Banning Ranch Conservancy rebranded as Coastal Corridor Alliance

For almost two decades, the objective of the Banning Ranch Conservancy was to maintain and preserve the 384-acre property that’s considered to be the last piece of undeveloped coastal land in Orange County.

The organization, born of a Sierra Club task force prior to its establishment as a nonprofit in 2008, successfully completed that mission in 2022 after the Banning Ranch Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land announced the formal acquisition of the now-inactive oil field. The property is under the stewardship of the the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority and is now known as the Frank and Joan Randall Preserve, named for the Orange County couple that donated $50 million toward the land’s purchase.

Once the conservancy completed its efforts to save the Banning Ranch from development, board members had before them an existential question.

“Do we keep going and reinvent ourselves or just fold up our chairs and go home?” stewardship consultant Melanie Schlotterbeck said in a recent interview, “Reinventing ourselves was the outcome. We worked with a strategic planning consultant [with] Conservation Impact and Nonprofit Impact, who was just phenomenal, and determined what we wanted to do, broadened our scope and vision to incorporate a wider mission as opposed to focusing on one property.”

“That, then, launched into a conversation about Banning Ranch as a property that no longer exists. So, that means we needed to think about our name and we went through a lot of different iterations with that. Because we were focused on a larger geography, we didn’t want to include the name of one property in our new name but wanted to have a broader impact,” she said.

The announcement to supporters came on Jan. 17: the Banning Ranch Conservancy would be named the Coastal Corridor Alliance, with its mission statement revised to address its intention to protect local biodiversity, foster community stewardship and advocate for appropriate human access to the Randall Preserve and Santa Ana River Coastal Corridor after final plans were committed in paperwork and with a logo redesign by Agency 689.

Schlotterbeck said the team sat on the new name for close to a year before the announcement could be made.

In the statement about the change, president Terry Welsh said, “With the permanent protection of the Frank and Joan Randall Preserve, everything has moved forward, and our focus now is on seeing that this preserve is a premiere destination within reach of millions of Southern California residents.”

Schlotterbeck said the nonprofit’s vision now touches the cities of Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Santa Ana.

“We’re going from the ocean up and down the coast because we recognize birds on the Pacific Flyway don’t look down and say, ‘I’m only going to Bolsa Chica.’ They look for where there is available habitat,” she said.

Schlotterbeck said much of the core people of the organization are the same, though there have been new additions to the board and new staff hires. Right now, the nonprofit is looking to set up the resource management plan and coastal resilience plans for the Randall Preserve in addition to other plans managed by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority and the Sacred Places Institute for Indigenous Peoples that will inform “when, where, what and how things happen on the Randall Reserve.”

The nonprofit has, since the completion of the acquisition of the Banning Ranch property, turned its attention to the master plans for Talbert Regional Park and Fairview Park in Costa Mesa in addition to what the Newport-Mesa Unified School District is considering with its 11-acre property adjacent to what is now the Randall Preserve.

“We recognize that there is more work to be done in this coastal geography than any one organization could ever do in anyone’s lifetime,” Schlotterbeck said. “Having another group participating in this region helps lift everybody’s boats, and provides an opportunity to collaborate, work on improved outcomes together and hopefully coordinate across jurisdictions and park managers as well as nonprofits and community groups.”