County to consider Dehesa easement in September voting

A September hearing will determine whether the county of San Diego acquires two agri­cultural easements including a 154.84-acre property in Dehesa.

A 5-0 San Diego County Board of Supervisors vote Aug. 7 set the Sept. 11 hearing date. The potential Dehesa ease­ment would be purchased for $381,000.

The Dehesa parcel is owned by Allen K. Trial. The land is east of Harbison Canyon Road and north of Dehesa Road.

In August 2011 the Board of Supervisors approved an update to the county’s gen­eral plan. The update directed county staff to develop a pilot Purchase of Agricultural Con­servation Easement program to compensate willing prop­erty owners for placing an ag­ricultural easement on their property which would limit future uses and eliminate fu­ture development.

The resulting PACE pro­gram includes three eligibil­ity requirements: the prop­erty must have been actively farmed or ranched for at least two years prior to the applica­tion, the general plan update must have reduced the proper­ty’s density, and the property must have had the ability to be subdivided prior to the general plan update.

Between 500 and 600 prop­erty owners expressed interest in taking part in the program, and 60 property owners sub­mitted applications for the pi­lot program. The applications were ranked on criteria estab­lished by the PACE advisory group. The primary ranking factor was the density reduc­tion due to the general plan up­date, and other ranking criteria included agricultural viability and the ability to contribute to the assemblage of the Multiple Species Conservation Program.

The pilot program included a $2 million allocation covering $212,000 for independent third-party appraisals and $15,000 for title and escrow expenses as well as the funding to purchase the easements. The appraisal which determined the value of the agricultural easements used the California Farmland Con­servancy Program traditional approach which estimates the market value of the land if un­encumbered and the market value of the land with the con­servation easement and then determines the easement value by subtracting the encumbered appraisal value from the value of the unencumbered property.

The 10 properties with the highest ranking were appraised during the pilot program. The property owners ranked second and fifth declined the easement offers while the owners of five properties totaling 10 legal par­cels provided “willing seller let­ters”. The acceptance of those five property owners exhausted the available funding, so offers were not made for the remaining ranked properties and apprais­als were not made for the prop­erties not ranked in the top ten. In July 2013 the Board of Super­visors approved the purchase of the five properties totaling 738 acres for a cumulative price of $1,694,000.

The 2013-14 budget process allocated $620,000 to complete the purchase of the 10 ranked properties. Two of those own­ers declined the easement offers while the owner of a 44-acre parcel in Lakeside accepted the easement purchase agreement. The remaining $560,000 was added to the unused $94,000 from the original $2 million to cover future purchases. In De­cember 2013 the county super­visors directed staff to work on acquiring easements from the 16 properties not funded during the pilot program while refer­ring the acquisition costs of those properties to the 2014-15 budget process. In September 2014 the supervisors approved the acquisition of easements on eight properties for $1,319,850, and that action also directed staff to include up to $1.5 mil­lion for PACE acquisitions in the 2015-16 budget.

If the Dehesa parcel and the 143.41-acre Rainbow parcel are both acquired, the county’s total agricultural acreage conserved under the PACE program would increase to 2,333.21 acres.

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