Known for tract homes and urban sprawl, Orange County is also home to vast, public-owned wildlands.

A drone buzzes overhead, photographing a jutting limestone ridge that sits near the juncture of two massive gifts of undeveloped land by Orange County’s largest landowner.

“One side of that ridge is old and one is new,” says John Gump, a county park ranger, standing on a hill that offers sweeping views of craggy bluffs, sage-strewn canyons and a glimmer of blue – Irvine Lake.

The “new” that Gump mentions is a gift made this month by the Irvine Company of nearly 2,500 acres of open space. This month’s gift follows the developer’s gift a few years ago of 20,000 acres.

Orange County is nationally known for well-heeled housewives and rows of tract homes, but the reputation for endless urban sprawl is misplaced. In the last five years, the swaths of open space and parklands owned by the county have grown by 50 percent – to nearly 60,000 acres.

And that doesn’t include the massive Santa Ana Mountain Range operated by the U.S. Forest Service that lines much of the county’s northern border.

With the latest additions, the trove that Gump surveys now stretches from Silverado Canyon to Anaheim – part of the tangible and growing legacy of Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Company. Bren, in return, will enjoy some sizable tax write-offs.

Earlier, some questioned whether OC Parks was equipped to steward such an expanse of open space. The county, however, promises to protect and preserve these lands for generations to come.

What can you find? A deer skeleton, for starters.

STEWARDSHIP

From behind the wheel of his pickup, Gump points to trails that wind through Black Star Canyon.

Exploring this land has never been easier.

Today, there are 9.5 miles of new trails in this area and elsewhere. A new audio tour guides hikers along six or so points of interest.

Much of the county’s open space lies under a conservation easement, meaning access is limited to protect native habitats and wildlife. But for the last four years, OC Parks has opened more than 90 miles of trails to the public through monthly self-guided Wilderness Access Days and daily docent-led activities.

These public programs, along with land management and wildlife monitoring, are handled by the Irvine Ranch Conservancy. The nonprofit has a $3 million annual contract with the county.

Gump points to a line of sycamore saplings in 5-gallon buckets.

He stands in the Baker Staging Area, an area with new picnic tables, portable restrooms and a shade canopy. On access days, this is open to the public. Gump says a youth group is coming to plant the saplings, an activity that wasn’t possible before the county took over.

“I think this is a good case study,” says Gump, who has patrolled these county lands and others for seven years. “There was very little access to this area, and now it has been expanded greatly.”

But in years past, some conservationists worried about the parks department’s stewardship of public lands. After the 1994 county bankruptcy, OC Parks’ budget was cut, along with those of other county departments.

It wasn’t until nearly 2010, according to reports, that parks officials felt confident that they could handle the financial burden of managing more land.

Theresa Sears sits on the board of Friends of Harbors, Beaches and Parks, a conservation group based in Newport Beach. She served on the Environmental Coalition Land Transfer Steering Committee, a task force that four years ago assessed the county’s potential stewardship of Irvine Company lands.

Sears likened the county’s growing open space to an art collection. “You start collecting and sometimes you don’t know if you can deal with it all,” Sears explained. “Can you afford it?

“Acquisition is one thing, but proper protection is another.”

But times have changed, and so has the department, according to Stacy Blackwood, who took over OC Parks’ leadership last year.

“That was a valid concern at that point,” Blackwood granted. “I think from the Irvine Company perspective, the reason they’re confident in giving the county this additional 2,500 (acres) is the success they’ve seen …with the previous gift.”

Two weeks ago, the county Board of Supervisors agreed and voted unanimously to accept the latest donation.

Even so, questions have surfaced.

As recently as September, county auditors alleged that OC Parks executives, including former parks chief Mark Denny (now the county’s chief operating officer) had a hand in granting no-bid contracts from 2009 to 2014. The contracts, auditors said, went to a friend of one of the parks executives.

LOVE FOR THE WILD

Back in Black Star Canyon, Gump encounters a partial deer skeleton in the middle of a dirt road. He stops his truck to take a closer look. The deer’s skull is still covered in gray fur.

It’s a rare sighting, Gump says. He talks about the wildlife in this canyon: bobcats, foxes, red-tailed hawks, great horned owls, even the occasional coyote and mountain lion.

“They’re not just passing through, they live here,” he says.

Gump doesn’t believe the deer fell victim to a mountain lion, which usually bury their kill. Taking a closer look, he says he isn’t sure how it died. “It’s the circle of life, I guess.”

Beyond the question of past financial strains and possible misdeeds at the highest levels of OC Parks, Gump sees a more fundamental issue: love of wildlands.

He explains the need this way: “People need to understand and experience and appreciate the land if they’re going to want to protect it.”

IRVINE COMPANY LAND GIFT MILESTONES

1897: Irvine Company makes first public land donation of 160 acres for what today is Irvine Regional Park.

1982: More than 7,300 acres of coastal canyon.

1988: 10,000 acres of open space in Irvine.

2001: 11,000 acres of open space; Donald Bren Stewardship Fund of $50 million created for long-term open space management, preservation, restoration and to enhance public access.

2010: 20,000 acres to county.

2014: 2,500 acres of land near Anaheim Hills, East Orange and Irvine Regional Park to county.

Source: Irvine Company

PRESERVING OPEN SPACE

The county Board of Supervisors this month accepted an additional 2,500 acres of open land and approved spending $300,000 a year on land management and public programs. Here is the breakdown of the latest gifts:

Mountain Park

1,073.9 acres; near the 91 and 241 toll road in Anaheim; previously entitled for development of 2,500 homes.

Santiago Hills II

16.2 acres; adjacent to Irvine Regional Park in Orange.

East Orange Area I

469.2 acres; west of Irvine Lake along Santiago Canyon Road and the 241 toll road in Orange; previously entitled to develop 2,200 homes.

East Orange Area II

936.5 acres; southeast of Irvine Lake in the city of Orange; adjacent to Black Star Canyon.

Source: OC Parks

Nicole Shine

Among Donald Bren’s fondest childhood memories are the weekends on Lido Isle, a man-made jewel on the Orange County coast. He’d trek down from the Westside with his best friend’s family and spend long hours rowing in Newport Harbor.

As Bren reminisced nearly seven decades later, he turned to the floor-to-ceiling view from his ninth-floor conference room, taking in Fashion Island, Newport Harbor, Lido Island and the shimmering blue Pacific.

“Long story short,” he said, smiling, “I didn’t go very far.”

Today, Bren is the sole shareholder of Irvine Co., one of the most successful real estate firms in U.S. history, owner of the Irvine Ranch and more than 600 premium office buildings, shopping centers, apartment communities and resort properties. He’s also Southern California’s wealthiest man and America’s richest land developer, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $12 billion, twice that of Eli Broad.

At age 78, he has begun to talk openly about a reality with far-reaching implications: that, one day, all of this will be owned and run by someone else.

In a series of recent conversations, Bren said he has made plans for Irvine Co. to continue as a private company controlled by its independent board of directors, which will choose a new chairman. The beneficiaries, he says, will be a combination of public and private entities, which he declined to specify.

“This is a private company that is set up to operate in perpetuity,” he said.

Bren has been more than just the owner; for more than three decades, he’s been its entrepreneurial heart.

“Clearly, Donald Bren is the Irvine Co. and the Irvine Co. is Donald Bren,” said John Cushman, chairman of the commercial real estate brokerage Cushman & Wakefield. Imagining the firm without Bren, he added, is akin to pondering what Berkshire Hathaway will be without Warren Buffett.

Over the years, Bren has sculpted the look of modern suburbia in California and, in the process, become one of the country’s largest and most-copied developers of planned communities.

He’s also preserved and donated to the public more acres of California’s open spaces than he has developed, including 20,000 acres of pristine wilderness that he gave to Orange County last year, asking only that it remain open space forever. (“It’s all yours,” he told the parks chief at the ceremony, where he also donated money to help manage it.)

Along the way, Bren has given away $1.3 billion of his fortune, much of it to bolster education, including millions to public school arts and science programs and $200 million to the University of California.

“In terms of great visionaries who have influenced Southern California, I’d put him up there with Walt Disney,” said Rick Caruso, who owns the Grove and other shopping meccas and is a member of the Irvine Co. board.

These days, Bren remains focused on running his company. He dresses in a suit and tie and drives himself to work for a full day of meetings with colleagues, and leaves each evening with a briefcase stuffed full of what he calls “my homework,” articles on history or science that have caught his eye as well as drawings and plans for Irvine Co. properties.

Sometimes, he’ll sit at his home drafting table at night, studying designs for houses, office buildings, shopping centers or resorts.

“He’ll blow in the next morning with a whole wad of tracing paper and overlap drawings for all of our projects,” said Robert Elliott, senior vice president in charge of the 23-person design team. “It’s amazing, because hardly anybody draws anymore. But he draws very well.”

The corporate ethos reflects Bren’s personality, a mix of self-discipline, creativity and entrepreneurship salted with an abiding thirst for knowledge.

But the man who runs this influential company is something of a mystery. He doesn’t like to talk about himself and limits his outside engagements. Those kinds of things, he said, “take focus and energy away from the challenges required to build a new city. I do limit my exposure to the public. You only have so much time.”

Bren looks years younger than his age, with a ruggedly handsome face and the sturdy frame of an athlete. He was a top-flight downhill skier as a young man, and attended the University of Washington on an athletic scholarship. He missed a chance to make the 1956 Olympic team when he broke his ankle in a fall on the slopes.

Bren, his wife, Brigitte, a 45-year-old lawyer, and their 7-year-old son spend many weekends at their ranch in Sun Valley, Idaho, where Bren still tackles the black diamond runs.

Former Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth and his wife, Ginny, have joined the family for sailing vacations on the Mediterranean, but they draw the line at the winter slopes. “We don’t ski well enough to keep up with Don and Brigitte,” he said with a laugh.

The Brens, who’ve been married for 12 years, have a home in West Los Angeles, where they enjoy dining with close friends, including former Gov. Pete Wilson and his wife, Gayle. But the Brens spend most of their time at their waterfront villa on tiny Harbor Island, an exclusive neighborhood just a seven-minute drive from corporate headquarters.

Bren’s home is designed in the style of Andrea Palladio, the 16th-century Renaissance architect whose influence is evident in the Pelican Hill Resort and other Irvine Co. properties. A student of architecture and history, Bren was inspired by Palladio’s famous treatise, “The Four Books of Architecture.”

“He’s probably the most influential architect in the history of the modern world,” Bren said. “I’m just in love with his designs.”

Bren and his wife are Republicans, and he describes himself as “a fiscal conservative and social moderate.” He backed Wilson’s Senate campaign and contributed to Meg Whitman’s gubernatorial bid. But he’s also long supported Democrat Dianne Feinstein, whom he calls “a great senator for California.”

Bren has worked diligently to keep his personal life private. He has six children, including one with Brigitte and three from his first two marriages.

The two other children, now 18 and 22, were with a former girlfriend. They battled Bren in court last year seeking $130 million in retroactive child support. Bren testified during the trial, and his attorneys noted that he had given the children more than $9 million since their birth and, although he rarely saw them, had already promised to pay their education expenses until the age of 25. The jury sided with Bren.

His two oldest sons are in the real estate business, though neither works for Irvine Co. “The best way for a young person to grow and prosper is on his own, as I did,” Bren said.

Bren grew up in Bel-Air and later Beverly Hills, and graduated with the Beverly Hills High class of 1950. His father, Milton Bren, was a real estate investor and Hollywood film producer best known for the “Topper” screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s.

His parents divorced when Donald and his brother were young, and their father married the film noir actress Claire Trevor in 1948, the year of her Oscar-winning turnin “Key Largo.”

Trevor earned fame playing tough dames, though off-screen she was an intellectual, an accomplished painter and sculptor, and a friend of artists, particularly the 1950s-era abstract expressionists known as the New York School. She introduced Bren to many of those artists, and her appreciation for art had a profound effect on her stepson.

“That was such an exciting period,” Bren recalled. “What I learned from Claire was to see a different dimension, the depth, the symmetry, the relationships, the color. That carried over to architecture for me.”

Bren, who sits on the board of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, describes himself as a modest collector. Paintings by the late Richard Diebenkorn, a California artist and one of Bren’s favorites, hang in the Bren home and at Irvine Co. headquarters.

Bren earned a degree in business and economics at UW, then entered the Marines as an infantry officer after the Korean War, leaving with the rank of first lieutenant. The discipline “was a rude awakening after college life,” he recalled with a laugh. But it’s something he still values, and he regularly attends the Marines’ birthday celebration in Orange County.

After his discharge, Bren considered law school. But on a return visit to Newport Beach he spotted a waterfront lot for sale on Lido Isle, the same place he’d played as a youngster. He borrowed $10,000 from a friend at a bank, a little more from an acquaintance at a savings and loan, and became a home builder.

Bren Co. grew quickly in the post-World War II boom, developing a reputation for attractive designs and quality construction. He developed the first master plan for 10,000 acres in Mission Viejo, building homes, a shopping center and a golf course, and was erecting thousands of homes a year across California.

In 1977 he took the fateful gamble of buying a controlling interest in Irvine Co. with two other investors.

The company’s signature property was the Irvine Ranch, 93,000 acres that stretched from Newport Beach to the Cleveland National Forest, five times the size of Manhattan and one-fifth of Orange County. The ranch was named for James Irvine, an Irish immigrant who pieced together Spanish and Mexican land grants during the Lincoln presidency.

When the housing market stalled in the early 1980s, Bren made a move that touched off one of the biggest legal battles in the history of Orange County.

It began when Bren borrowed $560 million and bought out his partners. Then he moved to acquire the final shares from Irvine family members, including James Irvine’s great-granddaughter Joan Irvine Smith. She contended that Bren had grossly underpaid for the company, and their years-long legal fight ultimately cost more than $30 million. In the end, a court mediator settled the case and Bren paid Smith $240 million, or less than half what she had sought.

By 1991, he was the sole owner of a stunning property that lay squarely in the path of an explosion of suburban growth south of Los Angeles.

Irvine Co. had taken initial steps to create the master plan for the city of Irvine and set aside land for public spaces, but after Bren took over, he greatly expanded those efforts.

Bren’s swift moves and his company’s growing power spawned enemies in those years. Environmentalists were suspicious of his promises to leave large parts of the ranch untouched. Others accused the company of transforming vast swaths of the ranch into bland suburban developments.

But, today, Bren has won over many of his critics. When he donated the wilderness acres to Orange County last year, environmentalists praised him. Jean Watt, president of the nonprofit Friends of Harbors, Beaches and Parks, hailed it as “a new era of cooperation.”

Even Larry Agran, the former mayor of the city of Irvine who for years was a Bren critic, has come around. “What the pioneers of the Irvine Co. understood, and what Bren and the company have come to realize, is that planning really works,” he said.

The city of Irvine, population 217,000, is about 85% developed, with a 20-year supply of residential lots remaining. It has a median home value of $600,000 and acres of space devoted to parks, community buildings, sports fields and green belts.

The Irvine Co. vision, that a community with plenty of open spaces would make the private development all the more profitable, has paid off. Last year, while builders everywhere struggled to get off the mat, Irvine Co. restarted its dormant home-construction division and has since sold 1,200 homes there.

Today, Irvine Co.’s suburban juggernaut covers 44,000 acres of the ranch, and nearly half the rest is a natural habitat with a National Natural Landmark designation, home to mountain lions, golden eagles and dozens of species of rare and endangered plants and animals.

“I’ve heard people say he only protected it because it couldn’t be developed. But they either haven’t seen it or haven’t seen what developers can do in Southern California,” said Michael O’Connell, a conservation biologist who heads the Irvine Ranch Conservancy. “He could have developed it all.”

The company’s reach now extends well beyond the ranch. It has commercial, retail, residential and resort holdings in Los Angeles, San Diego and Silicon Valley, 95 million square feet of investment property in all. A few months ago, it bought the 5-year-old Hyatt Center, an elliptical 48-story office tower in Chicago.

Irvine Co. doesn’t release financial details, but it holds the highest credit rating, with a debt load about half of its competitors’; most of its office and retail properties, and all of its land, are debt-free.

For more than a quarter-century, the key to Irvine Co.’s success has been Bren. He plans to lead the company as long as he’s able.

But, when the time comes, Bren says, the company board, which now includes Caruso, Ueberroth and Wilson, will select a new leader, most likely from Bren’s four-member “office of the chairman,” the top lieutenants who work with him to chart the company’s future.

“No one lives forever,” said Daniel Young, a five-term Santa Ana mayor who heads the company’s community planning and development division and is one of those top executives. “But there’s a system in place and a great board in place.”

Bren carefully chose his words when speaking about that future.

“The Irvine Co. doesn’t end with me,” he said. “I’m just here for a period. The company goes on.”

Scott Kraft
Los Angeles Times

A rugged, 20,000-acre parcel of the original Irvine Ranch a pristine landscape of steep canyons, native grassland and sycamore woodland that is home to golden eagles, mountain lions and dozens of rare and endangered species of plants and animals became public property Tuesday in a historic deal with the developer who has sculpted the look of modern suburbia in Southern California.

The open-space land, a gift from Donald Bren and the Irvine Co., was unanimously accepted by the Orange County Board of Supervisors, which also approved a long-term plan to manage the natural habitat, designated a National Natural Landmark four years ago. In one swoop, the size of parkland owned by the county grew by more than half.

The transfer of a large part of the historic ranch was an important milestone, placing the last major chunk of open private land in public hands and signaling the end of an era of enormous growth for Orange County.

It also was the culmination of an effort that Bren, a 78-year-old multibillionaire, launched more than three decades ago when he took control of the 94,000-acre Irvine Ranch, about a fifth of Orange County.

“It’s been a long trail, these last 30 years, and this is a very significant event for us,” Bren said in a rare interview after the handover.

He called the private-public partnership on open spaces a rare example of “social entrepreneurship,” adding that “I’m proud of the people in the company who spent so much time with these community partnerships. I couldn’t be more pleased. This is an investment in the future. It lives forever, and that is in fact a legacy.”

Over the years, Bren’s vision as a developer has transformed the Orange County landscape. His Irvine Co. created a retail, commercial and suburban juggernaut on 44,000 acres of the ranch, from the Newport coast to the city of Irvine, becoming, in the process, one of the world’s largest and most-copied developers of planned communities.

But he also set aside 50,000 acres for parks, greenways, and a recreational and wilderness preserve. More than half of that was previously donated to the public; the land given to the county Tuesday completes the transfer.

“I can’t even begin to guess what the value of this property is. But in terms of its biological and geologic value, it is truly priceless,” said Michael O’Connell, executive director of the Irvine Ranch Conservancy. “It’s a world-class piece of land.”

The conservancy, a nonprofit entity created by the Donald Bren Foundation, will continue to manage the land, under contract to the county’s parks department.

The new county wilderness area extends from near the 91 Freeway south to the hills above Irvine, and parts of it are visible from both sides of the 241 toll road in eastern Orange County. It includes Loma Ridge, Laguna Laurel and Limestone Canyon, and plans are under way to create a new, 2,000-acre nature park, Black Star Canyon Regional Park, adjacent to the Cleveland National Forest.

Nearly five times the size of Griffith Park, the land is essentially one large tract, which makes it important ecologically. It is part of what scientists call a Mediterranean climate zone, an area characterized by dry, mild weather and coastal fog that covers just 2% of the planet but contains 20% of all known plant species.

The land is a “truly magnificent, a globally important ‘hotspot’ of biological diversity,” said Albert Bennett, dean of the School of Biological Sciences at UC Irvine. He said students and faculty travel the world to study similarly endowed open spaces “and these local lands rival many of those places in their diversity and biological importance.”

Scientists also regard the tract as a geological treasure, and parts of it preserve an intact record of the last 80 million years of Earth history.

The parkland is rare among similarly sized natural habitats in the United States because it is so close to a highly urbanized area the land is within a half-hour drive of nearly 3 million people.

Much of the parkland is remote and untouched, though part of it has been accessible to the public in the past, mostly through naturalist-led hikes and recreation days when visitors can go mountain biking and horseback riding. But access to the sensitive habitat is limited, and the county says that is likely to continue as the county develops long-term preservation plans.

“We want to create as many opportunities as possible for people to connect to the land and care about it,” O’Connell said. “But not so much that they love it too much and threaten the values that make it so special.”

When the Irvine Co. announced the wilderness gift last year, some environmentalists raised questions about whether the county had the financial resources to protect it.

The funding plan presented Tuesday by Mark Denny, director of Orange County Parks, includes $4 million from the Irvine Co. for management and capital improvements as well as a $1-million endowment for a scientific research center at UC Irvine. In addition, the Nature Conservancy is contributing $2 million.

Environmentalists welcomed the plan Tuesday. Penny Elia, of the Sierra Club told the supervisors that it marked a “historic day.” Jean Watt, president of Friends of Harbors, Beaches and Parks, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting natural habitats, said the gift “lays the groundwork for a new era of cooperation” among the county, environmental advocates and private organizations.

The donation was the largest single transfer of private property to public ownership in Orange County history, increasing the county’s parks and open-space protected land from 39,000 acres to more than 59,000 acres.

The Irvine Ranch got its name from its original owner, James Irvine, an Irish immigrant who started a produce and grocery business in San Francisco during the Gold Rush and, with his partners, assembled the ranch from Spanish and Mexican land grants. His son, James Jr., inherited the ranch in 1892 and launched one of the state’s earliest large-scale agricultural enterprises.

In 1897, the Irvine Co. made its first public land donation: 304 acres near the city of Orange that is today known as Irvine Regional Park.

Bren, one of the last California land barons, took over the company with two partners in 1977 and, two years later, they sold a discounted tract of land to the state to create Crystal Cove State Park.

After Bren bought out his partners, he began a more aggressive move to develop the ranch and, at the same time, began a process of large-scale land preservation aimed at creating wildlife corridors and protecting the natural habitat.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Bren frequently took advantage of California’s open spaces, hiking and camping in the mountains. As an outdoorsman, he said, “I really appreciated nature.”

His family had a beach home in Orange County, and since he moved there 50 years ago, he said, “I’ve seen Orange County grow and I’ve grown with it. And one of the great opportunities was to be part of this open-space preservation partnership with the ranch. I think it’s really the monumental legacy for this company.”

Scott Kraft
Los Angeles Times

From shining sea at Crystal Cove to majestic Saddleback Mountain, 37,000 acres given national designation.

CRYSTAL COVE — About 37,000 acres of Irvine Ranch land, extending from Crystal Cove to the foothills of Saddleback Mountain, was recognized Tuesday as the country’s newest National Natural Landmark.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, National Park Service Director Fran Mainella, Rep. John Campbell — who gave Schwarzenegger the new title of “conservationator” — and others gathered Tuesday morning in a parking lot on a bluff in Crystal Cove State Park, thanking Irvine Co. Chairman Don Bren for his help facilitating the process.

“We’re celebrating more than protecting the environment; we’re also celebrating generosity,” Schwarzenegger said.

The land, which is owned by Orange County, the city of Irvine, the Irvine Co., California State Parks and the Nature Conservancy, was subject to scientific evaluation by 10 geology and biology experts to assess its physical and geological significance. The area received the natural landmark designation because of the presence of fossils — which date back 80 million years — and a diverse animal and plant population that includes some endangered species and others unique to the area.

“My dream is that the Irvine Ranch will be known and celebrated just for what has been preserved and protected here & as the Irvine Ranch is known for the outstanding quality of life communities that have been built here,” said Don Bren in a prepared statement to a crowd of supporters and media.

Bren said Tuesday’s announcement marked his dreams of conserving the land coming true.

The maintenance of the land continues to be the responsibility of the land owners and paid for through the Irvine Co.’s $50-million Irvine Ranch Land Reserve Trust.

“The $50-million trust is for stewardship and educational programs and things of that nature,” said Dan Young, executive vice president of the Irvine Co.

Not since 1987 has land owned by a public-private partnership been given the designation.

“We hope with this kind of leadership happening, maybe others in our country will be so inspired to nominate land,” Mainella said after the formal ceremony.

Fewer than 600 sites are designated as a National Natural Landmark and the Irvine Ranch land joins places such as Oahu’s Diamond Head, and California’s Torrey Pines State Park, Anza Borrego Desert and Mt. Shasta in its designation.

Along with Crystal Cove, other areas recognized by the designation include Limestone and Fremont canyons, Peters Canyon Regional Park, Laguna Coast Wilderness Park, the open space between Newport Beach and Laguna Beach, and Bommer Canyon.

The program was started to encourage land owners to protect natural areas to promote scientific advancement and education in the areas. Nominated sites must undergo an independent scientific evaluation.

Amanda Pennington
Daily Pilot

Big Swath Gets a Big Gift

The foundation of the Irvine Co.’s chairman gives $20 million to increase access to 50,000 acres of open space.

Standing in a small clearing amid giant sycamores in Irvine Regional Park on Thursday, Irvine Co. Chairman Donald Bren pledged $20 million to expand the public’s access to 50,000 acres of the former Irvine Ranch set aside as open space.

The gift brings to $50 million the amount donated by the Donald Bren Foundation to make sure the land is protected and remains in its rugged state.

Bren, making a rare public appearance before 200 invited guests, including U.S. Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, also announced the creation of the Irvine Ranch Land Reserve Trust, a nonprofit he said guaranteed that the acreage would be permanently preserved.

The old ranch land stretches from the Anaheim hills to the ocean and includes Limestone Canyon and Crystal Cove. Three mountains-to-sea bike paths are included in the public access plan, with one of them recently opened. The Irvine Ranch Land Reserve covers more than 145 square miles, about half of it urbanized.

Trish Smith, a senior project ecologist with the Nature Conservancy, which manages 34,000 acres of the reserve, applauded the creation of the trust.

“It’s hard for me to imagine it’s really happening. We’ve been thinking about it for a long time, noodling and wishing for it, but we never thought it would actually happen,” Smith said.

The benefit of the trust, she said, is the consistent management it should provide. If the land were managed by the government, it would be subject to political whim and the government’s own economic restraints, she said.

The skies were overcast and a light fog clung to the hills as Norton and Bren took a short walk before the festivities began. But the clouds burned off and the sun came through as Bren spoke.

“My vision,” Bren told those assembled, “is that the reserve will set a new standard for conservation stewardship and recreation that will be understood and appreciated, not just in Orange County, but throughout the United States.

CHANGE IN THE AIR: Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Co., chats with U.S. Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton at Irvine Regional Park, where Bren announced his foundation’s donation. One of three trails from the mountains to the sea has been opened.

“I believe we can create a world-renowned park … a place where the people from Orange County can enjoy nature close to their homes,” he said.

The $20-million gift will be used to enhance public access to areas of the reserve that now are off-limits, including the opening of 30 new trails in the next three to five years, company officials said.

The money will also support management and restoration of natural habitats.

Norton praised the plans for the reserve.

“The Irvine Ranch illustrates what cooperative conservation is all about,” she said. “A conservation-minded corporate citizen is working hand-in-hand with federal and state agencies, the Nature Conservancy, local communities, private citizens and other partners to thoughtfully and purposefully create an environment where both people and wildlife can thrive.”

Times staff photographer Don Kelsen contributed to this report.

By Sara Lin, Times Staff Writer