Joseph T. Edmiston

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has always led a sort of hand-to-mouth existence, scrambling to find money to purchase environmentally sensitive land in the midst of a mushrooming megalopolis.

This year has been no exception. But once again, Joseph T. Edmiston, conservancy director, has managed to pull a financial rabbit out of a hat, securing funding to keep the conservancy’s work going at least for the short term. It’s a magic trick Edmiston has performed many times during the conservancy’s 20-year history.

The Times recently spoke to Edmiston about the conservancy, its work, its funding and its future.

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Question: What is the conservancy’s financial picture as of today?

Answer: Gov. [Gray] Davis came up with $326,000 that will enable the core functions of the conservancy to go on and actually expand into Ventura County. In addition, the [state] Legislature put $21.8 million in the budget for land acquisition, including $10 million for the Santa Monica Mountains proper and $5 million for the Verdugos, the so-called Oakmont project. But the governor said that this money is not going to be available every year. He called it “manna from heaven,” and it should be used on one-time projects where there’s not going to be a lot of continuing cost to the state. So our criteria is to go after projects that would be lost if we had to wait for a bond act in the year 2000.

For example, in Triunfo Canyon, there was a major landowner who passed away in April. And his estate now says, “We don’t want to be developers; we want to liquidate and get out.” So that land will be purchased and transferred to the National Park Service. There’s a project pending for the [Los Angeles] County Board of Supervisors right now out in Little Sycamore Canyon. We think that rather than go through the vagaries of that, it also would go to the National Park Service. And there’s some property in Chatsworth. The owner died, and the estate could not pay the taxes. So the public administrator is selling that now in late July. We would like to be able to go to that public administrator’s sale with a check in hand to acquire that property. Those are the kinds of properties that we’re talking about. Opportunity purchases.

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Q: So that takes care of this year. What about next year and beyond?

A: There’s a park bond that’s proposed for the year 2000, and that passed the Assembly with 54 votes, which is the first time in a long time that a park bond has gotten the requisite number of Republican votes to get the two-thirds necessary. That’s a very strong, positive sign. We think that the [state] Senate will go along. So I feel pretty good that there’s going to be a bond measure on the ballot in the year 2000, and that should give us about $45 million total, an amount we could program out over three years.

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Q: Depending on the whim of the voters.

A: Of course. But that’s the kind of existence we’ve always had. We do not have any continuing funding source. In fact, park acquisitions statewide don’t really have a continuing funding source. It used to be that the concession revenues from the parks went into something called the State Park and Recreation Fund. And that fund was then used for capital improvements. What has happened over the last 16 years is that the fund has been used for day-to-day costs. They don’t take preventive maintenance or any of those things out of it. That’s why there’s such an enormous backlog. State parks got more than $100 million in the budget this year, trying to deal with their deferred maintenance backlog.

When Gov. Jerry Brown left, the state budget was about 2 1/2% devoted to natural resources. Now, it’s hovering about 1%. And if we’d just gotten to where we were in 1982, percentage-wise, then I think a lot of our resource issues would really be well on the way to being solved.

The interesting thing about resource issues is that many of them actually can be solved by throwing money at them. You’ve got social problems that you can continue to throw money at, and the next generation will still be throwing money at them. That’s what we learned in the whole welfare reform issue. But if you buy a park, you’re going to be spending a little bit of money to maintain it, but relative to the initial capital outlay, you can solve problems, and that really is where we need to be going in this state. We need to put more into the infrastructure and parks are part of the infrastructure.

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Q: What about the Chatsworth Reservoir? Will the conservancy be involved in that property?

A: That depends on what you’re going to do there. That’s the issue. Should it be turned into ball fields? There are some who say, “Fine, let’s turn it over to city parks and do that.” But we’re not in the municipal parks business. I had an epiphany driving around the property one day. As we turned around this one curve, maybe 1,000, 2,000 Canada geese rose up. They were resting there. It was just awesome. And it put a shiver down my spine to think that, in the middle of Los Angeles, this is still here. You can’t have that and have a soccer field. And I guess because people don’t know about the Chatsworth Reservoir, they don’t even know what they’re missing.

There is a giant park just south of Amsterdam. We went last year. It’s on the order of about 10,000 acres, and it was built as a public works project. And they have this one beautiful spot where you have this lake that also serves as a reservoir, and you have duck blinds. You go into the blinds and you’re invisible to the birds. It’s the best place. This is the kind of thing that we can have here, where you could take schoolkids. This is something that you don’t typically associate with Los Angeles.

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Q: Would you have a problem with the reservoir remaining under the jurisdiction of the Department of Water and Power?

A: Not at all. Really, the Department of Water and Power has done a good job of managing the resources that it has around the basin. Our concern, and what we have proposed to the DWP, is that there be a conservation easement placed on it. That means that some administration 20 years down the road doesn’t get the idea, “What a wonderful place for Disneyland North.”

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Q: What’s your long-range agenda?

A: There’s roughly 80,000 to 85,000 acres preserved in the Santa Monicas now. We probably need a minimum of 15,000 acres to connect that together. We need to keep our efforts up until we have made a biological connection, so that the existing protected lands don’t become an ecological island. What happened in the early part of the century, and even in the ‘60s and ‘70s, was what I called a Frederick Law Olmsted vision (Olmsted was the architect who designed New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park). You stand in the middle of a pretty valley, you look around, and if you can see nature around you, that was the way you defined a park. And that was fine when beyond the park boundaries was undeveloped land. But now what has happened is that development is coming in, and you cannot maintain the biological integrity of these little islands.

In the last several decades, we found fewer and fewer species in the protected areas. And people were asking, “How come this is the case?” And they started realizing that even relatively spacious areas, thousands of acres in size, are not sufficient to maintain the animal life that is needed. So if we maintain those biological connections, then we will be able to have real nature, not nature where the ground squirrel is the highest level of life that you find. This is how I define real nature: You need to be afraid of it. It might bite you. You have to be alert. You are subsidiary to real nature. That is the exciting thing that you have in the Santa Monicas, right in the heart of the city.

One of my favorite stories involves Rusty Schweickart, who was one of the Apollo astronauts. When he was orbiting in one of the spacecraft, he called Houston and said, “I see the blackout in Southern California.” And Houston came back and said, “There’s no blackout in Southern California.” “Oh, but I see it. I see it!” Schweickart said. “It’s a whole blackout of the section right at the heart of Los Angeles.” And you know, he finally realized that it was the Santa Monica Mountains. He had not realized that there was this wedge of undeveloped area surrounded by all the lights of the city. That really awakened me to how incredible this all was.

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Q: With the population expected to explode in the next 25 years, do you think the Santa Monicas and other parklands will be threatened?

A: I think if we are successful, there still will be a place where you can experience nature and experience open spaces. You’re going to see some very interesting changes as Southern California becomes a more Hispanic culture, a plaza culture. Think of Griffith Park on Sunday. And people are going to be demanding open public spaces.

As far as development, it’s economically impossible for that to happen as much as they’re projecting in the Los Angeles basin. You’re going to see more Moreno Valleys, the rapid expansion of the Inland Empire. That is where you can build a reasonably priced house. And economics is going to demand reasonably priced housing. You’re not going to build that housing in the Santa Monica Mountains because you’ve got $100,000 worth of lot costs and in grading the property out before you can even get your lot. And that’s not feasible. So, housing in the Santa Moncia Mountains is still going to be extreme upper-end housing. And there will be less and less of it.

If you fly a helicopter over Los Angeles, you would be utterly amazed at the amount of wasted space. And I think the great space discovery is going to be in the inner city. You’ve got a lot of derelict manufacturing that is abandoned.

We have a little, small example at Compton and Slauson [avenues], an eight-acre site that was a DWP pipe lay-down yard. We’re putting in a park there, unlike any other park you will see. It is a miniature of the ecosystems found in the Santa Monica Mountains. We’re gonna have a little stream, we’re building hills, we’re building an oak grove, a sycamore grove. The idea is to have a place where people can go acclimate themselves to nature and then you would take them from there into the Santa Monica Mountains.

But if we increase the amenity value of the already built areas of Los Angeles, where the land uses are enormously inefficient, people will live there, especially as the air gets cleaner. And the key, I think, to really restoring the whole feeling of Southern California is improvements in air quality. And over the next 20 years we’re going to have improvements in air quality. Change is going to be for the positive, I’m just 100% sure of it. People are going to want better quality of life. They’re going to be living longer. . . . I don’t think that the health business is a fad. It’s a whole lifestyle. And so the public agencies, the city, the county, everybody is going to be responding, I think, in a wholly different way. The whole idea would be that nobody would remember, I hope in the next generation, anything called the ecology movement.