Connect the Lots

Saying the land is a crucial wildlife corridor, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy for more than a decade has tried to acquire five acres north of the Ventura Freeway’s Liberty Canyon Road exit.

On Wednesday morning, conservancy officials, a handful of area politicians and park rangers celebrated the purchase of the commercially zoned property that connects more than 10,000 acres of protected public land in the Simi Hills.

“Now, from here all the way to the Santa Clarita woodlands is protected open space,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, head of the conservancy. “This is a small, but critical component. If this was commercially developed, the wildlife corridor would stop here.”

For more than 25 years, the property owned by the Haserjian family was marked with a 30-foot-high billboard for the family business, Carpeteria.

Founded in 1979 to preserve land in the environmentally sensitive region, the conservancy purchased the land from the Haserjians for $1.4 million with funds from Proposition A, a 1992 voter-approved bond measure to develop parks and open space.

“One of the reasons it took us so long to buy it is because seven different family members owned it,” said Paul Edelman, chief ecologist for the conservancy. “There was really no majority camp.”

On Wednesday, about a dozen people, including conservancy and park officials and Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, put on leather gloves and yanked the billboard down by tugging on a thick rope attached to the sign.

The small group cheered as the wooden billboard toppled.

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“I’ve passed this sign 1,000 times and seen how it has obscured the beautiful view of the mountains,” Edmiston said. “I always wished I could tear it down, and now the time has finally come!”

More important than the view, he said, is that conserving the land will ensure that the area will remain a habitat for such creatures as mountain lions, bobcats, American badgers, gray foxes, mule deer and long-tailed weasels, which thrive in the Santa Monica Mountains.

“This is a win-win decision,” Yaroslavsky said. “Animals have a crossing, natural terrain is protected and commuters get a break.

“Fifty to 100 years from now the area from San Luis Obispo to San Diego will be a huge megalopolis with few breaks, and the Santa Monica Mountains will be one of the few breaks, an oasis.”

Over the years, the conservancy has acquired and now manages more than 35,000 acres of parkland in a 450,000-acre zone that includes the Santa Monica Mountains and other area mountain ranges.

Throughout its history, the organization has scrambled to find money, often cobbling together city, county, state and federal funds to save mountain areas from mansions and subdivisions.

Earlier this year, the conservancy was at risk of running out of funds for the first time in 20 years. Gov. Gray Davis saved it with a last-minute $326,000 state grant funded by the Environmental License Plate program, in which drivers pay extra for special plates to help fund conservation efforts in California.