At Last, a Parking Lot That Won’t Be Built

I cringe every time a square foot of Orange County green-topped soil gets turned into concrete or asphalt.

Like at Cal State Fullerton, where well-meaning officials wanted to bulldoze 3.5 acres of topsoil and turn it into another parking lot. And not just any land but a hefty patch of the Fullerton Arboretum, the 26-acre botanical garden on the northeast corner of its campus.

To environmentalists, that would be like planting the next Burger King next to a wilderness trail.

Which is why it was heartwarming to see an outpouring of community opposition at a recent hearing by the Fullerton Arboretum Commission and in e-mails, calls and letters to the university. In the face of these aghast citizens, CSUF scrapped the parking lot plan.

To be fair, the university is certainly pro-arboretum. It created the place, holds three of its commission positions and has committed to providing most of its funding until 2020.

But interestingly, the arboretum was created in the early 1970s essentially to stop another university parking lot idea.

The school back then was within its rights. The land, former Valencia orange groves, belonged to the university, a site just off Yorba Linda Boulevard. But nature-minded faculty and students--the ones we’d think of as hippies--had been cultivating the acreage with their own organic gardens. They wanted to preserve it as a natural garden where people could come to think or study, and protested any assault from asphalt trucks.

The university agreed it was a good idea and put its parking lot somewhere else. The gardens grew into the formal arboretum, opened to the public in 1979.

Now it’s a favorite haunt of bird-watchers and those who want to study hundreds of different types of plants and trees. It draws about 150,000 visitors each year, and its annual Green Scene fund-raiser is a standout community event.

Attractive Offer

The university understood all this. And it didn’t ask for the land this time without an offer that to some seemed quite fair.

It would use the lot for only three years with a two-year option. It would even stockpile the topsoil for replacement after that. Also--most attractive to some on the commission--it would build a modern parking lot for the arboretum to replace its current gravel lot with proper drainage and all the trimmings.

That would fit nicely with some of the arboretum’s future plans.

“I thought it was an offer well worth considering,” said Joe Maag, a commission member for 18 years.

But the university dropped the idea in light of community protests before the commission could even vote on it. Of 17 who spoke at the commission hearing, not one favored approving the parking lot.

“I think they just feared that the university wouldn’t follow through on its promise to return the land,” Maag said. “There are such things as contracts, of course, which could have assured it. But some people just wouldn’t accept that.”

Hurrah for them. Once a parking lot gets built, it’s akin to a politician’s promise. Elected officials assure voters they won’t run for reelection, but when the time comes to follow through on their words, suddenly they argue that circumstances have changed. You don’t see too many stockpiles of top soil get shoveled back onto the ground in this county once they’re out.

Arboretum officials say the land in question might be used to expand its Mediterranean gardens. But on the other hand, some of it might be used for nothing more than storage. But at least it would be available.

If you’re an arboretum fan, you’ll be interested in what’s coming up the next couple of years. Executive Director Greg Dyment says ground should be broken within the year on its $2.7-million visitors center and science education/conference center, which will be built on 13,000 square feet not already part of its gardens. Plans include a museum and a tribute to the area’s agricultural pioneers, many of them Japanese Americans.

“The new plans will give us a greater presence in the community,” Maag said.

This doesn’t solve the university’s need for more parking, of course. You have to empathize. It’s got 28,381 students this fall by official count and a handful of major renovation plans. One is to build more student housing that will eat up about 400 existing parking spaces. The arboretum plan would have added 350 spaces. But Jay Bond, vice president of facilities management, says with that idea scrapped, there’s nowhere else to go.

The university does push for more car-pooling and use of mass transit, Bond said, “but with students’ having such diverse schedules, many of them are bound to their cars.”

Maybe something will be worked out to find more parking somewhere. But if at all possible, future growth plans ought to be wrapped in a parchment that says: Hands off the arboretum.

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Monday and Thursday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling (714) 966-7789 or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com