[calcowgirl]

I'm not familiar with your long list, but the State has created eight conservancies (Sierra Nevada would make 9). I would assume the ones you listed are private or non-State entities, without taxing authority, etc.

The eight are:

• Baldwin Hills Conservancy
• California Tahoe Conservancy
• Coachella Valley Mountains Conservancy
• San Diego River Conservancy
• San Gabriel & Lower Los Angeles Rivers & Mountains Conservancy
• San Joaquin River Conservancy
• Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy
• State Coastal Conservancy

[BJungNan]

The entities I listed are managing land trusts where the beneficiary of the trust is the state.

Typically the state comes in and tells home owners they are going to take the land and their homes, paying them for it of course, to make a state park.

The deal that gets worked out so these people do not get booted out of their homes is they agree to put their land in a trust that stipulates in 100 years the state will get the land. They get to live out there years there. But, since it is a trust, you lose some immediate control of your land to a trust management board that tells you want you can and can not do on the land (no taking firewood, no erecting fences, no altering the landscape, no additions to the home, etc, etc.

If you want to call this "private" fine, but in effect it is the same and you are only playing with semantics.

My first experience with such land trusts was over 20 years ago in Trinidad, CA on a stretch of coastline known as Moonstone Beach. The State Dept. of Parks and Recreation was going to take 24 homes I believe it was. The land trust that was worked out I believe was one of the first (others may have better information on the history of these trusts prior to Trinidad).

Again, call it what you will and refer to the one you are fighting now as the biggest, socialism or whatever. But this has been going on for a long time and a great deal of land, homes and lives have been affected.