Joshua trees meet very different fates in California, Arizona

The sun goes down on Joshua trees at Castle Mountains National Monument in eastern California on Feb. 1, 2016. Private land across not far from here was recently transfered to Mojave National Preserve in part to protect these iconic desert plants. (David Becker/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

By HENRY BREAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

It’s been an up-and-down month for Joshua trees in the region.

At Mojave National Preserve in California, thousands of the iconic desert plants recently won permanent federal protection, thanks to a land transfer that added 3,100 acres to the park 90 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, in Mohave County, Arizona, a Las Vegas businessman is defending himself from allegations of a “Joshua tree massacre” on about 100 acres of private property he’s clearing for agricultural development.

Al Barbarich, who owns the land about 95 miles southeast of Las Vegas and hopes to establish a nut and fruit orchard there, said his permit to clear the land did not require him to save any of the Joshua trees. But he said he arranged to have about 100 of them dug up and replanted at homes, a school and other locations in the area — all at no cost to those who received the plants.

“We tried to do something nice for the neighbors and the community,” he said.

Some area residents didn’t see it that way. In online posts and a Feb. 12 story in the Kingman Daily Miner newspaper, the developer was accused of wholesale Joshua tree murder.

Barbarich acknowledged that some plants were destroyed as the land was cleared, though he couldn’t say how many. He said a lot of the Joshua trees shown piled up in the photos posted by his critics were older plants with little hope of being successfully transplanted.

The negative publicity is “unfortunate,” Barbarich said, because he felt like he was trying, at his own expense, to do the responsible thing. “We wanted to preserve the trees to the extent that people wanted them,” he said.

FROM PRIVATE TO PROTECTED

The additional Joshua trees now under the protection of Mojave National Preserve in California were also once subject to the whims of private development.

The plants are growing on what used to be scattered pockets of private land within the boundaries of the 1.6 million acre desert preserve. Over the past decade, the nonprofit Mojave Desert Land Trust has been buying up such “private in-holdings” and selling or donating them to the National Park Service.

The latest land transfer, completed earlier this month, involved 110 scattered parcels ranging in size from 5 to 320 acres.

Frazier Haney, conservation director for the trust, said most of the land is located in Lanfair Valley near the eastern edge of the preserve, an area “really rich in Joshua trees and Mojave yucca.”


Haney said the trust purchased the property from “a variety of willing sellers” over the past nine years. The group paid a total of $1.5 million for the land and received $1.4 million from the park service in return.

That money will be used to buy other private property within the preserve and other desert parks in California, Haney said.

“Scenic views, sensitive habitat and historic resources that might otherwise be lost are now protected in perpetuity for all to appreciate and enjoy,” Greg Gress, regional realty chief for the park service, said in a written statement.

Haney said private in-holdings are not governed by the same rules and protections as the surrounding park land. Gradually eliminating the patchwork of in-holdings simplifies management of the entire preserve, he said.

‘STRICTLY WILLING SELLERS’

But Haney stressed that the trust isn’t trying to force private landowners off their property, some of which dates to the days of homesteading in the area roughly 100 years ago. “It’s strictly willing sellers,” he said.

Since it was founded in Joshua Tree, California, in 2007, the conservation group has donated more parcels of land to the park service than any other trust in the country, Haney said.

Mojave National Preserve has gained more than 30,000 acres — and countless Joshua trees — through the trust’s efforts.

Haney said more than 1,300 private parcels remain within the boundaries of the preserve, though, “so we’ve still got a ways to go.”

Nonprofit land trust turns over 3,000 acres to Mojave National Preserve

An entrance to Mojave National Preserve on Zzyzx Road near Baker, Calif. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)

Associated Press
Los Angeles Times

A nonprofit group has donated more than 3,000 acres of desert land to the Mojave National Preserve.

The Mojave Desert Land Trust announced Wednesday that it had handed over ecologically and historically significant land to the park. The 110 parcels already are surrounded by the national preserve. They include juniper and yucca stands and a century-old homestead site.

The trust has an ongoing program to buy up private land that survived within the boundaries of the Mojave National Preserve, Joshua Tree National Park and Death Valley National Park.

“Development of this private land can degrade neighboring park resources, impact public access and cause management problems for park staff,” a trust statement said.

Over the past decade, the trust has conveyed about 23,000 acres of land to the National Park Service.

“Our great desert parks are immeasurably enhanced” by the work, Greg Gress, regional realty chief for the National Park Service, said in a statement. “Scenic views, sensitive habit and historic resources that might otherwise be lost are now protected in perpetuity for all to appreciate and enjoy.”

Group sees 'violation of trust'

WILDLANDS CONSERVANCY: It brokered a BLM deal to protect the desert acres that are now being opened to development.

David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy, says he thought the Mojave Desert’s open spaces would be preserved after the conservancy brokered a deal to sell thousands of acres to the Bureau of Land Management. Proposed renewable energy projects will ruin the view from mountains such as Sheephole, Old Woman and Turtle, Myers says. 2004/The Press-Enterprise

By JANET ZIMMERMAN
The Press-Enterprise

A land conservancy from Oak Glen spent years amassing $45 million in private donations and negotiating the purchase of more than a half-million unspoiled acres in the California desert so it could be turned over to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management for protection.

Now, the BLM is considering applications for wind turbines and solar-energy arrays on thousands of those acres.

The proposals on the donated Mojave Desert parcels have riled residents, visitors and members of The Wildlands Conservancy, which orchestrated the land deals involving a broad scattering of parcels in eastern San Bernardino County.

"It's a violation of trust, not only for Wildlands, but for the public. That's part of how we got so much diverse support, including hunters and off-roaders, because this was about public access and enjoying the Mojave Desert," said April Sall, manager of the conservancy's Pioneertown Mountain Preserve near Joshua Tree.

Steve Borchard, the BLM's district manager, said his agency did not commit to preserving land donated by The Wildlands Conservancy.

The BLM has to balance multiple missions on public land, including energy, oil, gas and coal development, livestock grazing, habitat management, and recreational opportunities, he said.

"That is land that belongs to the American people that has been designated by Congress for multiple use by the American people," including renewable energy generation, Borchard said.

Renewable energy now provides about 12 percent of the state's energy needs.

By 2020, state law requires that investor-owned utilities get 20 percent of their electricity from renewable energy, a move to reduce dependence on foreign oil and ease climate change caused in part by traditional coal-fired plants.

The BLM is considering 162 applications for large-scale solar and wind projects on more than a million acres in its California Desert District.

When the conservancy-government land deal concluded in 2004, no one saw the renewable energy rush coming, Borchard said.

The land transfer was the largest of its kind in state history.

It involved 160-acre parcels laid out like a checkerboard along either side of the railroad tracks from Barstow to the Colorado River, the result of a grant from the government in the 1800s to spur development.

If the land had been sold to private parties, access to hundreds of miles of roads and public lands could have been restricted.

Conflicting Uses

The conservancy's purchase from Catellus Development Corp., a spinoff of the Santa Fe Railway, tapped $18 million from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, intended to preserve and develop access to outdoor recreation facilities, a congressional report says.

Now conservancy leaders are lobbying for a Mother Road National Monument south of the Mojave National Preserve to protect the lands from development, a 10- year-old idea that became more urgent with the "feeding frenzy" of energy applications, Sall said.

After The Wildlands Conservancy donated the land to the government for public use, the BLM dubbed the parcels "some of the most pristine and scenic areas in the California desert," valuable for their sand dunes, cinder cones and habitat for the endangered desert tortoise and bighorn sheep.

The land is also "some of the most valuable for solar development on earth," Borchard said recently.

The BLM already has pre-empted from energy development more than 8 million acres of wilderness and critical habitat, he said.

A 40-mile stretch of Route 66 near Amboy also has been deemed too historically valuable to build on, he said.

Borchard said wind and solar projects under consideration cover only 19,546 acres, or 8 percent, of the donated Catellus land.

More than half the projects probably will never be built, he said.

But Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who was instrumental in the Catellus land deal, vowed this week to ensure that the federal government honors its commitment to protect the property.

Conservationists said they don't oppose renewable energy, but they prefer rooftop solar units, or larger projects on land that already has been disturbed, such as abandoned farms.

They say transmission lines needed to carry the energy through the desert should be along existing corridors, such as Interstate 10.

Gary Thomas, of Upland, a board member of the Society for the Conservation of Bighorn Sheep, said he fears the effects of widespread desert development on the habitat of the 3,000 or so bighorn sheep in the greater Mojave.

His group builds and maintains watering holes for large game in the desert.

Habitat corridors linking open space are needed to preserve the genetic viability of sheep populations; without such diversity, the populations could die off in 60 years, Thomas said.

"Those (energy) farms are nothing more than an open pit mine without a pit," he said. "They are going to go in and clean everything out to bare dirt, then they fence them and everything that was living in that place will be gone."

The BLM's Borchard said conservationists are overstating the habitat-corridor issue. Bighorn sheep travel miles, not tens of miles, he said, and applying the issue of connectivity on such a large scale is "bunk."

David Myers, executive director of The Wildlands Conservancy, has vowed to maintain the Mojave's wide open spaces, a job he thought had been taken care of with the Catellus deal.

The renewable energy projects will ruin the view from mountains such as Sheephole, Old Woman and Turtle.

"You would climb a peak in an island in the sand to have this vista, and the higher you climb, the more industry you would see," he said.

Land In Question

592,847 acres of former railroad land donated to the government

19,446 acres of those proposed for wind and solar-energy development

Mojave land trust achieves acquisition milestone

Joshua Tree charity donates 10,000th acre to Park Service

Hi-Desert Star

JOSHUA TREE — The Mojave Desert Land Trust, a Joshua Tree public charity, announced the acquisition of its 10,000th acre of land to be donated to the National Park Service this week.

The land trust has given land to Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park through 183 transactions at a cost of $5 million dollars.

Mindy Kaufman, the land trust’s president, said she was extremely proud of the achievement: “We are only 3 years old as a land trust and these acquisitions speak to the grit and determination of the board, our funders, small staff, great volunteers and the community in its desire to preserve land in the Mojave Desert.”

Founded in 2005, the Mojave Desert Land Trust uses a fund in the Preserving Wild California Program to acquire privately held parcels inside the boundaries of desert national parks.

Most national parks contain private lands that are holdovers from the homesteading, ranching and mining days.

The Mojave Land Trust believes these lands can become the staging grounds for incompatible development, such as commercial real estate or homes, putting wildlife, natural and cultural treasures and the experiences of park visitors at risk.

According to the land trust, the National Park Service lists 1.8 million acres of private land it hopes will be acquired and donated to the government at an estimated price tag of $1.9 billion.

Inholdings that require restoration from dumping, illegal roads or other uses are restored by the Mojave Desert Land Trust before they are donated to the National Park Service.

To date, using professional contractors and the volunteer time of trained land stewards, over 70 acres have been restored — recycling more than 15 tons of debris, 36 vehicles and four travel trailers.

This year, Nolina Peak, which the land trust acquired in 2007, was incorporated into Joshua Tree National Park.

The 640-acre Nolina Peak parcel protects the Quail Mountain watershed originating in Joshua Tree National Park.

“In only three years, the MDLT has acquired over 3,500 acres in Joshua Tree, a rate of acquisition that far exceeds what the park was able to accomplish,” said Curt Sauer, superintendent of Joshua Tree National Park.

“While these lands are all critical to the management of resources within the park, the acquisition of Nolina Peak is a giant step forward in our ability to preserve the northwest end of Quail Mountain, with its resident populations of bighorn sheep, bobcat, mountain lion and desert tortoise.”

Sauer said he considers the land trust an important partner for conservation in the Mojave Desert.

Another recent acquisition of 320 acres is located in the Mojave National Preserve. A wildlife corridor, this land links the pinyon juniper highlands of the New York Mountains with the Watson Wash drainage.

The site also includes habitat for plants and animals and is the location of a historic homestead.

Preserve superintendent Dennis Schramm said the land trust’s help has been especially critical in the past several years, when federal money to buy land was mostly unavailable.

“Wilderness, desert tortoise critical habitat, springs and other biologically diverse properties are now permanently protected due to the efforts of MDLT,” said Schramm.

Ruling bars road to landlocked property

By Laura Brown
The Union





Bitney Springs Road.


Land trusts across the state are looking at a court decision in Nevada County and the precedents it could set for conservation easements elsewhere.

In a tentative ruling, a county judge has decided in favor of the Nevada County Land Trust and landowners Bill and Anna Trabucco in a civil lawsuit brought by adjacent landowner Ian Garfinkel.

But the ruling does not appear to decide between each party’s core issue: Garfinkle argued old roads crossed the Trabucco property, and as public byways, he wanted to use them to access his landlocked parcel. The Trabuccos argued a road on their land would violate their conservation easement, which preserves their ranch as agricultural land in perpetuity.

Rather, the Aug. 22 decision by Superior Court Judge Robert Tamietti is that the roads portrayed on Garfinkle’s maps cannot be proven to be on the Trabucco property.

Land easements such as the Trabuccos’ began about 30 years ago, said Darla Guenzler, executive director of the California Council of Land Trusts. The group represents 86 land trusts statewide.

“These early cases are especially important. That’s why our organization is watching carefully so good rules are created,” Guenzler said.

If developers successfully overturn easements in court, others could find it worthwhile to spend money to break down the protections, she said.

“So far, the land trust community has been prevailing very strongly,” Guenzler said.
To Garfinkel, the case is about gaining access to Trabucco’s property on what he said is a pre-existing road.

Garfinkel owns several properties with road access problems. He filed his lawsuit to gain a road easement traversing a corner of the Trabuccos’ property to his 160 acres of adjoining land. He purchased the property three years ago.

Garfinkel based his case on maps showing roads dating to the 1850s, access he said existed for 150 years prior to 2004, when the conservation easement was established.

But the two maps, county tax records and expert testimony was not enough evidence to prove that the roads ever crossed the Trabuccos’ property, Tamietti ruled.

Throughout the case, Garfinkel assured a road easement would only be used by his family and not pave the way to development.

Cattle rancher Jim Gates leases the Trabuccos’ property for his business, Nevada County Free Range Beef, and attention to the case has been regularly discussed in e-mails sent to members of the Local Food Coalition, in the BriarPatch newsletter to members and in other groups.

The tentative ruling is expected to become final soon unless Garfinkel’s lawyer, King McPherson, can find issues raised in trial that were not included in Tamietti’s decision, said land trust attorney Allan Haley.

“We’re obviously pleased with the tentative decision, but there’s still more proceedings to go before there’s a final judgment,” Haley said.

In his tentative decision, Tamietti ruled in favor of the defendants in all eight causes of action that were alleged in Garfinkel’s complaint. Garfinkel said he won’t fight the decision because it’s become a financial burden.

“It really appears it was a predetermined decision,” Garfinkle said. “You can’t fight that.”

Garfinkel alleges a “smear campaign” spread against him by large land owners, whom he called “good old boys,” influenced Tamietti’s decision.

“The losers are society and the rule of law and everything we’re based on,” Garfinkel said.

The outcome of the case will make it more difficult for property owners to gain access to the county’s landlocked properties, Garfinkel said.

“There are a lot of parcels that are landlocked. Access is everything. If you can’t get to the property, what do you do with it?” he asked.

During the court trial, 23 witnesses were called during eight days of testimony, 455 exhibits were admitted, and the court and counsel made two site visits to the disputed properties located off of Bitney Springs Road.

Nevada County Land Trust members said they are excited by the judge’s decision, because it will strengthen the legality of land easements if made final, said Executive Director Marty Coleman-Hunt.

“It’s not just a local issue. It is a national issue,” she said.