Conservancy Emerges as Force in Land Preservation

Created by state lawmakers in 1980, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy had a singular goal: to preserve vanishing open space in the velvety green mountains that ripple across metropolitan Los Angeles.

But while the agency was given broad powers to acquire land, it had no steady source of cash. After four years, the conservancy was supposed to fade away.

Twenty-three years and $317 million later, the agency and its longtime director, Joseph T. Edmiston, are still around, having emerged as masters of the land deal. With projects from Santa Clarita to South-Central Los Angeles, the conservancy has steadily expanded its reach, while continuing to develop its political and financial muscle.

To thrive in Southern California’s cutthroat real estate market, the agency has become as adept as the developers it confronts. Its sometimes shrewd tactics have helped secure thousands of acres of public parkland and repeatedly landed the agency in court -- often facing other environmental groups.

The conservancy, one of eight statewide, is a reflection of the ambitious leader who has stood at its helm since its inception. Edmiston, a burly man with an outsized personality to match, offers no apologies for his agency’s relentless pursuit of money, land, and power.

As a joke, he once hung a map in his Malibu office depicting the conservancy’s land holdings: the entire state of California.

“The mistake we have learned from,” Edmiston said recently, as he wheeled his SUV along Mulholland Drive, “is not being aggressive enough.”

The conservancy’s success is undeniable. The 115-member agency has helped preserve more than 55,000 acres of parkland throughout the region, stretching from the rolling hills of east Ventura County to the freeway-laced Whittier Narrows.

Flush with $40 million from a recent state bond measure to preserve wetlands and watersheds, the conservancy is poised for another buying spree. This time, it will focus on the Los Angeles River watershed, which it hopes to transform into a 51-mile “recreational greenway” of trails and parks.

But the conservancy’s wheeling and dealing also has its critics. Some charge that Edmiston is too quick to compromise with developers, clearing the way for new subdivisions in exchange for open-space donations. The most obvious example of such a pact, Ahmanson Ranch, remains one of the most controversial.

A decade ago, the conservancy agreed to support a 3,050-home development in the Simi Hills on the condition that 10,000 acres of parkland be preserved as open space. Developers donated some of that land, but park agencies paid $26 million in taxpayer money to acquire the rest.

“The conservancy has a history of making bad deals and actually facilitating up-zoning,” said Mary Wiesbrock, a longtime foe of the Ahmanson Ranch project who chairs the group Save Open Space. “Joe’s got this huge domain now, and elected officials are afraid of him. If they’re his friends, they can get open space for their areas.”

Defenders of the conservancy say Edmiston is simply a realist who knows a good deal when he sees one.

“In my view, practically all of the criticism of Joe Edmiston is unjustified,” said former Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude, who represented parts of the Santa Monica Mountains for 32 years. “I know, because I’ve suffered some of the same criticism from the environmentalists. It didn’t matter how much I did, as far as the extremists were concerned.”

Under Edmiston’s leadership, the conservancy has become especially adept at turning skeptics into supporters.

In the mid-1990s, when then-Los Angeles City Councilwoman Rita Walters questioned how parkland in the Santa Monicas would benefit inner-city residents, Edmiston turned on the charm. He took Walters on a helicopter tour of the mountains. Then he crisscrossed her South-Central district, looking for a suitable place to build a park.

A few years later, Edmiston, Gov. Gray Davis and a host of other dignitaries gathered at the corner of Slauson and Compton avenues, in the heart of Walters’ impoverished district, to dedicate the conservancy’s new $5-million nature park.

“One can call it politics if one wants,” Walters later said. “I call it delivering a very needed service in quite a loving way.”

The conservancy got much of its power from the start. In the late 1970s, when then-Assemblyman Howard Berman carried the bill to establish the agency, he took a gamble to win the votes he needed. With developers opposing the bill, Berman agreed to a four-year sunset clause.

But the compromise agreement also gave the conservancy considerable muscle to acquire land in the Santa Monica Mountains zone -- including development rights and easements -- and to lease, sell, transfer or swap land for parks. It also got priority to excess land that public agencies, from school districts to water departments, are selling within its zone.

To manage its acquisitions, the conservancy created a field operations arm, the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, a joint powers group forged with two Ventura County park agencies.

Since 1980, state lawmakers have expanded the conservancy’s jurisdiction five times, adding territory from the Rim of the Valley corridor to the Santa Clara River Watershed. The agency’s original sunset clause was extended, then abandoned

And Edmiston, who boasts that he is the last Jerry Brown-appointee left in state government, no longer serves at the pleasure of the governor but at the behest of his agency’s board.

“If anything, Joe Edmiston is a political genius,” said Dave Brown, a Calabasas planning commissioner who sits on the conservancy’s advisory board. “If you are buying land in a large number of Assembly districts, you’re going to have much broader support for everything you do.”

With no steady source of money, the conservancy has come to rely on voter-approved ballot measures to provide cash for major land purchases.

County initiatives passed in 1992 and 1996 gave it nearly $66 million. They were designed not as traditional bond measures, which require approval from two-thirds of the voters, but as assessment districts passed by a majority vote.

Recent statewide bond issues to preserve parkland, watersheds and wetlands have generated more than $100 million for the conservancy.

To augment its cash flow, the agency has also become expert in creative financing.

The authority, for example, uses money collected from garbage haulers who dump at the Puente Hills Landfill to pay the rangers who patrol surrounding open space

But Edmiston’s imaginative fund-raising sometimes gets him in trouble. That’s what happened after Barbra Streisand donated her 22-acre Ramirez Canyon estate to the conservancy in exchange for a $15-million tax write-off.

To make money to maintain the Malibu property, the conservancy came up with a plan for an academic think tank, the Barbra Streisand Center for Conservancy Studies. Revenue from conferences would pay the hefty maintenance costs. And the conservancy scored a new headquarters in the deal.

But the business plan flopped. The conservancy rented the place for weddings, cocktail receptions and garden tours, irking neighbors who griped that delivery trucks and shuttle buses were trespassing on a private road. The neighbors and the city of Malibu wound up suing the conservancy.

“It is a busy tourist attraction,” resident Kathryn Holguin told the court.

“I have seen no shred of evidence that this center has been used in a beneficial capacity for the study of conservation, environmental improvements or the people of the state of California in any way.”

Streisand, distressed by the conservancy’s activities, had her name taken off the center. The property is now called Ramirez Canyon Park, and the California Coastal Commission has imposed strict rules on the site, including limits on vehicle trips.

“We only had three weddings there last year,” Edmiston said. “With all the conditions put on it, it’s not as marketable as it was before.”

But the conservancy continues to thrive. Voters recently approved a benefits assessment district in the Santa Monicas, handing the agency yet another innovative money-making tool. The district can collect up to $40 per home from hillside property owners, giving the authority about $2 million per year to buy land.

A few property owners are challenging the measure in court, but the conservancy has already won the first legal round.

“Joe is smarter than most of us; let’s face it,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. “Because of the conservancy, more property is in the public domain than there ever would have been otherwise.”