Ex-Developer Now Battles ‘Killer Sprawl’
After 12 years working in commercial real estate development, E.J. Remson decided it was time for a change. So he went to work for the Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental organization. He quickly found that the skills necessary to buy and preserve land are much the same as those required to buy and develop it.
As manager of the Los Angeles-Ventura Project, Remson’s job is to use his deal-making expertise to acquire land along Southern California’s last free-flowing river, the Santa Clara.
His agency has joined forces with the state Coastal Conservancy to create a 20-mile-long river parkway, extending from the Ventura County coast north to Sespe Creek.
Remson, 49, said he is driven by the need to find the right balance between nature and development in such a fast-growing region.
“This is my passion,” said Remson, who was hired by the conservancy three years ago. “The stakes are high -- how to combat what we at the conservancy call ‘killer sprawl,’ to find a way to provide housing and jobs without eating up what natural and agricultural land is left.”
His background in both real estate and urban planning -- he once served as Pasadena’s planning manager in the 1980s -- has made Remson an invaluable member of the conservation team, officials said.
“E.J. has been absolutely critical because he brought the real estate skills we don’t have on staff,” said Peter Brand, project director for the state Coastal Conservancy.
Indeed, the Santa Clara River Parkway is Brand’s brainchild. But Remson’s job is to make it happen.
The Coastal Conservancy provides the money, while the Nature Conservancy identifies the biological and strategically significant parcels needed for the river project, then sets about acquiring them.
So far, $7 million has been spent to purchase 1,100 acres of riverbank property. The Coastal Conservancy hopes to earmark an additional $3 million this month for land acquisitions and expects to spend tens of millions of state park bond money to preserve thousands more acres.
Conservancy officials say semirural Ventura County -- pressed between metropolitan Los Angeles and rugged wilderness areas -- is a high priority because it still has so much to save and so little time to save it.
As Remson well knows, preserving land can be hard work. First, he starts with title searches.
Then he goes door to door, introducing himself to property owners and pitching his message of conservation.
Next comes the environmental reviews and subdividing what owners want to keep from what they wish to sell.
The work can be equally frustrating as it is complex -- particularly when a property owner changes his or her mind and a deal falls through.
It took nine separate transactions to save the first thousand acres along the river. This is why Remson’s negotiating skills are crucial, officials said.
“E.J. knows what property is worth, how to price it, and he knows how to deal with people,” said Ron Bottorff, president of Friends of the Santa Clara River, which has been active in efforts to protect and restore the riverbanks and floodplain.
Bottorff said it’s also important to have a big-picture understanding of how each land acquisition fits into long-term conservation goals, as well as what effect surrounding development could have on certain properties.
“The Nature Conservancy has gotten away from buying isolated pieces of land,” he said.
“They’ve realized you can’t just pick little pieces and try to preserve it. There are too many effects from surrounding uses, which in this case is not only agriculture but also mining, even golf courses.”
Once the river is safeguarded Remson will turn his attention to another goal of the Los Angeles-Ventura project.
The Nature Conservancy wants to buy land farther inland to protect two wildlife corridors that run between the Santa Monica Mountains and the Los Padres National Forest, he said.
Despite his real estate background, Remson said it wasn’t a personal epiphany or a mid-life crisis that caused him to switch jobs. He said he liked his previous work developing shopping centers and office buildings in Los Angeles and Orange counties and thinks the kind of infill projects he specialized in could work here.
But Remson, who takes an occasional break to backpack in the Sierra or paddle a canoe around northern Minnesota, said he ultimately wanted a job where he could merge his professional expertise with his love of nature.
Although there are some similarities in his past and current professions, Remson has discovered there is one key difference in his new job as a preservationist: Nature has no boundaries. As a result, it is important to always be thinking of the big picture, he said.
“With nature, everything’s connected -- land, what grows on it and wildlife,” Remson said. “It’s like a stack of cans in a grocery store. If you pull out a can from the bottom, the whole stack tumbles.”
