Experiment in Creating Permanent Open Space Takes Shape in Ojai

Throughout the past year, Ventura County’s new growth restrictions under the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) initiatives have drawn national attention. The vote on SOAR in November 1998 made it clear that a large majority of county residents wants to preserve both agriculture and natural landscapes.

In Ojai, we are attempting another approach to saving scenic land: We are buying it.

This is, frankly, an experiment. If the experiment succeeds, it can be applied elsewhere in Ventura County.

Here is the story: For 20 years, a 32-acre parcel known as the Palmer property, adjoining Highway 33, was battled over by determined developers and a band of equally determined citizens who wanted to keep it as open space. The Palmer property might be called the Gettysburg of Ojai.

At one time it was going to become the site of a freeway offramp. The freeway plan was scuttled. Then it was going to become a big shopping center with some tract housing thrown in for good measure, San Fernando Valley style. The California Supreme Court ultimately squelched that plan.

Through all of this, the parcel itself remained blissfully vacant. One of the last remaining grasslands on the floor of the Ojai Valley, it contains a number of specimen oaks and is flanked by a landmark eucalyptus grove planted half a century ago. It also features a large filled-in wetland that could, with a certain amount of excavation, be restored.

Even though the parcel has been plowed for years--to the point that ground-level vegetation has been practically obliterated--art classes from Nordhoff High School just next door routinely deploy on the property to paint.

Last spring, the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy began intense negotiations to purchase the Palmer property. Our goal was to ensure that the land would remain as open space forever. We also wanted to return it to its original state as revealed by grainy, century-old photographs in the local museum. We realized that we would need $525,000. This would allow us not only to buy the land (price: $400,000) but to restore, maintain and endow it (price: $125,000). Without an endowment fund the parcel would simply continue looking much the way it now does, like an oversized vacant lot.

The property went to escrow at the end of August. By the first of September we were planning a half-million-dollar capital campaign. Raising that amount of money in a valley containing just 30,000 people is no easy task, and nothing like this had ever been attempted before.

We got off the ground with a remarkable gift of $200,000 from a neighboring homeowners association. The Ojai City Council voted to grant another $100,000. The campaign to raise the remaining $225,000 has just begun; our deadline is Dec. 31. Of the total, more than four-fifths must come from private sources. As one of our members put it, “This is like jumping off a cliff.”

Well, not quite. The people of the Ojai Valley are famous throughout Ventura County for their eagerness to preserve the natural beauty that surrounds them. The campaign is generating a tremendous amount of excitement. Prominent locally owned businesses have volunteered to donate generous portions of their profits. The board and 700 members of the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy are responding enthusiastically. And large unexpected gifts have begun coming in.

Again, though, this is an experiment. The campaign is far from over. If we finish this race successfully, we will no longer view buying land to protect it as an experiment. We will have established a model that can be applied to other choice parcels under a broader campaign we call Preserving Ojai’s Special Places Forever.

There are a lot of places in the Ojai Valley waiting to be preserved. We cannot afford to buy them all. In the past, the conservancy has gratefully accepted donations of property. We have also worked out an agreement with a private school to maintain portions of its land as open space in perpetuity. But when such low-cost techniques fail to apply, a few very special parcels can be purchased outright by the conservancy.

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SOAR will be in effect for 20 years. Patient investors will soon be buying land and biding their time in hopes that SOAR will not be renewed in the next century. That means the opportunity to acquire genuinely permanent open space is right now. This is what the conservancy is endeavoring to do in the most conventional of ways: by negotiating for and buying it.

Meanwhile, we have renamed the Palmer property. It is now Ojai Meadows Preserve. Youth from Nordhoff High continue to paint there. If the conservancy succeeds, these students’ future children will experience a far more beautiful scene to record with their brushes. The high school as well as the surrounding public and private elementary schools will enjoy a nature preserve practically at their doorsteps.

A team of conservancy biologists and wetlands experts is hard at work on a plan to restore the preserve to its original natural state with native oaks, sycamores, grasses and flowering plants abounding. Public access will be guaranteed and people will be welcome to stroll the paths that cross the property.

The familiar fate of other Southern California landscapes--the chain-link fence, the cookie-cutter mall, the freeway offramp--will have yielded to a vastly different vision.