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Publication Date: Wednesday, December 18, 2002

Three conservation organizations helped change the future of the Peninsula, from 'Los Angeles North' to mostly open Bayfront, foothills, mountains, and coast

By Marion Softky

Almanac Staff Writer

Not many people remember the 1960 San Mateo County Master Plan.

Yet this pioneering document lays out a vision for what San Mateo County would look like in 1990 that few of today's residents would recognize -- or welcome.

In 1960, at the height of California's post-war building boom, San Mateo County was planning for a population of 800,000 by 1990. The late William Spangle of Ladera led the team that created one of the first master plans in California to accommodate the growth that was sweeping the Golden State.

To today's eyes, much of the plan jars with our present reality. Key aspects of its vision -- freeways down the Bay and coast, BART down the Peninsula, heliports, lakes -- have not happened.

Instead, San Mateo County is still mostly rural outside the dense urban corridor down the Bayside. Large tracts along the edge of San Francisco Bay are still natural and being restored. From Interstate 280, over the hills to the outskirts of Half Moon Bay and Pacifica, and south to the Santa Cruz County line, the county's incomparable coast is still mostly open.

Why? What happened to stem the powerful spread of megalopolis into San Francisco Bay, over the hills, and down the coastal terraces south of Half Moon Bay?

One of many things that happened was the environmental movement. Starting in the early 1960s and growing through the 1970s, grassroots groups started saying no to growth, and government agencies followed their lead. "Save the Bay" became a rallying cry, and the state established the Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) to stop rampant filling of San Francisco Bay, and to control uses along its shores. Neighborhoods arose and blocked the building of freeways -- including the Willow Freeway and later the Willow Expressway in Menlo Park.

Nationally, Congress passed revolutionary laws protecting the environment, clean water, clean air, and endangered species.

On the Peninsula, three organizations that are celebrating key anniversaries this year helped change many areas of the master plan from urban yellow to open-space green, and make many green areas permanent:

** The Committee for Green Foothills was founded in 1962 to fight the development crawling up the foothills above Stanford.

** The Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District (MROSD) was created in 1972 as a government agency to buy and manage open space for low-intensity recreation and natural resources.

** The Peninsula Open Space Trust (POST) is a private, nonprofit land trust founded in 1977 to help buy and save Peninsula lands, many of which are now part of MROSD's open space.

Over two generations, these organizations, and their allies in and out of government, have cumulatively made extraordinary changes in the future of San Mateo County. Working through political action, government purchase, and private finance, they have helped preserve tens of thousands of acres for open space, agriculture, recreation, and natural habitat. Most of the unincorporated Coastside is still open -- a large green swath on current plans.

"The whole mindset was so incredibly different," says George Mader of Ladera, who worked on the 1960 master plan, and has served as town planner for Portola Valley since it incorporated in 1964. People then weren't thinking about water quality or air quality or toxic waste. "Recycling had never been heard of. They were still burning dumps," he says.

"The Midpeninsula was the incubator for both planning and environmental efforts that are now taken for granted," says Lennie Roberts of Ladera, who has represented the Committee for Green Foothills in San Mateo County for almost 25 years. "These three organizations have made tremendous strides in preserving open space."

Audrey Rust, president of POST, agrees. "We all benefit from each other. We depend on work they've done," she says, quickly adding, "We don't always agree with each other."

Now that the foothills and Skyline are mostly secure, the organizations have a new vision, and a new challenge: to save the Coastside. "This is the only undeveloped, accessible coast adjacent to a metropolitan area in the world. It's amazing," says Mrs. Rust. "We have incredible diversity under immediate threat. But we have an immediate obligation to ourselves and to the future to see that these lands aren't lost forever."

In 2000, POST launched a campaign to raise $200 million to save more than 20,000 acres on the Coastside. Next year MROSD will continue its effort to annex the San Mateo County Coastside, from the southern boundary of Pacifica to the Santa Cruz County line, in order to be able to buy and manage land for agriculture, low-intensity recreation, and to preserve natural resources.

At a celebration of the 30th anniversary of MROSD, San Mateo County Supervisor Rich Gordon praised the vision of its founders. He also warned of opposition from farmers, property rights advocates, and those generally hostile to government; but he urged, "Hold fast to your vision."

Factories out of the Foothills

"All you have to do to feel the hills as a blessing is to live within sight of them, within reach of their climatic controls, and under the influence of their watershed."

These words by the late Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner set the vision for the Committee for Green Foothills. As its founding president in 1962, Mr. Stegner continued as the eloquent voice of the conservation movement on the Peninsula until his death in 1993.

The impetus for the Committee for Green Foothills came in 1959, when local conservationists organized to keep "factories out of the foothills" -- specifically to prevent Stanford from extending its industrial park beyond Foothill Expressway, then a narrow winding road.

As pressures grew to develop the green backdrop of the urban Peninsula, "Greenfeet" organized in 1962, with theoretical physicist and solar-energy pioneer Don Aitken of Skyline as its first president.

In one of its first battles, the committee joined Woodside to stop large power lines, being built to serve the new Stanford Linear Accelerator, from marching up the hills to Skyline. The David-and-Goliath fight against the Atomic Energy Commission also launched a young land-use attorney, Pete McCloskey, to a career in Congress.

Over the past 40 years the committee has been a powerful force for keeping the foothills, and now the Coastside, open. Its members fought -- and are still fighting -- Stanford to keep major development out of its foothill lands. They have fought private developers all over the county to stop large-scale developments in county open spaces.

The committee has also supported positive initiatives. With the leadership of Portola Valley Mayor and Councilwoman Eleanor Boushey, the committee helped make Skyline a state Scenic Corridor. They have supported parks, and played a key role in preservation of the Coastside.

Relations with county government, which controls land use over the two-thirds of San Mateo County not in cities, have come a long way from the 1960s, when the Board of Supervisors and Planning Commission basically bought into the 1960 master plan, but thought it had too much open space.

In the 1970s under Planning Director Don Woolfe, the county rezoned thousands of acres of the Coastside from parcel sizes of one acre or less, to a sliding scale of five to 40 acres. "That was very fundamental," says Mr. Mader.

In 1972, voters of California passed Proposition 20, the Coastal Initiative, which set up a commission to regulate development along the California coast. The Committee for Green Foothills joined other conservation organizations to pass Measure A in 1986 to strengthen protection of the Coastside even more.

These conservation milestones grew out of many factors. Individuals got turned on to a local issue. Organizations formed around specific issues, and joined together to work for a common goal -- defeat of the freeway bypass of dangerous Devil's Slide, for example. Larger organizations such as the Committee for Green Foothills or the Sierra Club got on board. They pressured government, filed lawsuits, passed initiatives.

"I started organizing people around hikes to see what was in their back yard," says veteran conservation fighter Olive Mayer of Woodside, who helped establish the county's trail system. "They saw what was out there, what needed to be done. It comes down to people working in their own back yards, and then cooperating."

In this county, preservation of the mountains and the coast was substantially helped by three physical factors: the mountain barrier between city and country; San Francisco's 23,000 acres of watershed dividing the Bayside from the Coastside; and the lack of water to support major development on the coast.

"There were big plans for development of the entire coast. We had to knock them down one by one," says Mrs. Mayer, who has worked for 25 years to block the a freeway and achieve a tunnel to bypass Devil's Slide. "We were helped considerably by topography and lack of water."

Also important in the county's change in planning was the incorporation of the foothill communities of Woodside and then Portola Valley in the 1950s and 1960s. Their leaders -- not always conservationists -- didn't like the way the county was planning their future; they wanted to control their own destinies. Portola Valley, in particular, feared subdivisions climbing Windy Hill -- now a Peninsula symbol for open space.

MROSD: fee simple

There's a saying in the conservation movement: "Victories are temporary; defeats are permanent."

As the 1960s wore on, conservationists tired of fighting trench wars against developers; they wanted something permanent.

A group of seven conservation leaders led by Palo Alto activist Nonette Hanko started meeting to plan a special government district that could raise tax money to buy and manage open space. Bill Spangle from Ladera, the visionary planner who made sure that San Mateo County's 1960 master plan had plenty of green, did the technical work for creating the new government agency.

As a result, the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District was adopted by voters in northern Santa Clara County in 1972, and expanded to southern San Mateo County in 1976.

Since that time, MROSD has acquired and preserved more than 47,000 acres of Baylands, foothills, mountains, and forest, from Cupertino to San Carlos, and from San Francisco Bay past Skyline Ridge. It manages 26 open space preserves for low-intensity recreation and preservation of natural resources.

In its first 20 years, the district totally reversed the dynamics of land use in the Peninsula hills. By acquiring large swaths of land, it has become the largest landowner of the Midpeninsula. It has changed expectations for the use of rural land from "develop it" to "protect and enjoy it."

"The open space district is the best thing that has happened," wrote Wallace Stegner. "The answer to preservation of land is fee simple. You have to own it to control it."

Non-government

As the Committee for Green Foothills helped form the open space district, the open space district helped form POST.

It soon became evident to the newly elected board and General Manager Herb Grench that the fledgling government agency had neither the money nor the flexibility to deal with many private landowners and buy the lands needed. They tapped Portola Valley venture capitalist Ward Paine, and other leaders in booming Silicon Valley, to form a private, nonprofit land trust, which could expand the district's ability to preserve land.

Enter POST, formed in December 1977.

POST helps the district in three ways, Mrs. Rust explains. It can operate in private, act faster, and make deals that government agencies are barred from; it can deal with landowners who don't want to work with the government; and it can raise private money. "I remember thinking: Wouldn't it be great if we could raise a million dollars?" Mrs. Rust chuckles.

POST has been phenomenally successful. It has saved some 50,000 acres, worth many, many millions of dollars. Much of the land has been sold to the open space district, but other lands are part of state and national parks. POST also owns and manages several thousand acres of farm and ranch land on the Coastside.

Landmark Windy Hill, which rises open and beautiful above Portola Valley, was POST's first major acquisition in 1981. It can be seen from the teeming Bayside from Redwood City to Mountain View as a symbol of the green revolution that has swept the rural Peninsula. POST acquired Windy Hill as a gift from Ryland Kelley and Corte Madera Associates, then sold it to MROSD for $1.5 million -- half its value -- and used the purchase price to create its revolving land-acquisition fund.

"When people look at Windy Hill, they know it's open," says Mrs. Rust. "They know it's not L.A. here."

Mrs. Rust is proud of POST's acquisitions, which spell the difference between sprawling city and living land. Its 187-plus acquisitions include: Bair Island, at the foot of Whipple Avenue in Redwood City; the Phleger Estate, climbing the hill from Canada Road to Skyline; the Cowell Ranch, with cliffs and Brussels sprouts just south of Half Moon Bay; Cloverdale Coastal Ranch, between Butano State Park and Ano Nuevo State Reserve.

Now POST is concentrating on saving the coast for nature, farming, natural resources, and recreation. It's more than half way toward its goal of raising $200 million to buy 20,000 endangered acres.

"Our challenge is to be able to acquire key large pieces of open space that allow us to construct a permanent conservation landscape," Mrs. Rust explains. "We're talking about a variety of uses compatible with conservation, like farming or sustainable timber harvesting. We have to serve the urban population through low-intensity recreation."

Challenges ahead

Over the last 40 years, the challenges to forging a sustainable and benign environment on the Peninsula have changed. And thanks to new conservation rules, the challenges are quite different on the urban Bayside of the county than they are on the still-rural coast.

"In this county, we have been successful in separating the urban from the rural -- permanently. That's crucial," says Mrs. Roberts of the Committee for Green Foothills. "On the Bayside, we drew a line around the cities and said, 'This is it.'"

On the Bayside, where transportation and housing problems are horrendous, cities and the county are working toward what is called "smart growth." They are trying to direct higher-density growth and affordable housing toward city centers and transportation corridors.

On the Coastside, with all its protections, the threat is no longer the row-houses and urban sprawl envisioned in 1960. "The coast is under threat from very large mini-mansions. People are building second and third, and even fourth homes," says Mrs. Rust.

Mrs. Roberts and the Committee for Green Foothills share the concern about the influx of applications for mega-houses. "You want to maintain the coast as an agricultural area," she says. "Putting monster houses that would look OK in Atherton or Hillsborough out there in the farm fields is not appropriate."

Next year could be decisive. POST hopes to complete its acquisition drive. And MROSD will be going through legal procedures to gain approval for extending the district into the Coastside. Under its proposal, Coastside residents would be able to vote for district board members, but would not pay taxes to the district. The district would then have authority to buy and manage open space for low-intensity recreation, and preservation of natural resources and agriculture.

Even though MROSD has agreed to give up the power of eminent domain on the coast, and promises to buy land only from willing sellers, the plan to extend the district still faces strong local opposition.

Wallace Stegner spoke for the groups that are trying to fulfill the dream of a healthy, rural Coastside: "Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future."

To reach:

** Committee for Green Foothills, 3921 E. Bayshore Road, Palo Alto, CA 94303; 968-7243; www.GreenFoothills.org.

** Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, 330 Distel Circle, Los Altos, CA 94022; 691-1200; www.openspace.org.

** Peninsula Open Space Trust, 3000 Sand Hill Road, Suite 4-135, Menlo Park, CA 94025; 854-7696; www.openspacetrust.org.