This story, the bare-bones version of it, has been told in the media of Ventura County and beyond: The long-contested wetlands at Ormond Beach, in Oxnard, are now public land and will be protected for people and wildlife. No liquid natural gas (LNG) terminal will be built on this shoreline.

The story could easily have had a different ending, had it not been for more than twenty years of patient effort by a few local people who cared deeply about the place and were determined to save it. They brought together a broad alliance that encouraged elected officials to step forward at a decisive moment, helping the Coastal Conservancy—in the last minutes of the eleventh hour—to secure the future of a place now locally known as “the Jewel of Oxnard.” The Conservancy bought 265 acres from the Southern California Edison Company with amazing speed, against heavy odds, on the very last possible day. This larger story—another chapter in the never-ending saga of the struggle over land use on California’s coast—may be of value to many other communities.

The decisive moment for Ormond Beach came in late May, when the Conservancy was confronted with an all-or-nothing option: either accept a nonnegotiable offer from Edison and buy the property by May 31, or see it go to Occidental Petroleum Corporation, as the potential site for an LNG terminal.

The area known as Ormond Beach, once part of a vast expanse of marshes, lagoons, and dunes, is a two-mile stretch between Port Hueneme and Point Mugu Naval Air Station. Although a substantial remnant of the natural landscape survives, most of the 4,000-odd former wetland acres have been drained and filled for agriculture, industry and military uses. At least one lagoon was used as a garbage dump.

To get to the wide sandy beach, you drive along Arnold Road past neat rows of celery, and park near the chain link fence that marks the boundary between the public shore and the Navy base. As you look toward the ocean—the coast faces south here—to your right you will see a power plant, which former owner Edison sold to Reliant Energy after the state deregulated utilities. A flat area inland of the plant was until recently the site of six fuel tanks. Should you drive farther east on the dirt road behind the cultivated field, you might encounter an unpleasant odor and notice a slag heap as you approach the Halaco Engineering Company’s recycling plant, which reprocesses aluminum and magnesium.

Nevertheless, wetland advocates explain, Ormond Beach is a gem, a rare one. The “Jewel” begins to shine when someone who knows the place well is your guide. That could be Jean Harris or Roma Armbrust, who led the fight to protect it. Or it could be Don Rideout, a planner who now works for the City of Carlsbad in San Diego County, but in the 1980s worked for Oxnard. As he recalls, “I had heard there was an endangered species on Ormond Beach, and I had never seen one. It turned out to be a least tern. To identify it, I got a bird book, went out and looked. And I realized these birds were nesting on the beach.”

Thrilled by this discovery, he returned repeatedly and perceived an ecological treasure. “It’s very subtle,” he said. “You have to go very quietly—at least that’s what I did. I went and stayed and would just sit—and after a time these creatures would come out. I began to see snowy plovers and discovered them nesting there. You have to sit and let the jewel emerge while you’re quietly looking for it.”

One day he saw a least tern nest with eggs, so he brought a newspaper reporter to it. But a least tern nest is nothing but a dent on an open beach, and by the time Rideout and the newsman returned, there was “just a yolk spot in the sand.” Someone had driven over it.

“I talked to Jean Harris, whom I knew,” said Rideout, “and she told me about Roma, whom I didn’t know.” Armbrust had recently become land use chair of the Ventura County League of Women Voters. “I called her and suggested she might wish to evaluate Ormond Beach.”

Roma and Bill Armbrust moved to Ventura in 1988 and bought a small house half a block from the ocean. After 25 years of teaching in San Fernando Valley elementary schools, she was ready to sit by the ocean with a good book. But she wanted to do more, so she joined the League. When someone was needed to head the land use committee, she agreed to do it—although she knew nothing about local land use issues. “The first I knew there even was an Ormond Beach was from Don Rideout,” Armbrust said. “He was a catalyst.”

At that time, various development projects were being proposed on open space along the shore, including marinas, resorts, hotels, a golf course, and thousands of new homes. Armbrust looked at the beach, the dunes, the tidal lagoon, and she thought of the children she had taught, many of whom never got to feel sand between their toes and smell salt air as she had during her childhood and youth—children who had never even seen a shorebird.

Armbrust decided the beach and wetlands had to be rescued. So did Jean Harris, a nine-year member of the Oxnard School Board, and also a retired elementary school teacher and grandmother. Before long, Armbrust said, “we were joined at the hip.” Using skills that good elementary teachers use to get children to learn and cooperate, they began to educate their communities, elected representatives, and others.

They attended public meetings, spoke with local officials in public and private, organized a watchdog group, Ormond Beach Observers, in 1989, and in 1993 brought together the Greater Ormond Beach Task Force. “Our purpose was to gather information, it was not advocacy,” Armbrust said. By “ripple effect—one person telling another,” more and more people came to agree that Ormond Beach was an asset that required protection.

Meanwhile, the Coastal Conservancy was searching for southern California wetlands in need of protection and restoration. Ormond Beach was recognized for its ecological value as early as 1972, when the Coastal Initiative laid the groundwork for the California Coastal Act of 1976.

In the early 1980s, the Conservancy worked for several years to consolidate a few hundred privately owned undeveloped lots at Ormond Beach, which the City of Oxnard purchased. It joined the Ormond Beach Task Force. Among Conservancy staff who worked with Armbrust and Harris early on was Terri Nevins. “Roma and Jean were so inspirational to me,” she said. “They were just tireless. They could see what the place was and what it could be, and they could articulate that vision.”

The Conservancy was on a very slim budget in those years, but it had expertise to contribute for proposals that might be funded if and when money flowed again for coastal projects. It helped the Task Force to develop a consensus plan, which provided protection for wetlands and dunes but allowed for some housing, “as far as possible from the wetland,” Armbrust said. The plan was submitted to the City Council in 1996. Now the “Jewel of Oxnard” vision moved into the political mainstream, where it took on new life.

Both the county and the city were struggling with problems associated with rapid growth. People were moving in from the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere, and concrete was covering the alluvial soils of the Oxnard Valley, which produce a greater value per acre than any other food-growing region in the state. A voter initiative, Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR), passed in 1998.

In Oxnard, population growth had exceeded the capacity of public service systems, including wastewater treatment. “In 1948 we had maybe 18,000 people, now [in 2002] we have 170,000 or so, and the infrastructure never was up to that fast growth,” said former mayor Jane Tolmach. Building more housing when services were already under stress did not make much sense. Protecting wetlands and dunes did.

Agreement and About-Face

The 1996 legislation that required utilities to sell power-generating plants also required that they dispose of surrounding lands so as to provide a speedy return to rate payers. In 1999 the Conservancy initiated negotiations with Southern California Edison for purchasing wetlands at Ormond Beach, Mandalay Dunes, and Huntington Beach, and in February 2000 approved $16.8 million to buy all three. The Huntington Beach property was purchased in 2001 through a grant to the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy, while the Mandalay site, according to Edison, is still available. But the 610-acre Ormond Beach property was the big one.

The Conservancy had first right of refusal for part of this property under a 1969 agreement between Edison and the State of California. After negotiations began, Edison sold the 350 acres that were not covered by this agreement to Southland Sod Farms. This diminished the wetland value of the remainder, but the Conservancy continued to negotiate. The hope was that more adjacent land could be acquired and restored later, said Peter Brand, the Conservancy’s project manager for the Edison purchases.

In February 2001, after agreement was reached on the purchase price and other terms of sale, negotiations stalled on the issue of hazardous materials that might be discovered on the land after environmental cleanup had been completed and land ownership transferred. Edison wanted the State to agree not to bring any claims or actions against the company for such conditions, and this the State was unwilling to do. Then came California’s energy crisis. As natural gas prices soared in 2001, Edison did not respond to the Conservancy’s inquiries about reopening negotiations.

The Conservancy heard nothing more from Edison until February 2002, when the company informed the Resources Agency that it had reached a purchase agreement with another buyer in December, and asked the agency to surrender its right of first refusal. The Resource Agency referred the letter to the Conservancy, to which it had delegated this right. The Conservancy declined.

The letter did not say who Edison’s buyer was. That was revealed by the press: Occidental Petroleum, which intended to build an LNG terminal on the property.

All Over Again

This news brought an awful sense of déjà vu to people in Oxnard, who had defeated a very similar LNG proposal, by Southern California Edison, in 1977. At that time, the natural gas was to come from Indonesia; now it might come from the Mideast as well as Asia. Beyond that, there seemed to be few differences between the proposed projects. The compressed liquefied gas would arrive by tanker at an offshore dock and be tranported by pipeline to an onshore terminal, there to be stored, then heated, regassified, and piped into the natural gas delivery system.

Natural gas is a clean-burning fuel, and many of California’s non-nuclear power plants use it, receiving it as a gas by pipeline. When compressed into a liquid state, however, it must be treated with extreme care: when it gets into air it vaporizes, spreads quickly, and is extremely flammable. A large accidental release into the atmosphere could create a plume that might ignite, burn back to the storage tanks, and cause a major conflagration, killing thousands of people.

Occidental Petroleum argued that the chances of any such accident were so negligible as to be almost nonexistent. Bill Ahern, energy analyst for the Consumers Union, agreed with this assessment. The trouble is, he said, if a worst-case accident were to occur, the consequences would be truly catastrophic.

Jane Tolmach, then a member of the Oxnard City Council, was among those who had gone to great lengths to check out assurances that there was no hazard when the LNG facility was first proposed. She canceled a vacation to Greece and, instead, traveled to Japan to see an LNG terminal that the proponent of the Oxnard terminal said was comparable and a model of safety. She found major differences: that facility was on Tokyo Bay, not on the open ocean, and it received tankers far less frequently than was proposed for Oxnard. “This is a rough, windy coast,” Tolmach pointed out, and Oxnard is downwind. Accidents do happen here. This year, during an air show, two planes flown by experienced pilots crashed in nearby duck club preserves— less than a mile from the proposed LNG site.

Now people’s awareness of the hazard is even greater. “Putting an LNG plant in this location [between a naval base and a deep-water port] is like putting a bull’s-eye between two bases for terrorists to knock out,” William L. Terry, who lives within a mile of Ormond Beach, argued to the Coastal Conservancy.

Tolmach and others who had been involved in the earlier LNG protest got ready to pull files down from their attics. Meanwhile, Armbrust recalled that “for many people in this community, the LNG fight put Ormond Beach on the map.” Activists began to consider how Occidental Petroleum’s plans might help save Ormond Beach.

The Conservancy was to meet in Monterey on Thursday, May 23, eight days before its right of first refusal was to expire. If it approved the purchase, one more step was needed: approval by the California Public Works Board, which was to meet the following Tuesday. The decision would be difficult. Not only was the purchase price of $9.7 million more than twice the price Edison had agreed to, but Occidental Petroleum had agreed to far more liability for unforeseen hazards than Edison had proposed.

To encourage both agencies toward boldness, advocates turned to the media. Hiring professional help, they produced a radio ad and on May 17 staged a rally and press conference at the beach. “It all had to be done very hastily,” said Armbrust. Assembly members Fran Pauley and Hannah-Beth Jackson came and spoke in front of TV news cameras, as did Oxnard’s mayor, Manuel Lopez, three county supervisors, actor Beau Bridges, and others. Participating environmental groups included the Sierra Club, Surfrider Foundation, and the Environmental Defense Center. Mati Waiya, executive director of Ventura CoastKeeper and the Wishtoyo Foundation, a Native American organization, wore Chumash regalia as he conducted a prayer ceremony. “The media blitz helped the critical mass to come together,” said Armbrust.

Among those who appealed for purchase at the Conservancy meeting were John Flynn, president of the Ventura County Board of Supervisors, and Supervisor Kathy Long. Mayor Lopez sent a plea through a delegate. Elderly veterans of other coastal battles were present, and younger people too. “If the pelicans could come up and speak, or the birds, or the red-legged frogs, or the plants, they would be here,” said Mati Waiya. “But you’re here. Don’t disappoint the elder women who dedicated their lives to this. Be the warriors that you are, Conservancy, this council that represents the people. Let the children benefit. Protect our past.”

Bill Boyer, representing Occidental Petroleum, spoke briefly, saying that Ormond Beach was the optimal site for an LNG terminal in California, that only the 95-acre site of Edison’s storage tanks would be developed, that there would be “minimal environmental impact,” and that public access would not be impeded.

The Edison-Occidental purchase agreement had a number of conditions that released and indemnified Edison from any liability, going so far as to protect Edison at other sites, if hazardous materials taken to a disposal site were identified as having come directly from the property.

This was a cliffhanger. The Conservancy’s counsel, Marcia Grimm, was able to show that its insurance policy covered all possible risks. Moreover, the county supervisors and the City offered critical support: they would back up the Conservancy on the liability provisions. Chairman Flynn offered to call a special meeting to get the Board of Supervisors to issue a formal resolution.

In the end, the Conservancy unanimously approved the purchase. At the ensuing special meeting, Ventura supervisors voted unanimously to support the purchase. That resolution was carried to the Public Works Board meeting in Sacramento. The Board also approved the deal. On May 31, the purchase agreement was signed.

Polishing the Jewel

Now we need to complete the vision,” said Peter Brand. “The area that looks like a dirt parking lot, the former tank farm, will be returned to coastal wetlands, but that’s just the beginning.” The Conservancy hopes to add about 500 acres to the newly acquired 265-acre property by buying and restoring filled wetlands that are available for purchase. This would improve survival prospects for the snowy plover, least tern, and other species. “We have the opportunity here to reestablish surrounding dunes and grasslands and to bring back the edge-dependent species and predator/prey dynamic that assures a self-sustaining ecosystem,” said Brand. In time, a National Wildlife Refuge might be created, joining Ormond Beach and Mugu Lagoon.

Local advocates hope that an interpretive center can be built and a docent program created. Waiya looks forward to participating. The Wishtoyo Foundation, which he founded, seeks to preserve Chumash culture and link it to current issues. “This is the home of the future,” he said, “and the key lies in the past.” (Wishtoyo means “bridge.” Legend has it that the Chumash people crossed from Limuw, now Santa Cruz Island, to the mainland on a rainbow bridge. Their ancestral lands extend from Humaliwu, now Malibu, to Pismu, now Point Conception.)

Supervisor Flynn, whose district is “80 percent non-Anglo” has observed that environmental activism has become much more inclusive than it was in the 1970s, drawing in “people from all walks of life.” The relationship between healthy marshes, public health, and quality of life is much better understood “by the general population and elected people.” To promote a future that takes into account the well-being of everyone in the county’s increasingly diverse population, Flynn is establishing a countywide Vision Committee, which he expects will start meeting in November.

Local people who were involved in the battle for Ormond Beach are standing taller now and looking at larger possibilities. They see what can be done by people like themselves, citizens without a lot of money or access to political leaders. Roma Armbrust still hasn’t had much time to sit on the beach with her books. She’s still a teacher, and her experience is in demand. She can tell a story that carries a lesson, as do Native American and other legends. It shows how in conservation, as in the martial arts, preparation and timing are critical; and how—with a lot of work, imagination, and courage, plus a little bit of luck—a movement started by a few determined people can shape their community’s future.