Use Official Clout for Wildlife

Red flags have flown for decades around proposals to develop a lovely but geologically shaky property in Trabuco Canyon known as Saddleback Meadows. This week an Orange County judge threw the latest wrench into the machinery. This is one of two recent examples of how the county needs to be a more active participant in open-space preservation.

The Board of Supervisors chose to ignore warnings from state and federal wildlife officials more than a year ago that building 299 homes at Saddleback Meadows would harm wildlife. The supervisors said they knew best, that all the environmental planning and reports were on the up and up, that the wildlife corridor would be just fine despite the housing. But on Wednesday, Superior Court Judge Robert E. Thomas said the county’s approval process was flawed. The county says the judge is wrong, and the property owner has appealed.

But rather than mire this project in more litigation, the county should try again to bring together the property owner and the two religious groups that own nearby tracts. At one point a deal was in the offing for St. Michael’s Abbey and the Ramakrishna Monastery to buy most of the land, leaving the choicest 44 acres for homes. Unfortunately, the deal fell through. Now is the time to try to revive a compromise or find a way to purchase and set aside the property.

The county’s regional park system is testimony to the attention paid to parkland by previous officials. But land once gone cannot be retrieved, and the pressures of development continue. The question for the county is whether it is going to be an active guardian of open space and use the powers available to it to protect wildlife corridors or whether it is going to pay lip service to the cause.

At Barham Ranch, the county has gone from being a potential savior to a powerless bystander largely through default. The future of 525 acres of wilderness is now in the hands of local school and water district boards. On Jan. 21, the Orange Unified School District cut a deal with the Serrano Water District to make Orange Unified sole owner of Barham, thus putting the school district in the odd business of being a trustee of open space.

The fate of the property is in limbo, but this is only because the county did little when it could have stepped in and prevented the current uncertainty. It should have made good on its earlier intention to purchase the property.

Why this happened is still unclear. The county was going to make the land part of a regional park system. But in 1997 it mysteriously withdrew support.

On the Trabuco Canyon and Barham Ranch sites, the county has had a golden opportunity to be the facilitator in tying together various wildlife corridors. The supervisors can and should be much more proactive in using county financial resources and the board’s own powers of persuasion to preserve open space.