Major Deal Preserves Ranch Land in California
By Felicity Barringer – The New York Times Staff Writer
Friday, May 9, 20087
Almost 90 percent of one of Southern California’s best-known ranches — long the property of one of the state’s best-known newspaper families — will be kept permanently free of development under the terms of a deal announced on Thursday between the ranch corporation and five major conservation organizations.
"This is the Holy Grail of conservation in California," said Joel Reynolds of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Bill Corcoran, the senior regional representative of the Sierra Club, added that the property, known as the Tejon Ranch, which reaches from the firs of the southern Sierra Nevada across the dry Tehachapi Mountains and west to the coastal range, "is the keystone for protecting Southern California’s natural legacy."
In return for the commitment to allow easements on roughly 240,000 acres, the groups, including the Sierra Club, Audubon California and the Natural Resources Defense Council, will give up their opposition to industrial, resort and residential development on another 30,000 acres near Interstate 5.
The agreement brings to an end a standoff between Tejon Ranch, a publicly traded company formed after the Chandler family heirs, onetime owners of The Los Angeles Times, sold the land more than a decade ago, and conservation groups that wanted to prevent the ranchland, with its varied ecosystems, from becoming part of the sprawl of greater Los Angeles.
"What this agreement does today is it clears the way for us to go ahead" and seek permits for development from local and state environmental and land-use authorities, said Bob Stine, the executive director of the ranch, 60 miles north of Los Angeles. "That process can now go ahead without the environmental groups opposing it."
Pete Bloom, a scientist who worked on California’s program to recover endangered condors in the 1980s, said the land to be conserved would be "ideal foraging and roosting habitat" for the condor. "They would use it as a place to have lunch and dinner," Mr. Bloom said.
The lands to be put under conservation easement would be governed by a new nonprofit entity, the Tejon Ranch Conservancy. This group would ensure the permanent protection of about 178,000 acres "through a combination of dedicated conservation easements and designated project open spaces," according to a statement released by the ranch and the groups on Thursday.
In addition, about 10,000 acres would be set aside for 37 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from Mexico to Canada and would be rerouted to the ranch’s land.
The conservation groups would have the right to buy — almost certainly with the aid of a state-sponsored bond issue — another 62,000 acres within three years. Tejon Ranch would accept the value set by a state appraiser, according to both Mr. Stine and Mr. Reynolds of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Mr. Reynolds also noted that public access to the ranch, from the grasslands to the gnarled Joshua trees, would be guaranteed, and that a 49,000-acre park would most likely be created out of some of the land where the ranch now runs cattle and harvests pistachios and walnuts.