Former Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, in his first prominent role since leaving government, is helping the Hearst Corp. broker a deal worth $200 million or more that will determine the fate of Hearst's fabled seaside ranch in San Simeon.
Babbitt has also been hired by a developer hoping to jump-start stalled plans to build a mini-city of 3,050 homes on the Ahmanson Ranch in rural Ventura County.
At issue for Hearst is 83,000 acres of salt-sprayed tablelands that step down from the Hearst Castle and span 18 miles of mostly wild, undeveloped coast that form the southern gateway to Big Sur. At Ahmanson Ranch, the proposed development would spread across one of Southern California's last expanse of hillsides not yet crowded by urban sprawl.
As a troubleshooter for wealthy developers, Babbitt would seem to have made a dramatic about-face from his years as an interior secretary who reintroduced wolves to the Rocky Mountains, protected Yellowstone National Park from the ravages of mining and saved giant redwoods from loggers.
Babbitt declined to be interviewed for this story.
But the Hearsts say he is helping forge an environmentally friendly strategy that would preserve the vast majority of the ranch as open space and represent a substantial reduction of the corporation's previous plans for hotels, golf courses and a dude ranch.
The Hearsts' strategy, involving consultation with their neighbors and negotiations with a nonprofit land conservancy, stands in marked contrast to their aggressive, closed-mouth attempt three years ago to build a multiphased resort. Those plans, which enraged environmentalists and many local residents, were rejected by the California Coastal Commission.
Yet Babbitt, hired through the law firm Latham & Watkins, and others on the Hearst team have their work cut out for them.
Their challenge is to avoid an epic battle that would pit the property rights of a famous and powerful family against the public's claim to enjoy a treasure of the California coast.
For the latest plan to work, Babbitt will have to draw on his own credit with environmentalists, long suspicious of the Hearst agenda. He also must satisfy his client, the Hearst Corp., a media giant that owns The Chronicle.
Douglas Wheeler, former California resources secretary, believes it will take a joint state-federal project on the scale of one that saved over 7,000 acres of old-growth redwoods in Northern California's Headwaters Forest.
For now, Hearst, with Babbitt's help, is reviewing proposals by the Nature Conservancy, the American Land Conservancy, the Conservation Fund and other nonprofit groups that specialize in putting together complex deals to preserve land.
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