A Gallery of Rogues

This is a summary of the role of each of several agencies complicit in the legal isolation of the Briggs Road community.

There are two routes from black top to our community. To landlock us, it was necessary to close both. The historical access started at Soledad Canyon Road, crossed the Santa Clara River over a pair of culverts, ran through Oasis Park on existing park roads, crossed the Southern Pacific Railroad (now used by Southern California Regional Rail Authority, i.e. Metrolink) on a paved at-grade crossing, and continued on dirt road to our neighborhood. 

The “Back Way” is on Southern California Edison’s easement road. It starts at Agua Dulce Canyon Road, crosses a small piece of property owned by Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, an agency created decades ago by the California Legislature, and continues on for five or six (depending on where one lives) miles over a miserable dirt road.

• ·         Rancho Agua Dulce LLC, new owners of Oasis Park, began the nightmare by blocking Briggs Road residents one day in August, 2004. Paul Novak, deputy for Los Angeles Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, appeared to save the day and managed to get the route open.
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• ·         That December, a flood wiped out the culvert in the Santa Clara River—not a rare occurrence. The owners of Oasis Park refused to allow residents to repair the bridge, and so we began to use the back way. Meantime, on behalf of the Briggs Road community, the title insurance companies took Oasis Park to court for a legal easement, and after a lengthy battle, won an Easement by Necessity in court. 
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• ·         However, by now the California Department of Fish and Game had decided that even if Oasis Park had to allow residents through, they were prohibiting replacement of the culvert, on the grounds that they were protecting an endangered species of fish, a subspecies of stickleback trout that lives only in the Santa Clara River. Other abuses, up and down the river, were ignored by Fish and Game. As far as we know, only the residents of Briggs Road were forbidden to cross the river. And…
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• ·         Just to make sure, Metrolink also barred use of the long-existing crossing, threatening handcuffs and jail. Dozens of other crossings remain open.
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• ·         The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy bought the last bit of acreage through which the back way crossed. It was a tax sale, but the County of Los Angeles somehow failed to notify the community of their chance to prevent themselves from being sealed off. When approached by the title companies to negotiate legal passage for Briggs Road residents, Conservancy representatives became abusive and refused even to consider accepting payment of some $700,000 for an easement.
  The Conservancy vowed that there would be no building permits issued in the area, easily enforced because no landowner could claim legal access to his or her property.
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• ·         All this time Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy was buying up properties as owners gave up on ever building their dream homes or just enjoying owning a piece of bare California land.
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• ·         The City of Santa Clarita also began buying properties, as the County of Los Angeles assisted with funding. Possibly embarrassed by the placement of Stevenson Ranch, a tract of homes just west of their western boundary, Santa Clarita may be intent on avoiding a similar humiliation to the east.
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• ·         Norm Hickling, deputy for Michael Antonovich, has been acting as go-between and some-time advocate, though it is increasingly apparent that the word “acting” is the most appropriate. Observers with experience of the man assert that Mr. Hickling is motivated only by the wishes of Mr. Antonovich, and we can be assured he has little intention of assisting this community.
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• ·         Further, again based on anecdotal reports from those who have seen him work in other contexts, Mr. Antonovich is widely believed to be working solely for his own benefit, and depends on Mr. Hickling to intercept any mud tossed his way. All we know about any of this is that in almost ten years Mr. Antonovich’s office has accomplished no visible progress in opening the Metrolink crossing, despite his position on the board of same. Nor has he or anyone in his employ made any headway in re-establishing the river crossing. Not to mention the back way.

So that’s the cast of characters, as best we know. If you go back into past postings, you can find more fleshed-out stories for most of these. There are a couple of stories yet to bring out.

If this were a bank robbery or some kind of street crime, and only one of these outfits held a gun and pulled the trigger, all would be charged with the offense. We learned that in high school. Readers have emailed their concern that a focus on one of the perpetrators of our nightmare might be letting others off the hook. No, every single member of the list above is an eager participant, should be regarded as such, and thus held responsible for the part it plays in this heartless collusion. A posting can expand on only one of them at a time.

It is amazing that among all these complicit participants, not one single person has had the guts or the simple decency to stand up for what is right. But I have yet to meet anyone outside of this issue who is not horrified by the actions of these Southern California public offices. I dare not begin to express the disdain of the larger community for those people.

Just as reprehensible, not one representative of any of those agencies has had the common courtesy to come forward and attempt to justify the actions of his or her office. Perhaps they realize that if they did so, the world would soon discover that their arguments are specious and absurd. We can only interpret their silence as voluntary participation in a self-serving scheme.

We would like to find one, even just one California public official with a sense of ethics evolved enough to support our righteous cause.

Do you know one?

George’s Story: They Crushed my Nest Egg

            I was a single parent two weeks shy of thirty when I moved to Southern California in 1975, looking for a fixer-upper on a piece of land where I could have some quiet and enjoy the country. That piece of land did not have to be forty acres, but the house of my dreams came with that size parcel, between Santa Clarita and Palmdale, California.

The home, nestled in a little canyon, is tucked under an immense sandstone formation, and faces a pretty 4000 foot mountain two and a half miles to the south.  Built by a retired stone

mason, the walls are rock, eighteen inches thick.  The building is ingeniously oriented so that the sun does not rise over the eastern hill before ten on a summer morning, and it sets behind the western ridge by four. At night a cool breeze flows down the canyon—and through our dwelling if we open the windows.

Hell's Angels and vandals had abused the house pretty badly. All the glass had been shot out and the window frames were gone. Renters had stapled plastic over the openings. You could see daylight through the upstairs ceiling here and there. This was a genuine fixer-upper.

I had lived in 30 different places, if you count college dorm rooms. I intended to live here only a year then move back to Cleveland, but I fell in love with the place and committed to it. Soon my dream was to grow old here, to retire here. The property would be my nest egg. If the area built up and got too crowded, then I could sell and take my nest egg to buy elsewhere.

The original dirt road to my house is a mile and a half long. It begins at Soledad Canyon Road and runs through Oasis Park. In those days the camp was managed by Bill Jameson, one of the owners and a pretty good singer. On weekends The James Boys entertained park campers and visitors with real live country music. Bill was very friendly, and often even babysat my son when I had doctors’ appointments or other obligations to which I could not take a child. I knew that I had no easement through the park—none of the residents on “the Hill” did—but I did not worry about ever being closed out by Bill or the other owners.

I married Ann in 1984. With my two and our two, four children have grown up in that little stone house.

I certainly did not expect to live here all that long. But I did, and meantime Bill Jameson moved back east and the park was sold. The great irony is that when the third set of owners got serious about closing the way through the park, it was not they but Metrolink, California Fish and Game, and Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (another California agency) who effected the legal closure.

At the moment, Briggs Road residents have physical access to their homes, but it is a pretty insecure feeling that the way could be closed at the whim of the Conservancy. Metrolink and Fish and Game have already had their whim. I had intended to build a better house on my property, since the old one is vulnerable to earthquake, but no building permits are possible now, and stricken property values make it just about impossible to salvage any equity for down payments anywhere else nearby.

Other stories will follow. Meantime please show you care with a comment.

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Four Blockades

Our little Briggs Road community has two access routes to the outside world. Our primary (at least until it was blocked) route is a mile or two long dirt road that crosses the Southern Pacific Railroad, runs on existing roads through Oasis Park, a (former) trailer park/campground, and crosses the Santa Clara River over a large culvert to meet Soledad Canyon Road. The back way is a five or six mile long torturous dirt road that ends at a locked gate at Agua Dulce Canyon Road. It is a miserable, jarring drive, very slippery in the rain, always rough.

In August 2004 the residents of Briggs Road headed home to find their passage through the defunct trailer park obstructed by men who threatened to shoot them. Los Angeles County sheriffs enforced the re-opening of the passage, but when the culvert washed out in a flood the new owners of the park took advantage of the opportunity to refuse to repair the river crossing.

Many months and tens of thousands of dollars later, the courts ruled in favor of the Briggs Road community and established an easement along the existing roads in the campground/park. But in the meantime California Fish and Game prohibited the replacement of the culvert, despite the existence of many other culverts in the area. Metrolink prohibited use of the paved at-grade crossing, and threatened handcuffs and jail to those who attempted to cross. And, the coup de grâce, Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy bought the small property at the end of the back way in a secret deal. There is no other route in or out; the terrain is too rugged. Our eleven homes are legally landlocked.

Here is a hand-sketched map of our area. The blue line is the river. Briggs Road is the thin black wiggly line. Our properties are very approximately indicated with green patches. This

is all public information, and if you wish to see a map with better detail, you should have no trouble finding one online.

When you think about the judge’s ruling for an easement by necessity through Oasis Park, you realize that if any of the other obstructing entities were private, the courts would favor an easement and allow us legal access to our homes. Instead, we are powerless against agencies of the County of Los Angeles and the State of California.

In future posts this blog will fill in many astounding details about each of the four blockades mounted against our community—none with any believable justification. We will invite you to ask your own questions of the authorities, to see if you can do any better than we have to ferret out a reasonable explanation.

Our only hope is public opinion, expressed clearly and vociferously. Our only hope is for you to participate with a note or a phone call, just as we would do the same for you if you found yourself victims of a capricious predicament. Information on how to do that is coming soon. Meantime, please comment.

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Our Plight is Your Plight

Our little rural community of eleven families and numerous bare-land owners has been struggling for the past nine years to survive. First closed in by admitted criminals, we are now legally landlocked by public agencies of the County of Los Angeles and the State of California. We have been fed lies after lies after lies, but have never been given a believable reason for the official maneuvers that have reduced our property values by 80% and more.

The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States asserts “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” So consider this measly way around eminent domain: landlock thousands of acres of property, wreck their values, and sit back and wait for everybody to give up, move away and stop paying taxes.

We have tried every remedy we can think of. The Title Insurance companies won a lawsuit over one piece of the necessary easement, only to be confronted by three more blockages created by agencies of Los Angeles County and the State of California. We will be recounting strategies we have tried, in posts on this blog. We anticipate that readers will suggest others.

We Americans are recovering from a hard kick to the heart. A realization has been forced upon us, in a strikingly rude way, that our elected representatives do not represent us, that they are not at all concerned with the welfare of the American People.

It doesn’t matter what your politics are. Maybe you support the idea of universal health care, maybe you do not. Maybe you believe in rights for the as-yet-unborn, maybe you believe in a woman’s right to control her own body. Maybe you insist that guns be controlled, maybe you hold to our right to bear arms.

It doesn’t matter! And it doesn’t matter what our elected representatives believe. You don’t enforce your opinion by making trouble for the American People.  

Like it or not, we are all at risk together. If the recent shutdown did not demonstrate that, then you might as well stop reading. But the rest of us, the vast majority of the American People, now recognize that too many elected representatives have found too many ways to abuse their power. If we can’t change national politics right now, we can start in our neighborhoods.

Most abusers of the public good scurry for cover when the light goes on. We beg your participation as follows:

1.       Our story is too long to tell on one page. We will tell the story in regular installments on this blog. We ask you to follow, comment, and subscribe.

2.       At some point, and it might not be long from now, you will understand the injustice of our plight. We ask that when you do, you do more than just read. Jot a note or an email to let our oppressors know that you are on to them. Turn others on to our blog.

3.       It is important that all of us realize that this abuse of power and neglect of the People’s well-being is epidemic. If we can demonstrate that informed, participating citizens have the wherewithal to shame public officials into decency, we win a victory for all. We expect that other cases all over America will come to light and be brought to our readers’ attention. We pledge to study and support the causes of others and ask that our readers do the same.

Think of all the good that united Americans have accomplished! National policies have changed. The very consciousness of the People has evolved. When I was a kid in New Jersey, the idea of a Black or female bus driver was unthinkable, just to pose one astounding example. Together we can do amazing things. These are the grass roots.

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