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Vince Garrod walks down a trail in the Fremont Older Open Space Preserve. His grandmother planted the eucalyptus trees in 1907, after a landslide in the 1906 earthquake had made the ground barren.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Open Reason
Thirty years ago, residents decided it was time to preserve a diminishing resource: room to roam
By Oakley Brooks
Photographs by Paul Myers
At the top of Vince Garrod's property above Saratoga, he can see many of the green and brown mottled hillcrests of the South Bay. Just to the north, Fremont Older Open Space Preserve rolls away from the Garrod Farms property line.
On a recent June morning, a long train of kids on horseback headed from the farm toward the open space--part of the area's vast network of such lands. The riders were just some of the thousands who escape every day to these public spaces reserved for wildlife and trail enthusiasts. Garrod himself has grown used to the sight: "I like to see people using the land," muses the 83-year-old farmer and open space advocate.
Since its inception three decades ago, growth of the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District, which manages the Fremont preserve, has been staggering: the organization now controls 46,000 acres of land. Its slightly younger sister organization, the Peninsula Open Space Trust, has purchased an equally impressive 41,000 acres, with the intent of protecting the land.
Like men on the moon or life without Woolworth's, the broad sweep of the open space on the Peninsula is something Garrod and others long involved with open space preservation say they never imagined.
But three decades ago, those activists also couldn't imagine these hillsides saturated with houses. So they banded together and convinced the northern half of Santa Clara County to vote for an open space district that could buy and manage land and slow development's steady push into the region's wild spaces.
The idea of an open space district came about in 1970 in the living room of a Palo Alto piano teacher named Nonette Hanko. A nature lover, Hanko had found solace in the foothills in and around Palo Alto since she was child. She fought Stanford University's plan in the 1960s to develop some of its foothill land, and in 1969 she followed a study by the city of Palo Alto regarding the future of its nine square miles of foothills. The city discovered that it would cost more to install roads and sewers to allow building in the hills than the property tax revenue Palo Alto might expect from those future homes.
As an alternative to development, the city's consultants suggested the creation of an independent district to protect the foothills and other open space in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, following the model of the regional park district, established in the East Bay in the early 1930s.
Acting on the suggestion, Hanko postponed her son's birthday in April 1970 and assembled several friends, including two attorneys, at her house for the first of several brainstorming sessions. The group found that they could organize a district along the lines of the East Bay organization. But it would require a two-thirds vote of the citizens within the proposed district's boundaries. Hanko's group began to explore the possibility of an agency that could acquire and manage open space from southern San Mateo County down to Los Gatos.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Vince Garrod, 83, hikes on the piece of open space above Saratoga that the Garrods sold to become part of the Fremont Older Open Space Preserve.
The West Valley was ripe for something like an open space district. Throughout the 1960s, sparsely populated communities filled up with houses for workers in defense contracting, as the industry gradually pushed out fruit growing and packing in the valley. The Garrod family started giving up on prunes and apricots about 1960, switching to horse lodging and, later, winery grapes. Louise Garrod Cooper, Vince's sister, recalls that the valley floor looked more bare and industrialized than today, with all the trees being felled to make room for homes.
"No long-range plans [for the land] were being developed by any public agency," Vince Garrod said. "The planning departments were all based on growth."
Garrod says the general public was beginning to see that environmental needs were not being met. Saratogan Kay Duffy, 63, one of the city's first park commissioners, agrees that people around her were beginning to grumble about all the land being subdivided for houses. Throughout the Bay Area, environmental awareness grew in the 1960s as a result of a concerted effort to protect the San Francisco Bay.
But it took a considerable effort on the part of Duffy and others in Saratoga to convince citizens to support setting aside land, even for city parks.
"People thought they were out here in the country, and they didn't need parks or sidewalks," recalled Duffy recently.
Eventually, the Saratoga City Council developed a comprehensive plan for 10 new parks in 1969.
Meanwhile, over the course of 1970 and '71, Hanko and her group began pitching the idea of an open space district to people at shopping malls and, more formally, to city councils throughout the proposed district area. The general public responded overwhelmingly in favor of the proposal, which would involve raising their property taxes. Hanko remembers they also received favorable feedback from the Los Gatos and Saratoga councils, including Saratoga's mayor at that time, Jerry Smith. Monte Sereno was the lone protester among city governments--the city did not wish to see any more money flowing out of town.
Given the otherwise popular support, Santa Clara County's board of supervisors agreed to put the proposed district to a vote in November of 1972. San Mateo's board, still dominated by development-minded supervisors, according to Hanko, refused to put the district on the ballot.
Photograph courtesy of Kay Duffy
Kay Duffy stands between her husband William Duffy (right) and Saratoga Mayor Jerry Smith in October 1972, about a month before Saratoga and the rest northern Santa Clara County voted to form the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District.
Wounded, Hanko's group pushed on. They received a good omen from a county park bond measure that Santa Clara voters approved early in 1972. Then as the district vote grew near, supporters took to the streets to court individual votes. Duffy, a member of some of the same organizations as Hanko--the League of Women Voters and the Association of American University Women--enlisted high school students and other volunteers to distribute voter information door to door in the West Valley.
"I thought, 'This is crazy, but it's such a good idea,' " said Duffy.
The measure passed, garnering the needed two-thirds of the citizens' votes. Duffy recalls that Saratoga, which had nine voting Republicans for every five Democrats in 1972, passed the district measure easily.
The measure allowed the district to collect 10 cents property tax for every $100 of assessed property in the organization's boundaries, which stretched roughly from Los Gatos north to the San Mateo line, and from Skyline Boulevard east to the bay. As a condition of putting the open space agency on the ballot, however, the county supervisors required it to spend 90 percent of its budget on land acquisition for the agency's first 10 years. Supervisors didn't want the district to duplicate the county parks administration, as simply a recreational land managing unit.
The district's staff remained small through its first few years, with Hanko, Duffy and three others serving as board of directors for their respective regions.
By 1974, the district had acquired its first property--181 acres in the same Palo Alto foothills that were close to Hanko's heart and had given rise to the organization. In 1976, residents of six eastern San Mateo County communities gathered enough signatures in support of the new open space group to override the veto of the county supervisors and put an extension of the district on the ballot. And again two-thirds of the residents from Woodside north to San Carlos approved the expansion.
The early growth of the open space movement by no means marginalized development interests in the west valley.
Saratogans in favor of keeping the town's hillsides open had to settle for only slightly diminished housing numbers in the Parker Ranch development, after a long struggle to keep the housing density low on dentist Painless Parker's former land.
Photograph by Paul Myers
'I like to see people using the land,' says Vince Garrod, whose family sold a portion of its land (left) to the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District in 1980. But the Garrods ensured that use would be limited to people, horses, and wildlife, not homes.
Development proponents continued to steer the Los Gatos city council in the mid- to late 1970s, according to Pete Siemens, who joined the council in 1978. When the county approved a development known as Montezuma Hills southeast of town, Los Gatos looked into replicating that estate's quarter-acre lots in hillsides just east of the downtown area.
Siemens, 64, recalls that Los Gatos' study of hillside development returned much the same results as Palo Altos' in 1969: the cost of installing infrastructure to serve the future homes on the hillsides would outpace the resulting increase in property tax revenue.
In 1978, Siemens and Tom Ferrito, both sensitive to environmental interests, were elected to the town's council. "Things were getting busier in town. The traffic was increasing, and people were becoming interested in environmental issues," he said recently.
About the time of the turnover on the city council, Los Gatos and the open space district began pursuing the land around St. Joseph's Hill, owned by the local branch of Novitiate Jesuits, a religious order, to protect it as open space. When the council failed to bring the Jesuits to the negotiating table, it voted to pursue an eminent domain suit for the hill property.
But Los Gatos learned it could not take the land because it was outside of the city's limits and its jurisdiction. Siemens says the open space district, with its powers of eminent domain throughout the district boundary, became the lead player in trying to get the St. Joseph's land. By threatening to take the land through court proceedings, the district convinced the Jesuits to sell, and the organization and Los Gatos split the cost of the 170 acres of open space on St Joseph's Hill.
St. Joseph's was one of several cases in the district's early years when it used the threat of taking property under eminent domain to preserve a piece of open space.
"It was an effective tool," Duffy said. "You don't do it lightly. But in a lot of cases, people were asking too much and the district used eminent domain to control costs."
Photograph by Paul Myers
A rider on horseback pokes through the Fremont Older Open Space Preserve, above Saratoga.
The agency also purchased land from willing sellers like the Garrod family, which added 120 of its own acres to the Fremont Older Preserve in 1980 for a below market cost of less than $10,000 an acre. The sold property amounted to half of the Garrod's land, including some eucalyptus groves planted by Vince and Louise's grandmother and "our best hilltop view," according to Louise.
A year later, Vince joined the board of a young land acquisition group called the Peninsula Open Space Trust, which open space district staff members had first conceived of and helped start.
The trust was a nonprofit, privately-run organization funded primarily by donations. The nature of the group allowed it to enter into real estate deals as if it were an individual, without the constraints of public input and formality that might hinder the open space district. The trust also wasn't limited by tax dollars in its pursuit of open space.
"We never received enough tax money to complete the green belt we wanted," said Craig Britton, the district's general manager and a member of the staff for 22 years.
The organization made its first purchase at Windy Hill in Portola Valley and then turned over the land to the open space district to manage.
The two organizations have continued to grow side by side ever since. As the open space district has turned its sights increasingly toward managing land--its budget now sets aside roughly 75 percent of revenue for land acquisition--the trust's fundraising campaigns for land purchasing money have grown exponentially. The organization has launched three separate multi-million dollar campaigns over the last decade.
Photograph by Paul Myers
Kay Duffy of Saratoga was one of the early proponents of the establishment of an open space district in the area. Upon first hearing of the proposed district in the early 1970s, Duffy remembers thinking, 'This is crazy, but it's such a good idea.'
The movement has not been without some growing pains, however.
In the early 1990s, a Santa Clara County Grand Jury report found that the open space district was not adequately listening to its residents and sometimes operating independently of local sentiments. Duffy says several landowners in the region were also unhappy with the district's pursuit of eminent domain cases.
The agency now rarely uses eminent domain to pressure sellers and has recently agreed to give up the right to take land, in order to assuage the fears of residents in a section of coastal San Mateo it is considering annexing next year. Britton maintains that the group has done much recently to open itself up to the public.
"We've made sure the public is aware of us and our mission," he said of an agency that has grown to 75 employees. "Some of the early problems of the agency had to do with an identity crisis."
Activities at the trust have been driven more recently by the wealth of Silicon Valley and the steadying real estate market over the last year. The organization is currently in the midst of a well-publicized $200 million campaign to put 20,000 acres on the San Mateo coast under protection. Many in the conservation community believe it to be the largest campaign by any local land trust in the nation.
Los Gatos hills resident Norman Matteoni serves on the trust's board and says the recent campaign is pushing the trust's staff to the limits. He says the group has contracted out some acquisition to part-time consultants. But Matteoni says, "If the money's there, the acquisitions will happen. It makes for interesting times."
Many of the roots marking the open space movement's beginnings are still firmly set. Garrod still lends some history to discussion at the open space trust, as one of its board members. Hanko continues to serve her region of the open space district as a board member. And though Duffy left her board post in 1992, Siemens replaced her as representative of Saratoga, Monte Sereno, Los Gatos and parts of Cupertino.
Duffy still treks up all 1,250 feet of St. Joseph's Hill on occasion. "It's a longer way up than I remember," she said after a recent hike. But from the top of that knoll, she can see the expanse of the district. And from there the memory of what was at stake in the open space movement's beginning remains fresh.
"It feels good to have created something that's going to last a long time," she says.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
