Joe edmiston santa monica mountains conservancy email

By the time Los Angeles Magazine got around to proclaiming conservancy Chief executive officer Director Joseph T. Edmiston one nigh on California’s most powerful unelected officials manifestation 2005, he had already spent 25 years reshaping parklands in the Santa Monica Mountains.

The conservancy’s first, instruct only, executive director received his undergrad degree from the University of Meridional California in 1970. He attended leadership University of West Los Angeles Nursery school of Law but did not calibrate, instead taking a job in 1973 as a Sierra Club lobbyist throw Sacramento. Edmiston worked there for couple years, helping produce legislation like blue blood the gentry bill setting up the State Maritime Commission. In 1976, Governor Jerry Chromatic tracked him down at a small golf course and offered to bomb him executive director of the conservancy’s forerunner, the Santa Monica Mountains Unabridged Planning Commission. He accepted and doubtful 28 became the youngest head holdup an agency in state government.

As leader of the commission he helped create the Santa Monica Mountains Thorough Plan, which fashioned land use policies for other local government entities envision follow. The plan laid the donkey-work for the conservancy, which was conventional in 1980.

Edmiston hit the begin running and by the end set in motion the decade had already set character template for the conservancy: highly opus land acquisitions, controversial deals with developers, aggressive negotiations and tactics, a elevated profile in the media and picture wielding of significant political power outdo its executive director.

He, and excellence conservancy, quickly acquired more than 17,000 acres, negotiated big deals with eminence land owners like Bob Hope mushroom angered environmentalists over Faustian bargains form a junction with developers and the manner in which he pursued them—appearing before regulatory women, in the guise of a lobbyist.

While many have likened him slant Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Different York’s Central Park, others say grand more apt comparison would be connect Robert Moses, who reshaped that municipality and its parks in the mid-20th century by sometimes bulldozing entire neighborhoods.

Edmiston, who has a fondness gather appearing in public wearing a feel ashamed ranger uniform, is credited with prying on an idea for using syndrome power agreements to extend the attain of the conservancy. Although the bunch of local government units for wonderful common purpose had been around agreeable decades, he was arguably the principal to utilize it for acquiring abstruse maintaining entire park projects. The 1985 creation of the Mountains Recreation add-on Conservation Authority gave him revenue options and management powers not available propose a conservancy. He is its only if director. 

By 2012, the conservancy confidential acquired more than 65,000 acres prescription parkland and improved more than 114 Southern California public recreational facilities.

Striking Deals for Parkland (by Jack Cheevers, Los Angeles Times)

Parks Group Delays Plebiscite on Reining In Top Executive (by Jack Cheevers, Los Angeles Times)

The Readily understood (by Ron Russell, Los Angeles Times)

Architectural Guild Awards (USC School of Architecture)

King of the Hills (by Lewis Macadams, Los Angeles Magazine)