San Diego Gains 234 Acres of Open Space

March 4, 2009

Contact:
Colleen Windsor, SANDAG, (619) 699-1960
Mina Nguyen, San Diego County Parks and Recreation, (858) 966-1331
Vanessa Vaughan, The Conservation Fund, (703) 908-5809

The San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG), the County of San Diego, and The Conservation Fund have teamed up to buy and preserve a large tract of sensitive habitat in the Elfin Forest area that had previously been slated for development.

The $11 million purchase of Sage Hill, finalized Feb. 23, consists of 234 pristine acres north of Elfin Forest Road. The property is located in the County’s proposed North County Multiple Species Conservation Program and is within an area of coastal sage scrub habitat whose conservation has been determined critical to ensure the continued viability of the California gnatcatcher and other sensitive native species.

The land – which also supports a live oak forest and a fresh water marsh – is now owned by the County of San Diego’s Parks and Recreation Department and will be managed permanently as open space.

“This partnership achieves all our goals,” SANDAG Executive Director Gary Gallegos said. “We preserve open space for future generations, mitigate for highway and local road construction, and expand the County’s park system for use by the public.”

SANDAG contributed more than $8 million toward the purchase through its Environmental Mitigation Program (EMP), which uses local TransNet half-cent sales tax funds to purchase large tracts of land as mitigation for the future construction of transportation infrastructure. The EMP goes beyond traditional mitigation programs by filling the future mitigation needs of major transportation infrastructure improvement projects comprehensively, rather than on a project-by-project basis, to maximize the cost-savings of early land acquisition. The $800 million program, which began purchasing property in 2008, has now acquired approximately 824 acres of land and spent $31.5 million.

The Conservation Fund, a national land conservation organization, facilitated the deal and helped arrange for $2.1 million from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to be contributed to the project. The County of San Diego added another $830,000.

Supervisor Bill Horn, who recommended preserving the Sage Hill habitat in 2007, said: “This is a prime example of how the County and local community can work in partnership to protect natural resources that fit perfectly with the need to use land in a responsible way while protecting sensitive sites.”

Before the purchase, the property had been slated for development of 70 estate homes.
“It is very rare to find such a large undeveloped parcel of such high quality habitat in the northern San Diego County area,” said Scott Ferguson, Southern California director for The Conservation Fund. “The protection of this important and highly threatened site was only achieved through the great cooperation of our many public agency partners. We are especially grateful to SANDAG, the County of San Diego, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the California Wildlife Conservation Board for their support for this acquisition.”

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