Santa Monicas Struggle With More Acreage, Less Resources : Recreation: To relieve the budget squeeze, park officials have moved to cut visitor access to the scenic Circle X Ranch and reduce frequency of other programs.

With its acreage growing but its operating budget trailing behind, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is struggling to serve visitors and manage sensitive lands entrusted to its care, according to officials and others involved in protection of the mountains.

To relieve the budget squeeze, national recreation area officials have taken steps to cut visitor access to part of the Circle X Ranch property in southeastern Ventura County, arguably the most spectacular site within the mountain park. They also expect this year to decrease the number of ranger-guided hikes and other interpretive programs at various sites and say they lack the troops to close off unauthorized trails and repair erosion damage.

“We end up decreasing the amount of service we’re providing in sites we already own, just to provide absolute bare minimum services on the new sites,” complained David E. Gackenbach, superintendent of the recreation area.

The Santa Monicas park also is too short-handed to adequately monitor and comment on private development projects that threaten wildlife habitat and scenic views, Gackenbach said. Moreover, he said, the growing park needs a second maintenance shop to cut hours of commuting time between maintenance jobs. As it is, the single maintenance shop at Diamond X Ranch in Calabasas is a cramped stable in which horses and power saws compete for space.

While park holdings increased more than 70% in the past six years, operating funds went up during the same period about 15%, failing to keep pace with rising costs for salaries and supplies.

But National Park Service officials say Spartan operating budgets are the rule throughout the system. “I don’t know of any park in the system that is funded at the level that the local management thinks it should be,” said Lew Albert, deputy director of the Park Service’s western regional office in San Francisco.

“I can hear the same thing from the people at Death Valley and Grand Canyon and Yosemite and Sequoia and Point Reyes,” Albert said. “No one is buttered with money. It’s not like we’re denying money to Santa Monica so we can make Redwoods National Park flush.”

Established by Congress in 1978 and stretching from Griffith Park in Los Angeles to Point Mugu State Park in Ventura County, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is actually a mosaic of federal, state and county parks and beaches interspersed with private holdings. Of 155,000 acres within the recreation area boundary, more than 65,000 acres are publicly owned, and federal and state acquisition programs eventually are supposed to bring that total to 100,000 acres.

But growing parks are hardest hit by flat budgets, supporters of the Santa Monicas park say.

The budget strain in the recreation area is, in one sense, the cloud that hides a silver lining: the park’s success in coaxing money from Congress to buy more land. Thanks to a full-court press by area lawmakers and conservationists, the Santa Monicas park perennially is a top recipient of acquisition dollars, getting about $24 million the past two years--or one-seventh the entire acquisition budget for the 357 national parks, monuments and historic sites.

Although progress was slowed by lean allocations during the Reagan years and the astronomical cost of land in the Santa Monicas, the recreation area itself now owns about 17,000 acres--nearly half way to its goal of 35,000 acres.

More land, however, creates the need for more of everything else, from signs and trash cans to ranger patrols and maintenance crews.

Park officials and local and congressional supporters have always stressed acquisition funds over money to manage existing parkland. Otherwise, relentless development pressure and high land prices could keep the park from ever being completed.

Still, the effect of austere budgets could increase this year, because other organizations serving mountain visitors face financial strains of their own.

The recreation area’s operating budget rose this year from nearly $2.1 million to $2.37 million, the biggest increase in years. Most of the budget pays the salaries of about 60 employees, including rangers who make about $18,900 to $24,900 per year--considerably less than their state counterparts, including those at state parks within the recreation area.

A significant contribution comes from loyal volunteers who spend more than 60,000 hours a year licking stamps, building trails and even taking photos for slide presentations. Also, other organizations such as the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy supplement and even subsidize Park Service programs in the mountains.

For example, the mountains conservancy, a state agency, provides information on mountain parks through its 1-800-533-PARK telephone hot line. The conservancy also is helping underwrite a new Park Service AM radio channel that soon will provide visitors with recorded park information. Moreover, the conservancy has pledged $50,000 toward construction of an American Indian cultural center at the recreation area’s Rancho Sierra Vista tract south of Newbury Park.

Other groups have relieved demands on the Park Service by guiding hikes and providing environmental education.

But this safety net is showing signs of unraveling. An example is the William O. Douglas Outdoor Classroom, an organization that guides hikes and gives nature talks to tens of thousands of visitors each year at Franklin Canyon Ranch in the mountains above Beverly Hills--and it gets half its budget from the conservancy.

But the conservancy, facing budget pressures itself, might have to sharply reduce its support of the WODOC when the current grant expires at the end of next month.

Gackenbach said the Park Service won’t be able to make up the deficit. “If you can’t feed your family, you’re sure not going to feed somebody else’s,” he said.

The conservancy’s own environmental education program, which annually brings thousands of inner-city residents, most of them students, to the mountains for naturalist-led hikes and presentations, also faces an uncertain future, with funding assured only through June, according to Joseph T. Edmiston, the conservancy’s executive director.

The conservancy’s shrinking grant funds are also forcing the recreation area to make cutbacks at its Circle X Ranch.

The 1,655-acre tract includes Sandstone Peak, the highest point in the Santa Monicas; a network of hiking trails; the pine and sycamore-shaded Happy Hollow Campground; and a striking, boulder-filled gulch and gurgling stream known as “The Grotto.”

The recreation area has run Circle X with a $250,000 conservancy grant that will be used up in a matter of days. To cut costs, officials have closed the road to Happy Hollow and The Grotto. Hikers will still be able to reach the areas, but the move is designed to reduce visitation and the burdens of patrolling, removing trash and jump-starting stalled cars.

Also, park officials are talking with a local council of Boy Scouts about maintaining trails and performing other caretaker tasks in return for preferential use of the ranch.

The irony is that Circle X was a Boy Scout ranch until the conservancy bought it a few years ago and resold it to the Park Service. Conservancy chief Edmiston said his agency didn’t buy the land from the Boy Scouts so it could again become a Boy Scout ranch.

On the other hand, Edmiston said, the conservancy’s job “is not to subsidize the National Park Service, and . . . you can only improvise these subsidy methods for so long.”

Edmiston believes the recreation area’s financial straits reflect the low status of urban recreation areas, which are in easy reach of millions of people but lack the wildness and pristine beauty of Yellowstone or Yosemite.

“This is not your glory park,” Edmiston said. “This is a poor stepchild of the Park Service.”

Albert, the deputy regional director for the Park Service, denied that. The Santa Monicas park “is not viewed by anyone here as a stepsister,” he said. “If I were king, we’d put a lot more money into” all the parks.

Supporters of the park continue to maintain that buying land is the top priority, even if service is deferred. Once parkland is purchased, they argue, the development threat disappears, and visitors can hike and picnic with or without a ranger there.

One such supporter is Jess Thomas, president of the Old Agoura Homeowners Assn., whose members, close neighbors of the recreation area’s Cheeseboro Canyon unit, are sometimes disturbed by youthful revelers who enter the park after dark because no ranger is available to lock the gate at night.

Still, Thomas said, “I’d rather them spend every available penny acquiring land . . . and then figure out” how to manage it.