National Seashore Washing Out With Bush Administration

The Bush administration on Monday edged away from a Clinton-era proposal to create a national seashore on one of the last undeveloped stretches of Southern California’s coast, just north of Santa Barbara. The administration’s reaction came during a meeting here to review a National Park Service study to establish a Gaviota National Seashore. Such a designation would protect 46 miles of dramatic cliffs, remote beaches and terraced grasslands. It could also halt the advance of urban sprawl by buying land for permanent conservation.

In the weeks leading up to the meeting, U.S. Department of the Interior officials had expressed interest in coming up with a plan that would offer protection for the land while honoring private property rights.

But the tone was standoffish Monday as Lynn Scarlett, assistant secretary of the Interior, distanced the administration from any plan that would establish a national park.

“This administration and this Interior secretary are operating with a vision: private stewardship of land, partnerships with private landowners and retaining working [agricultural] landscapes. Land acquisition is not a priority of this administration.”

Although the administration convened the meeting, local environmentalists dismissed it as a forum to give opponents a chance to shoot down the plan.

It was part of “an effort to kill the national seashore through delays and meetings with deliberately hostile ranchers and property rights groups,” said Mark Massara, manager of the Sierra Club’s coastal program.

Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara) called for the national seashore feasibility study, which the Park Service began working on in 2000.

Applauded by conservationists, the proposal is an anathema to others, including owners of small parcels of land and some very large developers. They seethe at the prospect of rules and restrictions that can accompany government designations of public parks and preserves. They fear a national seashore would limit how they could use or market their land.

Scarlett, who lives in Santa Barbara, said that she has no personal vision for the Gaviota Coast and that it would be inappropriate for her to have one. Instead, she said, her goal is to be fair to everyone.

Over the last 13 months, she said, she talked to residents and property owners and detected signs of common ground, including a love of the land and a willingness to consider some form of conservation, providing it was not forced on people by Washington.

“I heard from almost everybody that whatever happens it should be through local action, not federal action. And, ‘Gee, a big federal presence? We don’t think that’s a good idea.’ ”

So Scarlett helped arranged Monday’s meeting, which was sponsored by the National Park Service.

Scarlett said she was not prepared for the verbal bashing the administration has taken since the announcement of the meeting earlier this summer.

“I was perhaps Pollyannaish in my notion that good intentions would be enough,” said Scarlett, a former director of the Libertarian-leaning Reason Public Policy Institute.

The angriest reaction has come from property rights activists, people the administration has sought to mollify with its emphasis on local control of land use decisions.

“Blame this one on George Bush, not Bill Clinton,” reads an action alert issued last week from the American Land Rights Assn. “A top-level Bush administration appointee, ... Lynn Scarlett, has joined forces with a left-wing extreme enviro member of Congress, Santa Barbara’s Representative Lois Capps.

“Together they are attempting to jam a 215,000-acre national park down the throats of unwilling residents, all in the name of currying favor with the politically powerful environmental lobby.”

The scolding continued Monday.

“I’d like to know, what’s the difference between a national park study and stealing?” asked one rancher.

Coastal Threat

“What I see as the biggest threat to the Gaviota coast is those who want to save it,” said Nancy Crawford-Hall of the Santa Barbara Cattlemen’s Assn.

The Park Service study focuses on 200,000 acres from Coal Oil Point on the UC Santa Barbara campus in Isla Vista to Point Sal at the northern boundary of Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The Air Force controls nearly half of the area, about 102,000 acres, followed by the 24,500-acre Bixby Ranch, which straddles Point Conception and has sought in recent years to subdivide its historic family cattle ranch among heirs.

The Los Padres National Forest is the third-largest landowner, with about 20,000 acres in the study area. It’s followed by the Hollister Ranch, a gated community of ranchettes of 100 acres or more with celebrity owners who include movie producer James Cameron and singer-songwriter Jackson Browne.

Private property owners from the Hollister Ranch and elsewhere sued the Park Service three times to short-circuit the study. All three attempts were rebuffed by a federal judge.

The Hollister Ranch Homeowners Assn. assessed its members at least $300,000 to hire a former congressman in Washington as its lobbyist to scuttle the study or influence its outcome.

Hollister Ranch has tried to keep its eight miles of beachfront closed even though the California Coastal Act specifically calls for public access to that stretch of coast. Visiting surfers have written to the National Park Service, complaining about being driven off at gunpoint when they tried to reach some spots by boat. Some of them have joined the push for a national seashore.

But that pressure has come mostly from environmentalists who fear that development will spread up the coast from fast-growing Goleta.

The northward push has already begun. The 360-room Bacara Hotel and Spa recently opened on a piece of undisturbed shoreline. A golf course and luxury home subdivision is proposed a bit farther up the coast at Naples Beach.

A number of nearby ranches have been sold in recent years to developers or real estate speculators. Other land owners have indicated an interest in developing. They have not renewed contracts to preserve agricultural land in exchange for lower property taxes.

“If you look at the history of Southern California, you have to ask yourself, ‘Why would development stop here?’ ” said Mike Lunsford, president of the Gaviota Coast Conservancy.

“This is the largest remnant of non-urbanized coast in Southern California. If you look down the coast, with the exemption of Camp Pendleton, it’s all gone.”

Park officials said they have no choice but to finish the study because it was ordered by Congress in 1999. After much delay, the first draft is set for release in January.

The draft will not make a recommendation, but rather spell out five options, including establishing a national seashore, doing nothing, enhancing state and local protections or setting up a national reserve or preserve. The final report, after 90 days of public comment, will recommend to Congress what option is best.

A national seashore would offer the most protection. It would designate a specific area that would allow the Park Service to set up a program for buying land, establishing a coastal trail and public access ways to the beaches, and preserving Chumash Indian sites as well as habitat for 13 endangered species.

But Park Service officials said they would have no control over private property and would not force the sale of private land.

Furthermore, Scarlett said, “The Park Service has done other feasibility studies, and whenever the local folks don’t want a park presence the Park Service has walked away.”