Funding Well Runs Dry for Mountain Land Conservancy

Throughout its 20-year history, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has often lived a beggar’s existence, scrambling to find money to preserve land in the environmentally sensitive region.

Now, however, top conservancy officials fear the handouts have finally vanished.

For the first time since its founding in 1980, the conservancy has no money left to buy land in the Santa Monicas. The funds available from past Los Angeles County bond measures, which have supported the agency in recent years, will be used up in a few final acquisitions scheduled to be completed by June 30.

And if those final purchases take place, conservancy officials say they won’t be able to work toward future property buys in the mountains, since such planning activities are paid for by land acquisitions.

“There is a very serious funding crisis looming in the future,” said Jeffrey Schwartz, chair of the agency’s budget committee. “The conservancy has been able fulfill its mission by being very crafty and wily with respect to how it generates money. Now, we’re basically up the creek without a paddle.”

Even if a developer walks in the door wanting to donate land, conservancy officials said they may have to turn the offer away because there will be no money available to support the cost of processing the transaction.

“As of June 30, there will be no legal authority to work in the Santa Monica Mountains for anybody” at the conservancy, said Joseph T. Edmiston, head of the agency.

Still, the seriousness of the money crunch is the subject of much debate.

At the state level, some see the conservancy’s dilemma as a way to get attention in a tight fiscal year in which much of Gov. Gray Davis’ budget is focused on education. And locally, even some members of the conservancy’s own board of directors believe the agency will muddle through.

After all, they note, the agency still has enough money to buy land through the year 2000, though all of it is earmarked to pay for projects in other parts of the county, such as in the Santa Susana Mountains or around the Los Angeles River. None of the money can be used to buy land in the Santa Monicas.

And, they say, Edmiston has worked miracles in the past, cobbling together county, city and state money for the agency’s efforts to save the mountains from ego mansions and pink-tiled subdivisions.

“The conservancy has regularly had a hand-to-mouth existence,” said Liz Cheadle, the conservancy’s chairwoman and dean of students at UCLA Law School. “It’s dire, but Joe (Edmiston) always pulls a rabbit out of the hat.”

Critics--and there are many--see the potential crisis as an opportunity to reassess the conservancy’s mission and even its existence. They point out that the National Park Service has $5 million this year to buy land in the mountains. What does the conservancy matter, so long as there is some money available for the region, they ask.

And with nearly half the region already saved from future development, perhaps the time is right to look at another way to save mountain land, they say.

“I don’t think this conservancy is needed at all,” said Save Open Space Director Mary Wiesbrock, who has long criticized the agency and Edmiston for compromising with developers in land deals.

There is at least one bright spot, everyone agrees. Four statewide park bond measures currently are under discussion in Sacramento, including two in the Senate, that would allocate $35 million to the conservancy.

But Schwartz points out that such measures have failed to come through in the past. And even if a bond measure passed on a March 2000 ballot, there would still be a long gap between this June and the date the money started flowing.

At the minimum, conservancy officials are hoping that Davis’ office will add another $500,000 of state money to the conservancy’s budget to keep operations going through next year. They argue that the current mechanism, which takes a percentage out of money spent on buying land, is unfair.

The state, whose share of funding for operations has dropped from 100% to 18% in recent years, has a duty to support the agency it founded, Schwartz said.

“This is a serious issue for us,” he said.

Legislative officials promised to step in if needed. Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl, a Santa Monica Democrat whose district includes most of the mountains, said the conservancy’s concerns must be taken seriously.

But state budget officials expressed surprise at the demand for more money, saying the agency made no mention of the need when it submitted its budget request last fall.

In any case, they said, it’s tough to justify adding more money when time is short for a final budget proposal to be submitted to the state Legislature. The biggest problem is that the conservancy has a series of sister agencies, such as the Mountain Conservation and Resource Authority, whose functions overlap with the conservancy. The authority, for instance, runs many of the parks on land the conservancy bought.

The state, however, has no obligation to pay for the sister agencies, budget officials said.

“I don’t know if there’s a moral or legal obligation for the state to step in and take care of those things,” said Fred Klass, program budget manager for the state’s Department of Finance.

The potential crisis comes, ironically, at a time when environmentalists are celebrating several recent victories: the purchase late last year of the 1,500-acre Eastport property in the center of the mountains and the near-completion of a long-held goal to secure a wildlife corridor under the Ventura Freeway.

A lack of money for the mountains now would slow momentum that has been building for a long time, supporters of the agency said.

“This is just a bolt from the blue,” said Dave Brown, a member of the conservancy’s advisory board and longtime activist in the area. “We need to be concerned.”