Sonoma County Offers Lessons in Preserving Land

The model for Ventura County’s proposed land conservation district is in the county’s demographic twin in Northern California--Sonoma County.

But if the Ventura County Board of Supervisors is looking to that affluent coastal county for a how-to on getting the district up and running, it might want to look again.

Andrea Mackenzie, general manager of the Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District, said Sonoma County struggled through 10 difficult years before it decided what its goals were and how it would get there.

“It’s been a learning process,” Mackenzie said. “We can’t preserve everything, and we had to make some hard decisions.”

But Mackenzie and other planning analysts are optimistic Ventura County’s conservation program will work if local officials first prioritize the types of land it would preserve.

Sonoma County settled on four spending priorities: farmland, greenbelts that separate cities, parcels that have ecological value and lands that can be converted to public parks. That list would also seem to fit Ventura County’s expressed goals.

In a recent poll, voters strongly supported similar protections in Ventura County. And they said they would be willing to pay for it.

Although the county probably could not muster the two-thirds vote needed to pass a sales tax increase, some type of property assessment has a good chance of approval, the survey results show.

But the simple majority needed for that can be achieved only if voters have a clear idea of what types of land will be acquired and how the purchases will benefit them, a consultant told supervisors last month.

Supervisors are scheduled to take up the issue again at Tuesday’s board meeting. Two supervisors, Judy Mikels and Kathy Long, said they are concerned about the cost of creating a district, estimated at $400,000.

And it is unclear whether state legislation needed to put the issue on a local ballot will move forward without unanimous support from the Board of Supervisors. Mikels has asked that any decision be postponed until Jan. 8.

Supervisors have pursued the district since 1998, when 68% of voters said they would support its creation in an advisory ballot measure. Supporters see it as the long-term successor to the landmark Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources growth-control laws enacted by voters in seven of the county’s 10 cities and its unincorporated areas in recent years.

Those laws prohibit development on farmland or open space unless voters give approval. But those regulations begin to expire in 20 years, preservation advocates note.

If the county does not take steps to buy cropland in perpetuity, its farm industry could be driven out, Supervisor Steve Bennett said. Many officials estimate the county needs at least 70,000 acres of prime cropland for the industry to survive.

“We need something in place to keep us from dropping below a critical mass,” Bennett said. “That’s what happened in Los Angeles County. It happened in Orange County. And it will happen in Ventura County unless there is something in place.”

Ranchers Proved to Be Tough Sell

Sonoma County’s open space district was created by a ballot measure in 1990 and raised about $10 million a year from a quarter-cent sales tax.

The challenge there was to persuade ranchers that it made financial sense to sell the development rights to their land, said Al Sokolow, a UC Davis researcher on farm policy and land use. District administrators initially had a hard time finding willing sellers in the crucial greenbelts that separate cities, Sokolow said.

“They found that they couldn’t really get enough landowners in those areas to accept easements,” Sokolow said. “Because many of them assumed they could make more money by selling to developers.”

The district started spending money on ranches that were far from urbanized areas and thus unlikely to prevent growth. That brought criticism from residents who said the money wasn’t being used in the way voters intended, Sokolow said.

In response, Sonoma County supervisors last year adopted new acquisition goals that rank properties in a variety of ways.

The district now aggressively pursues willing sellers in each of the four broad acquisition categories. It uses a computer mapping program to refine high-priority properties, general manager Mackenzie said.

The district’s five-year goal is to double the 52,000 acres it has purchased. Those 97 transactions cost $75 million, she said.

Ventura planning analyst William Fulton praises Sonoma County’s efforts as a thoughtful way to implement larger land-use goals.

The creation of an open space district suggests that you can’t solve the problem of runaway urban development through growth controls alone, Fulton said. But supervisors must decide what, exactly, they are trying to achieve, he said.

“Ventura had better learn from Sonoma’s mistake by being very clear about why we are doing this, what are the goals and how are we going to do this,” he said.