Land Costs Threaten Preservation
Copyright 2000 Associated Press
December 26, 2000
By COLLEEN VALLES
BOULDER CREEK, Calif. - A 300-foot-tall redwood tree towers over the Waterman Gap property in the Santa Cruz Mountains. So does another 300-foot tree. And another, also 300 feet. And another and another.
The dense forest is a mass of 300-foot-tall redwoods, the result of seedlings growing up together for a century, restoring the land that logging had left barren.
Trying to keep such deforestation from happening again, a nonprofit land preservation group bought the land for $10.9 million in October, despite timber companies' efforts to pay nearly twice as much for it.
It was a rare bargain for preservation groups. Skyrocketing land prices these days are forcing them to pay more for less, and some wildland has proved too expensive to save.
''That's happening in and around most metro areas,'' said Mike Dennis, general counsel for the Nature Conservancy, the nation's biggest nonprofit conservation group. ''What will happen in the next couple of years is the scenic beauty will be pulverized.''
Nowhere is the pain felt more deeply than in the San Francisco Bay area, where the nation's highest housing prices have encouraged people to move into areas that once were relatively immune to runaway development.
In the land where tech workers' stock options have made for legendary real estate bidding wars, even the most charitable sellers can drive hard bargains.
Take the Russian Orthodox nuns selling 284 acres of lush ridgetop property above Half Moon Bay, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. Listed at $2.84 million in late June, bids pushed it to $3.5 million in July. That forced the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, which gets its scarce funds from property taxes, to match the higher price.
The district, which plans to preserve the habitat and provide access to the nearby Bay Area Ridge Trail, says the land would have sold for just $1 million only four years ago.
Still, that's a better deal than one the district had to let go: a 20-acre parcel in Woodside, about 30 miles south of San Francisco that sold for $3.25 million, said Mike Williams, the district's real property representative.
It was tough, but wise, to let that land go, according to Michael Mantell, a consultant with the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which does some land preservation. He advises groups to try to keep prices down by getting realistic appraisals and refusing to pay too much.
''I think we need to be rigorous about which are the really important lands to have,'' Mantell said.
The Nature Conservancy paid $9 million in September for nearly 25,000 acres of Minnesota tallgrass prairie, home to the federally threatened western prairie fringed orchid and critters from moose to butterflies. It paid $5 million in June for 400 acres on Washington state's Whidbey Island.
In Texas, the conservancy spent $7.5 million to buy more than 24,500 acres on Padre Island, including a lagoon between the island and the mainland that is one of only five hypersaline (super-salty) lagoons in the world. The island's beaches provide nesting habitat for the endangered Kemp's Ridley sea turtle, and the island is a staging area for rare peregrine falcons in migration.
It considered buying about 1,200 acres in the Methow Valley of northern Washington. But the $17 million price was just too high, conservancy spokeswoman Leslie Brown said.
The Sempervirens Fund, based in Los Altos, Calif., got the 1,340-acre Waterman Gap parcel about 70 miles south of San Francisco thanks in part to lobbying by neighbors who didn't want logging.
Jim Mueller, district manager for the San Lorenzo Valley Water District, said the timber companies' offers, while high, were never finalized because they were all based on the water district getting a permit to allow logging. The water district has a policy against logging on its lands.
Sempervirens plans to give the land to the state to expand an adjacent park.
One thing that's helped: The state has made more money available this year with the passage of Propositions 12 and 13, which directed about $4 billion in bonds to open-space preservation and water quality.
''In the whole decade of the '90's, there was virtually no money,'' Sempervirens executive director Brian Steen said. ''Now you're seeing a flurry of activity, and all that's doing is catching up.''