Wagner Ranch Nature Area must be saved

October 1, 2005
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/opinion/12791813.htm

By Jason Kibbey

THE ORINDA Union School District can't seem to resist using the Wagner Ranch Nature Area (WRNA) as a site for a new maintenance yard, despite the $25 million sale of their current yard to a developer.

Is building on the nature area in the best interest of Orinda's children or one of the largest homebuilders in the United States?

The Wagner Ranch Nature Area is a nationally recognized preserve that has provided environmental education to generations of Orinda schoolchildren.

The proposed maintenance yard site in the WRNA was "accidentally" graded only days after an angry crowd of citizens was told that it would be months before just the planning phase was completed.

Public outrage over this gaffe has led the Orinda schools superintendent to hold off on plans to use Wagner as a maintenance yard until all options are considered.

In fact, a site committee has considered other options and building on Wagner appeared near the bottom of the list of alternatives.

Still, all signs point to the school board going ahead with Wagner as their preferred location for a maintenance yard.

School board officials have attempted to split the community by saying that the district can't afford to build a maintenance yard anywhere but on the WNRA.

Teachers, libraries, and classroom supplies are pitted against environmental education in divisive campaigning. This rhetoric misleads the public and doesn't match up to the facts.

The maintenance yard has to move only because the district is selling the site of the current yard to Pulte Homes for more than $25 million.

Further, a maintenance yard on Wagner Ranch will probably be more expensive than the other locations because of the costs of a complicated environmental review process, developing sewer and utilities at the site, and a very high likelihood of litigation.

Not to mention that the district will lose money year after year because of the inefficiency of a maintenance yard located on the periphery of town.

Aside from all of the financial and political reasons not to build a maintenance yard on Wagner Ranch, it is time the school district recognize that keeping the nature area whole is the right thing to do.

Open landscapes that provide wildlife corridors and working ecosystems are increasingly rare. Those that can be used to expose children to the natural world are even harder to find.

Wagner Ranch Nature Area has introduced thousands of children to the living environment and deserves to continue to serve the community as only it can.

District officials have said that they are only carving off a portion of the nature area for the maintenance yard. This precedent sets the stage for the nature area to be dismantled, piece-by-piece.

New York's Central Park would have been paved 17 times over if every proposal to carve off a portion had been approved.

Further, a bustling maintenance yard with dozens of truck trips every day will assure that the environmental education programs at the nature area will rarely include the chance to encounter wildlife.

The Orinda school district would never consider knocking down classroom buildings to build their maintenance yard. But what it fails to recognize is that the Wagner Ranch Nature Area (in its entirety) is also a classroom, a living classroom for generations past and present.

It's the future students who are in jeopardy of losing this vital part of their education.

Kibbey is director of Defense of Place, which is a non-profit organization dedicated to assuring that parks, open space, and wildlife refuges stay protected in perpetuity.