Controversy Surrounds Conservancy and Public Rights to Pristine Land

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  About 1,200 acres of pristine land in the hills behind San Juan Capistrano and San Clemente are at the center of a dispute between environmentalists eager to protect the virtually unspoiled property and the powerful South County developer that controls its fate.

Called the Rancho Mission Viejo Land Conservancy, the land features 500-year-old oaks, rare natural grasslands and coastal sage scrub. More important, it provides a clear botanical snapshot of California as it existed centuries before cattle, people and machines altered the landscape forever.

Even amid the vast and historic 40,000-acre Rancho Mission Viejo, this piece was considered a jewel, said Pete Bloom, a Santa Ana research biologist who has studied the ranch extensively.

The land was turned into the county’s first land conservancy in 1990 in exchange for the right to develop a 3,500-acre community called Talega Valley at the ranch’s southern end along the border of San Clemente.

At the heart of the dispute is access to the land now controlled by the nonprofit conservancy. Under its bylaws, the public is entitled to tour and study the property.

But Jill K. Davison, a UC Berkeley-trained biologist who directed the conservancy, said ranch officials have tried to thwart access and continue to allow cattle to graze, risking environmental damage.

“This conservancy is an absolute sham and everyone knows it,” said Davison, who resigned last spring after three years as conservancy director. “Anything I ever did, it was with the ranch people kicking and screaming all the way.”

Davison contends the ranch left the conservancy’s land surrounded with five-band barbed wire, despite its potential danger to animals in the area. It declined to monitor rare and endangered plants. And it kept bookkeeping and financial records secret from her and other members of the conservancy board.

Ranch officials even changed the locks on the conservancy gates, Davison said, leaving her embarrassed and without an explanation for people unable to take a tour.

“There I am standing out there trying to tell people why I can’t get into my own conservancy property,” Davison said.

Gilbert Aguirre, the ranch vice president who has presided over the conservancy board since its inception, denied the ranch has tried to prevent public access and he dismissed Davison’s charges as the claims of a disgruntled former employee.

The conservancy, Aguirre said, is in the infancy of what will be a decades-long mission.

“We are just barely getting started,” said Aguirre, from the ranch’s sprawling headquarters on a hillside above Ortega Highway. “The bottom line is [the conservancy] has been successful and it will be successful. We are going to make this work because this is our land and we are proud of it.”

A depression in the local real estate market is as much to blame as anything for the poor access to the land, he said. The public’s main access to the conservancy is through Talega Valley, which was sold by the ranch in the mid-1980s and has changed hands several times but has not yet been developed.

Davison’s charges come at a potentially awkward time for ranch officials who are negotiating with county and federal officials to put more land into a private preserve in exchange for development rights--something that should make the public wary, she said.

The chance to work on such lush and virginal property is what excited Davison and prompted her to become the conservancy’s second executive director.

The land itself, said Bloom, is spectacular.

“That mixture of wildflowers and grasses really is the way Orange County used to look prior to the Spanish land grants, prior to cattle and sheep, prior to grading and prior to the introduction of nonnative species,” Bloom said.

“The land conservancy represents some of the finest, pristine, native grasslands, coastal sage scrub, oak woodlands and riparian community you will find in Southern California,” he added.

During her tenure, Davison set up student tours and night visits for astronomy buffs, but her attempts to arrange more serious research was rebuffed by the board.

“What has killed this is the apathy on the part of the board and the ranch,” she said. “No one cared. The board members didn’t go to the programs and they never even came out to the conservancy, even though I offered constant invitations. We’d make decisions at board meetings and, no matter what, Gilbert would do what he wanted.”

Bob Hamilton, the county’s chief of asset management, said creating the conservancy “was the ranch’s idea and the board [of supervisors] accepted that.”

It was funded with donations from the public and the interest accumulated from a $500,000 endowment donated by the O’Neill family, which has owned Rancho Mission Viejo since 1882. The family acquired the ranch, which once encompassed 250,000 acres and stretched from Laguna Niguel to Oceanside, from the Forster family of San Juan Capistrano.

Under the agreement, the conservancy is governed by a nine-member board with the ranch maintaining controlling interest by choosing five of the members.

That feature alone was controversial from the beginning, said Marie Patterson of Capistrano Beach, an original board member who had argued unsuccessfully that if the ranch was to control five members, board actions should require a two-thirds vote for adoption.

Unlike other land conservancies with an outside manager or overseer such as the Nature Conservancy, in this instance only the landowner is accountable. If something happens to the conservancy, the landowner maintains title, according to the agreement.

“We were leery because we knew from the beginning that the landowner was not the least bit interested in this sort of thing,” said Patterson, who has left the board. “They are businessmen and their business operation is their main goal. That’s the problem.”

The county’s Hamilton said two “key concerns” at the time the conservancy plan was approved were public access and grazing. The bylaws stipulate that a scientific study of the flora and fauna will be undertaken and monitored continually.

Aguirre acknowledges that no study of the effects of grazing nor any biological monitoring have been done since the conservancy was formed. Nor has any public access plan been written, he said.

He blames Davison. “This was hers to do, she had all the free reign in the world,” Aguirre said.

Grazing is only sporadic in the conservancy, he said, and then only by “about 40 or 50 head of cattle.” Grazing will continue on the property because the bylaws allow it, he said.