Land

The City Council voted Monday night to continue negotiations to buy 18 acres of land surrounding Costa Mesa High School from Newport-Mesa Unified School District. A school district appraisal set the price of the parcel, formerly a school farm, at $6.7 million to $8.3 million. A final price will be set sometime this week, Mayor Joe Erickson said.

Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt said Saturday he supports plans by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to acquire 248 acres owned by Soka University in the Santa Monica Mountains, but stopped short of backing a controversial effort to condemn the land. Babbitt said now was "the ideal time" for the conservancy to acquire land in the Santa Monicas for a network of trails and parks in Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

For the first time in more than seven years, the city will auction off surplus property. Zoned for residential use only, the parcels are either remnants of a development or land left over from street widening projects. The largest parcel, at Alabama Street and Nashville Avenue, contains four lots and will require a minimum bid of $400,000. Two parcels at 602 and 620 Yorktown Ave. will each require minimum bids of $100,000, and a parcel at 2501 N. England St.

The Board of Supervisors has approved expanding the county's metric conversion program to cover the subdivision process, including parcel maps, grading permits and other official documents. The county is one of numerous government agencies slowing moving from the inches-pounds system to meters and liters. Caltrans already uses the metric system for most projects, and the federal government plans to adopt the system by 2000.

The county is likely to have a major new bus maintenance facility in five to eight years. Transportation officials took a step in that direction Monday by instructing the Orange County Transportation Authority's staff to search for land--probably in central Orange County--for such a facility. "We've had significant ridership growth," OCTA spokesman John Standiford said. "We're buying more buses to meet that growth, and we need more space to store, repair and keep those buses going."

In a major step toward a full-scale Orange County cultural arts center, the Segerstrom family has tentatively agreed to donate land for a $100-million concert hall and museum complex. The Orange County Performing Arts Center has a "verbal agreement in principle" with the Segerstroms to transfer a nearby 7-acre parcel--worth about $16 million--to the center. "We need to work out the details. . .

At the Summer X Games in 2006, the fiery-haired action sports superstar Shaun White tried 21 times to land the most elusive trick in skateboarding, a holy grail of a maneuver that no human had yet to achieve: "The 1080. " That's three complete midair revolutions on the board, which requires both considerable air time and skill. White failed all 21 times, just as he had failed in all 29 of his tries at the Summer X Games in 2005. A 6-year-old sandy-haired boy from Malibu watched those 21 failures from the stands.

ELDORADO DOS CARAJAS, Brazil - At 4 in the afternoon on April 17, 1996, a 13-year-old girl with blond hair climbed onto a truck stopped on a road in the Amazon basin. From the top, Ana Paula Silva - known for a long time after as "the girl" - could see everything. More than a thousand protesters had gathered on the road outside a village called Eldorado dos Carajas. People called them the sem terra , the landless. They sharecropped for large landowners, and they were among the poorest people in a country of very many poor and very few rich.

The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy will receive 27.3 acres of open space from the J. Paul Getty Trust on Wednesday. The dedication ceremony will be at 2:30 p.m. at the Crestwood Hills Park Clubhouse, 1000 Hanley Ave., Brentwood. The land grant was made possible by Crestwood Hills Assn., which bought the land, a wooded parcel in Kenter Canyon, from the Getty Trust and donated it to the conservancy for preservation and public recreational use.