forward with an offer, but a number of groups have toured the property. And the Central Coast in general is attracting conservation money as preservationists move to protect the kind of undisturbed landscapes that long ago disappeared elsewhere in the state.

“It’s strikingly beautiful,” Kara Smith, project director of the Nature Conservancy, said of the Santa Margarita Ranch. “They have these beautiful valley oak savannas in a quality and acreage just rarely found in California today.”