Land Exchanges

A Republican congressman from rural Pennsylvania has introduced legislation to give away 110 prime acres of national forest around the Mt. Wilson Observatory to a science institute whose top officers share his skeptical view of global warming--and whose board includes his chief of staff. U.S. Forest Service officials estimate the land is worth $100 million. But Rep. John E. Peterson is proposing to give it to the Mt.

The Bureau of Land Management has come under fire from government auditors and two watchdog groups for conducting real estate appraisals that benefit private landowners at the expense of taxpayers. Auditors for the Interior Department, which oversees the BLM, found that a senior official may have compromised the agency's integrity by adjusting appraised land values so they would be "acceptable to landowners."

A Superior Court judge ruled Thursday that billionaire businessman Eli Broad, Nancy Daly Riordan and a third wealthy Malibu property owner cannot circumvent restrictions on the size of their homes by buying other oceanfront property and dedicating it to public use. In an opinion made final Thursday, Judge David Yaffe ruled that "such practice, called 'offsite mitigation,' violates the basic purposes of the Coastal Act."

Almost every weekend, Lisa Evans saddles up her quarter horse, Amos, at the Serrano Creek Ranch Equestrian Center in Lake Forest and goes for a ride along the tree-cloaked riverbed. It's a short ride, though. Very short. The trail starts at Serrano Creek Park off Lake Forest Drive and draws to an abrupt end just a few blocks away. "You get to Bake [Parkway] and the trail ends," Evans said. "So I'll usually go down the street a little way and take a fire road back to the center."

The stage is set for a showdown Tuesday that has city leaders facing a choice between long-coveted open space and the possibility of much-needed housing for senior citizens. The Thousand Oaks City Council will consider a complicated development-rights swap that aims to save 180 acres of land known as the Western Plateau, once owned by MGM film studios and now slated for 147 single-family homes.

In exchange for helping Pacific Gas & Electric recoup part of its multibillion-dollar debt, the Davis administration is seeking a package of assets that includes its transmission system, power from a large generator under construction and beach and watershed near the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

Traffic engineers shopping for ways to unsnarl Brentwood's busiest intersection have come up with an unusual one. They want to block off a city street and give it to a developer as a site for a mini-mall. In exchange, the developer of the proposed $27-million mall would widen part of Barrington Avenue at its intersection with San Vicente Boulevard.

Government officials moved thousands of landless blacks onto more white-owned farms over the weekend, despite a Supreme Court order Friday banning the resettlements for not meeting the terms of land reform laws, farmers said. The government has promised to confiscate without compensation 3,000 white-owned farms, divide them up and give them to landless blacks.

A federal court victory by environmentalists has dealt a setback to plans by Los Angeles County to dispose of much of the area's trash by sending it by railroad to an enormous trash dump at an abandoned gold mine on the eastern edge of Imperial County. An appeals court in San Francisco last week nullified a land exchange between Gold Fields Mining Corp. and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that would have allowed creation of an immense trash dump east of the desert hamlet of Glamis.

A celebration was held Saturday to mark the end of a 6-year effort to protect a 1,031-acre ranch at the scenic northern gateway to Mono Lake from development. Officials from the Trust for Public Land, Mono County and the Bureau of Land Management joined local residents in hailing the purchase of the Conway Ranch, 3 miles north of the lake. In 1998, the trust purchased the ranch to block a controversial 440-unit commercial and residential development approved for the site.