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Now That It's Worth Only Pennies On The Dollar...

May 13, 2008 – Comments (5) | RELATED TICKERS: TRC

Editorial from today's New York Times:

May 13, 2008

If you’ve ever driven up Interstate 5 from Los Angeles and over the Grapevine, you’ve passed signs for Tejon Ranch, the largest contiguous privately owned property in California.

The Interstate passes along the western edge of the 422-square-mile ranch, which spills to the northeast across the Tehachapi Mountains and into the Mojave Desert and the San Joaquin Valley just south of Bakersfield. Like so much of Southern California before it was developed, Tejon Ranch is an environmental mosaic, a place where several ecological regions converge. Now, unlike most of Southern California, it will be protected from development.

Last week, a coalition of five environmental groups, working with the company that owns and manages the ranch, announced that 240,000 acres — the vast majority of the ranch property — would be protected by a new conservation agreement, which will gradually phase in conservation easements. Development will be allowed on 30,000 acres, mostly along the corridor created by Interstate 5.

Protecting this much land would be big news in any region of the country. But to set aside this much land so close to Los Angeles, where development has gone unchecked for the past half-century, is remarkable, a testament to the cooperative spirit in which this conservation plan was formed and the strength of the desire to keep the courts from deciding the fate of Tejon Ranch.

It is an old habit in Southern California to think of open land as future housing. But this decision ensures that most of Tejon Ranch will never become human habitat, though there will be some carefully controlled recreational access. Instead, it will remain a sanctuary for all the other animals and plant communities that thrive there, including the California condor, for which this has been designated critical habitat.