Plan to Sell Mountain Preserve’s Land Draws Critics

By The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif.

Apr. 13–Inland environmentalists are threatening to sue to stop the sale of a portion of a San Bernardino Mountains preserve that’s home to rare plants and animals and was once managed by a man now imprisoned in a notorious shooting.

A San Bernardino Superior Court judge last fall appointed Roger Williams as director of the foundation that oversees the 150-acre South Baldwin Lake Preserve, just east of Big Bear Lake.

Now, Williams is selling 20 acres of it to pay off debts left from the former head of the Natural Heritage Foundation, who failed on promises to make improvements to the land before going to prison.

Williams, who is also the administrator of the Wildhaven Ranch — an animal-rescue sanctuary in Cedar Glen — declined to identify the buyer or say what stage the sale is in. He said the land will be used for grazing horses, as it has been for years, and the sale will fund projects such as restoring ponds.

“Basically, the place was a junkyard,” Williams said.

But while Williams said the land contains no special habitat, members of several Inland environmental groups say it sits beside another 20-acre parcel in the preserve known to harbor two plants considered by the state and federal governments to be endangered and facing extinction.

The two plants at risk are the slendar-petaled mustard and the Big Bear checkerbloom, which are only found in the Big Bear area. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the mustard has already lost 85 percent of its habitat.

“It’s highly likely that those plants extend on the property they’re trying to sell,” said Tim Krantz, a University of Redlands environmental science professor and an Audubon member who has studied the area’s resources for 30 years.

He said the parcel in question is habitat for wintering bald eagles and includes part of the lake, that when full, harbors the unarmored threespine stickleback, an endangered fish that lives in an adjoining creek.

Williams took over the foundation about a year after Robert Lindblad was sentenced to three years in prison. He pleaded guilty to being an accessory to attempted murder and false imprisonment by violence. His son, Christian, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for shooting his girlfriend, then holding her in the family’s garage in the Big Bear area for six days in 2002.

Williams said the sale of the 20 acres was approved by the state attorney general’s office.

Tania Ibanez, deputy attorney general, recommended to the judge that Williams take over the foundation and not another Inland group known for land management, a move that surprised members of the San Bernardino Valley Audubon Society, the local Sierra Club chapter and others.

Williams described the recent criticism from them as “sour grapes.”

“They (the court) looked at me and my experience and decided I was the best person that could do the job,” he said.

The environmental groups said the attorney general’s office should have never recommended a group that didn’t have the financial resources to manage the land.

Plus, they said, the sale violates the public trust placed in the foundation to preserve the land.

“They obviously don’t understand the value and importance of the land entrusted to them,” said Sandy Steers, a Big Bear-area environmentalist.

Ibanez defended the sale in a letter Wednesday, saying that Williams “confronted many unexpected costs, including but not limited to creditor claims and attorneys fees.”

But Krantz said there’s no compromise you can make in this case.

“This is their last place,” he said of the species. “We can no longer afford to sell off land … to save what remains for them.”

By Jennifer Bowles and Imran Ghori

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Press-Enterprise, Riverside, Calif.

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