74
Chapter Two- Development of the Community, 1972 – 1995
Since the building of the Mission Viejo community, Rancho Mission Viejo has methodically built master development communities. The community of Rancho Santa
Margarita servers as the best example of this as illustrated by its design concept, features, intended and realized goals of the community and public policy debate over continued suburban development. Today the community, of Rancho Santa Margarita serves as an example for subsequent master planned developments and future urban expansion in and out of Orange County.
Armed with the experience that came from the development of Mission Viejo, in fall, 1972, the development process began anew at Rancho Mission Viejo. This time the
O’Neill-Moiso family under the leadership of Anthony Moiso desired to develop, 5,000 acres east of Mission Viejo on a flat area know as the Plano Trabuco. Mr. Moiso, after reflecting on experiences with conglomerate Phillip Morris, the Mission Viejo
Company’s one-time business partner and now current owner, sought exclusive management in developing this new community on the Plano Trabuco. It was felt that this would best serve the family and Rancho Mission Viejo. Hence, Rancho Mission
Viejo spawned the Santa Margarita Company to purchase the land and develop it as a master developer overseeing the growth of the entire community.

75
In order to understand the design concepts used in the development of Rancho
Santa Margarita one must first reflect on the norm for suburban design in America.
Kenneth Jackson’s,
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States,
(1985) remains the most comprehensive history on American suburbanization and provides an excellent starting point for a broad look at the nation’s change in living patterns and development of an entire culture.
1
Orange County, a microcosm of growth in the last half century demonstrates this. North county development reflects an urbanization of communities lacking continuity designed on the fringe of Los Angeles where suburbanites commuted to work.
2
Subdivisions of homes share strikingly similar attributes yet differ in appearance from other subdivisions in the same city. Usually residential communities remain isolated from each other despite their close proximity.
Even worse are the places people frequent outside of the home. Shopping centers, “big box” chain stores, industrial parks and strip malls do not fit into any one design.
3
Much of this is attributed to the numerous developers involved the building of these communities and the public policy that results from development.
4
Said development usually results in a community that lacks function, physical appeal, and ultimately a sense of community. Judy and Michael Corbett urban consultants describe this development as
“piecemeal planning” and explain it as such,
1 Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. (New York: Oxford
University Press. 1985).
2 Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the
Decline of the American Dream. (New York: North Point Press, 2000). 4f.
3 Ibid., x.
4 Stephanie Pincetl, et al.
, “Suburbanization in Southern California: What’s Happening & Where are We
Going?,” Plenary Session, California Studies Association - Orange County History Conference Dana
Point, California 02CSA-10, 2001, cassette.

76
Piecemeal planning is the result of our tendency to try to deal with each problem as if it existed in a vacuum, as if our attempts to deal with each problem had no effect on other values and problems. Our suburban neighborhoods provide an instructive and unfortunate example. For the past quarter century, they have generally been laid out with no more than two or three goals in mind: to provide every family with its own house and yard, connected to water, sewer, gas, and electric utilities; to allow every resident to drive speedily through the neighborhood to his or her own front door; and to exclude any kind of commercial enterprise.
5
South Orange County developed later than the north county and its developers, many blessed with land derived from complete expansive ranches, sought innovative means to attract residents who ultimately tended to work in the county rather than Los
Angeles. Two design concepts influenced South Orange County developers who sought solutions to “piecemeal planning.” The first design concept which was the master planned community. Jesse Clyde Nichols, in Kansas City, was first credited with pioneering the master planned community and founding the Urban Land Institute in the first half of the twentieth century.
6
William Worley’s J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of
Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities illustrates how the developed looked beyond home construction to community development.
7 Specific architectural styles guided construction and unified a community theme.
8
The Nichols
Company planned for commercial, educational, and recreational locations within its development by zoning them in order to safeguard this.
9
Extensive marketing campaigns drew those seeking a sense of community associated with an “ideal home life,” enjoyable
5 Judy Corbett and Michael Corbett, Designing Sustainable Communities: Learning from Village Homes .
(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000). 3.
6 Jackson, 177.
7 William S. Worley, J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential
Communities , (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990).
8 Ibid. 259.
9 Ibid. 90.

77 neighbors, and the pride of home ownership in an exclusive neighborhood.
10
A homeowner association guaranteed this.
11 Thorough analysis of the housing market and planning provided value for the buyers and the creation of a community that would hold its value for decades after its build out.
12
The second design concept that influenced developers was that of a village concept, which emerged and gained popularity in the late twentieth century. The village concept community developed in and around existing cities or communities as in the cases of Village Homes in Davis and The Irvine Company’s University Village and
Woodbridge communities built in the 1960s and 1970s.
13
In a village concept, community architects such as William Pereira in Irvine made the most of the natural environment by incorporating nature into land-use planning.
14
In terms of design theory, the first architect credited with an integration of the natural environment into a development was an Englishman, Ebeneezer Howard. His garden city design, sought to offer a solution to Europe’s industrial sprawl, which was prevalent by the 1890s.
15
During the Great Depression New Deal, reformers adopted such design techniques in what came to be known as the greenbelt town under the Resettlement Administration
(RA).
16 “Enmity packed homes” typically open onto common areas linked by bike paths
10 Ibid. 72.
11 Ibid. 164.
12 Ibid. 88.
13 Judy Corbett and Michael Corbett, 3.
14 Martin Schiesl, “Designing the Model Community: The Irvine Company and Suburban Development,
1950-88,” in The Transformation of Orange County Since World War II, eds., Rob King, Spencer Olin, and
Mark Poster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 59.
Jackson, 195.
15 Schiesl, 59.
16 Schiesl, 59.
Jackson, 195.

78 thoughtfully laid out by community planners.
17
Homeowner associations created by the developers maintain parks, pools, and common areas within each community.
Furthermore, the homes strategically link to agricultural areas, parks with recreational opportunities, and commercial centers thereby providing a community in which residents enjoy a higher quality of life.
18
The Santa Margarita Company brought in experts to aid in their endeavor.
Richard Reese, the community architect who designed the Woodbridge and Turtle Rock
Communities for the Irvine Company, laid out the plans for the community and obtained the necessary permits. By 1979, Steve Schrank of the Irvine Company came on board as master developer for the company. Building the infrastructure that included fresh water lines, sewer treatment plants, and bridges to support the community proved an expensive task for the Santa Margarita Company. This time financing provided by Copley Real
Estate Properties allowed Moiso control over the development rather than a partnership.
Rancho Mission Viejo would eventually employ similar techniques for the subsequent developments such as 1,000 acres in Las Flores and 4,000 acres Ladera Ranch.
19
Rancho Santa Margarita’s village concept capitalized on many of these previous design ideas gleaned from developments in Mission Viejo and Irvine. Richard Reese, a colleague of William Pereira’s at Irvine, provided instrumental direction in his position of master planner for the Santa Margarita Company. Reese described the concept at Rancho
Santa Margarita as a prototype of a “lifestyle enhanced opportunity village – a place to
17 Schiesl, 64.
18 Judy Corbett and Michael Corbett, 22f.
19 Anthony R. Moiso, 13 December 2000.

79 live life different from any other suburban area one could live.” 20
The heart of this concept would be to develop the entire community around features that serve as people gathering places.
21
The features in the community of Rancho Santa Margarita encouraged residence to leave the confines of their home and interact with each other as well as the environment. Schools, shopping centers, the library, parks and the lake featured places for people to gather. Plazas, courtyards, community rooms, community pools, and meeting places enhanced these places. Furthermore, a “lifestyle system” connected all
Plaza Antonio demonstrates the use of architect Richard Reese’s “people gathering places” Spring 2001
20 Richard Reese, Interview by Michael G. Woods, 5 December 2000, OH #2905, not transcribed. South
Orange County Incorporation Project, California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program. 082.
21 Ibid., 090.

80
Arroyo Vista Park integrates with grade school, walking paths, and community pool, Spring 2001.
these places. The lifestyle system consisted of a network of walking trails integrated with street parkways, which connected all the features.
22
The design for the community was considered so unique in car-dependent Southern California it was the feature of an ABC
News 20/20 segment entitled “Welcome to Heaven” that aired in April of 1992, in which the producers likened it to Shangri-La from the 1937 film Lost Horizon .
23
In order to integrate the community with the natural environment the Santa
Margarita Company took an inventory of the surroundings before planning commenced and used the information to tell them how to design the community. Their inventory revealed a picturesque valley with a flat plane in the center called the Plano Trabuco.
Tijeras Creek and Trabuco Creek skirt the Plano Trabuco within the slopping hills of the valley. The valley draws to a close as Saddleback Mountain rises above all other terrain in the area. Of the 5,000 acres that became Rancho Santa Margarita, 2,500 acres remained preserved as permanent open space held by the county as parkland primarily
22 Ibid., 082.
23 “Welcome to Heaven,” prod. ABC News, 20/20, 3 April 1992. transcript.

81 around the creeks. In doing so, this community became an urban village in an open space where humans predominated in the community and nature in the open space.
24
Planners then brought the pristine natural land that surrounded the Rancho Santa
Margarita up into the community for the purposes of integrating nature and people.
25
Most commonly, this occurred by providing for the sycamore trees, indigenous to the open space, to rise from the preserved areas and into the urban village. The sycamores then line the major parkways through the community and at every intersection; clusters of tress occupy the four corners of the intersection in an urban design known as “corner cutoffs.” In Rancho Santa Margarita humans, cars, and structures do not merely occupy busy intersections but nature as well thereby creating a thoughtful interface between society and its environment. The reasons for such measures centered on urban planners’ awareness that, eventually 50,000 people with their noise and pollution would occupy the community. Reese contends that nature drowns out noise and masks pollution thereby controlling man’s urbanity.
26
Trees begin to rise above the red tiled Rancho Santa Margarita’s roofs demonstrating the efforts to bring the surrounding natural environment into the urban area, January 2001.
24 Richard Reese, 318.
25 Ibid., 318.
26 Ibid., 350.

82
Solving Orange County’s housing shortage provided the first goal of the Santa
Margarita Company in developing Rancho Santa Margarita. In the 1970s thousands of
Orange County workers commuted daily from San Bernardino and Riverside Counties because there were few affordable homes in the county. Therefore, if there were modestly priced homes in the county many of these workers would, most likely, choose to live close to their jobs.
27
Providing affordable homes to a variety of people that would reflect the county’s future demographic shifts accomplished this.
In order to do this the Santa Margarita Company considered various methods to enhance the desirability of the community they planed to grow. First, the home prices in
Rancho Santa Margarita were the lowest in Orange County. In fact, they were fifteen percent below the county’s market price. In the mid-1980s, the community was remote – on the fringe of county urbanization and this provided incentive for people to move out there.
28
Second, the community had to appeal to cross cultural, multi-ethnic, and economically diverse groups of residents. The Santa Margarita Company strove to make the urban village a balanced community for the people who lived there with opportunities for employment, recreation, and worship. The company conceived a village that appealed to people in all stages of life - single, married, families, and retired.
29 A homeowner association, SAMLARC – Santa Margarita Lake and Recreation Community and a community activity organization, CASA - Community Activities & Services
Association were both established by the Santa Margarita Company, which insured a quality life enhancing environment and activities. In essence, the Rancho Santa
27 Anthony Moiso, Interview by Michael G. Woods, 112.
28 Ibid.
29 Richard Reese, 100.

83
Margarita community’s design encouraged one to make the community their life long home.
Rancho Mission Viejo’s ownership of the Santa Margarita Company ended in
1995 as it fell victim to one of the most severe and lengthy recessions in California history. Financiers assumed the company when the housing market declined. Eventually other developers who were not master developers acquired the few areas of undeveloped land left. Some of this land included the community’s Town Center and this accounts for the village’s lack of continuity in this section.
30
However, Rancho Santa Margarita served as a prototype for subsequent Rancho Mission Viejo developments like Las
Flores, Talega Ranch, Ladera Ranch, and current future development for the remaining
23,000 acres.
It is important to look at the motivations behind Rancho Mission Viejo in developing communities like Rancho Santa Margarita. The ability to develop portions of the ranch allowed the family to continue ranching and agricultural activities on their land.
Ownership of thousands of acres requires huge maintenance costs and a burdening property tax bill. In the last few decades, the ranching industry has narrowed to a few large ranching companies dominating the once diverse business. Ideally, cattle graze the
Ranch Mission Viejo in the winter months when feed is plentiful. In the late spring, steers are trucked north to feed for the summer. Today, this involves costly transportation rates accounting for hundreds of dollars per head. The money created by the growth of communities allows the ranch the luxury of continuing the family business and allows the ranch to take an active role in increasing the surrounding property values.
30 Ibid., 487.

84
Over the years, many ranches occupied the communities that would eventually become Orange County. Some were even descendents of Great Mexican Ranchos like the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores – although none as large. As urban sprawl came to these properties, families like the Bixbys, Irvines, Moultons, and Whitings, sold their ranches to developers. Many continued ranching elsewhere in the United States.
Yet, the O’Neill-Moiso Families’ decision to remain and systematically develop their property themselves reflected a noteworthy stewardship for the land. Since 1882, the
O’Neill’s land ownership demonstrated a concern for land preservation, heritage, and the families’ desire to continue ranching on the land that was once their ancestors. Although these concerns at first glance seem virtuous, they make good business sense as well. A rancher ties his or her wealth to the land and ranching provides an income until the land becomes so valued that agricultural pursuits are no longer feasible.
31 Therefore, it is in the rancher’s best interest to pursue such concerns for the land in order to optimize its value.
Venturing into the growth and development of communities like Rancho Santa
Margarita afforded Rancho Mission Viejo a unique opportunity to celebrate and maintain a heritage for their ranch land. Establishment of a sense of history in new communities has long challenged suburban planners. Potential residents desire safe, established communities in order to purchase homes and plant family roots.
32
Most new suburban communities do not possess any sense of historical legacy since they were recently acquired undeveloped lands. In the case of Rancho Mission Viejo’s land, this was
31 Gilbert Aguirre, Interview by Michael G. Woods, 13 April 2001, interview not cataloged and not transcribed. Rancho Mission Viejo Project, California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program,
109.
32 Judy Corbett and Michael Corbett, 143-146.

85 different. The ranch’s operation dates back to an era preceding California’s admission to the Union thereby providing a historical legacy.
Not unlike other developers, the Santa Margarita Company attempted to create a thematic approach to their development of Rancho Santa Margarita. John Findlay illustrates similar thematic development concepts in his work Magic Lands: Western
Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940 in which he examines the success of four development designs – Disneyland, Stanford Industrial Park, Del Webb’s Sun City, and
Seattle’s World Fair in terms of each being “. . . a place, a process and a state of mind.” 33
According to Steve Schrank, the chief of development for Rancho Mission Viejo the company consciously attempted to market the land’s history to homebuyers.
34
In doing so, the ranch went to great lengths to incorporate historical accuracy into their developments. The company drew on archives maintained by the O’Neill family and such depositories as the O’Neill Museum in San Juan Capistrano.
35
Architecture of public buildings maintained a Spanish Colonial design. Construction often took the form of several structures grouped together as a cluster with uniform tile roofs rather than one larger building.
36
The central theme to Rancho Santa Margarita was best characterized in the Santa Margarita Company’s marketing slogan, “ Where the west begins . . . Again” which appeared on development literature and license plate frames distributed by CASA.
Today, the architectural schemes of structures resemble pictures and drawing of buildings on the ranch years ago.
33 John M. Findlay, Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992) 10.
34 Stephen Shrank, 080.
35 Ibid., 396.
36 Richard Reese, 381.

86
Although Rancho Mission Viejo embarked on the development of portions of their ranch in the 1960s, it does not desire to leave its original pursuit – ranching which is still active to the south of Rancho Santa Margarita. Today the ranch company maintains a cow camp along the Ortega Highway. The camp has been in operation since the 1940s.
The ranch actively pursues a variety of agricultural endeavors including the planting of citrus trees, a long abandoned activity in Orange County. The ranch’s geography yields some of the best cattle feed in the world and in rainy seasons.
37 Rancho Mission Viejo drives in thousands of heads of cattle to fatten before returning the stock to a northern
Nevada ranch the O’Neills own.
38
An agricultural agreement maintained by the ranch and the County of Orange precludes development on thirteen specific areas of the property.
39
The ranch maintains contracts not only with tenant farmers, but air-space, mining, oil, waste disposal and quarrying companies as well.
40
The growth and development of communities such as Rancho Santa Margarita provided the Rancho Mission Viejo with the ability to maintain the capital in order to continue ranching activities as the family has since 1882. Anthony Moiso admits, to doing this in a manner that best benefits his family, the employees of the ranch, and the county’s growing population.
41 Since the family intends on remaining on the ranch, master development of their land provides them with the ability to control the future development of their home and business.
37 Gilbert Aguirre.
38 Ibid., 109.
39 Warren Wilson, 13.
40 Gilbert Aguirre, 123.
41 Anthony Moiso, Interview by Michael G. Woods, 299.

87
The development of Rancho Santa Margarita and other such developments by
Rancho Mission Viejo have not been without its criticism. The most vocal criticism comes from the environmental community that speaks for a need to preserve that land or land surrounding the community in its current state. In the United States it had been customary to view land as property and as such an owner is free to use that property as they see fit until the 1970s. However, current environmental views and those who enact public policy see it differently. A growing number of people see that society has a say in the development of lands like Rancho Santa Margarita. This is best articulated in Adam
Rome’s,
The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American
Environmentalism in which he states a person may not have the right to develop large tracts of land as they see fit even if they legitimately own it.
42
A shift in the view of property rights came in 1973 with a report entitled The Use of Land: A Citizens Policy
Guide to Urban Growth in which undeveloped land was no longer viewed as a commodity but as an important resource that needs to be managed.
43
Interestingly, Rome explains that traditionally Americans believed that land value came from the “‘bottom up’ – from the enterprise of the landowner. . . . [Instead ] land value came from the ‘top down’: It was created by society, which provided the context for economic development.”
44
Furthermore, those who enact public policy have adopted the concept of land as a finite resource as mentioned in The Third Annual Report of the Council on
Economic Quality.
45
With regard to Rancho Santa Margarita, Pete De Simone, a research biologist and manager of the Starr Ranch Sanctuary comments in his oral history that at
42 Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American
Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
43 Ibid., 137.
44 Ibib. 138.
45 Ibid. 224.

88 the time of the development’s planning, late 1970s to early 1980s, the environmental community was not as organized as it is today and therefore objections to the development were largely unheard.
46
This criticism exists even though the Rancho Mission Viejo has had a lengthy history of preserving undeveloped land. In 1948, the O’Neills’ began preserving the first portion of the vast ranch to remain in perpetuity by deeding to Orange County 254 acres for the purposes of a nature park and recreation sight, and the land bears their name –
O’Neill Park. Over time, Rancho Mission Viejo generously donated over 1300 acres to this 3100-acre park. Today the park, with its hundred-year-old oak trees and creek beds is home to campers and nature enthusiasts seeking refuge from urban encroachment.
This park complements other such preserves that were once part of the original ranch namely, Starr Ranch home to a National Audubon Society Sanctuary, Caspers Regional
Wilderness Park, and Riley Regional Wilderness Park managed by the county.
47
Although the environmental community was silent at the initial building stage of
Rancho Santa Margarita, activists continue to address the challenges brought by urbanization in ecologically sensitive areas surrounding Rancho Santa Margarita.
According to Mr. DeSimone, the build out of Rancho Santa Margarita has affected the wild lands adjacent to the community in terms of light and noise pollution caused by the
46 Pete DeSimone, Interview by Michael G. Woods, 9 March 2004, interview not cataloged. Rancho Santa
Margarita Project, California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program.
47 “O’Neill Regional Park” [web site on-line] (Trabuco Canyon, accessed 9 April 2004) available from
<http://www.ocparks.com/oneillpark/ >; Internet.
“Starr Ranch Sanctuary” [web site on-line] (Trabuco Canyon, accessed 21 June 2004) available from
<http://www.starrranch.org/ >; Internet.
“Ronald W. Caspers Wilderness Park” [web site on-line] (San Juan Capistrano, accessed 9 April 2004) available from < http://www.ocparks.com/caspers/ >; Internet.
“Thomas F. Riley Wilderness Park” [web site on-line] (Coto De Caza, accessed 9 April 2004) available from < http://www.ocparks.com/rileypark/ >; Internet.

89 city.
48
Ray Chandos, a local environmental activist and recreational astronomer, further confirm this in his oral history done for this project.
49 Water has been another issue as it has been throughout much of California’s development. Communities like Rancho Santa
Margarita pipe water into this inherently dry area. Excessive water drains off into what were once intermittent streams leading eventually to the ocean. Not only does this water contain pollutants such as fertilizers and detergents, but these remains in the streams year around. As a result, animals like frogs breed and alter the life cycle on these once was untouched areas.
50
In addition, plants not indigenous to the area spread into what once wilderness areas altered the flora and forever changed their natural appearance.
51
Despite efforts made by the Santa Margarita Company to create, an aesthetically pleasing community surrounded by riparian open land, their development has altered the natural condition of that once untouched land. As a result, the environmental community has taken a more active role as an educator on the effects of urban development and at the same time used the negative environmental effects of such as fodder to alter or challenge further Rancho Mission Viejo development.
Recently Rancho Mission Viejo took an aggressive leap forward into environmental preservation and the maintenance of open space in Orange County. As late as 1990, Rancho Mission Viejo established the Donna O'Neill Land Conservancy formerly the Rancho Mission Viejo Land Conservancy.
52
In doing so, the ranch, acting in conjunction with the county, devoted land for the purposes of enjoyment and study.
48 Pete DeSimone.
49 Ray Chandos, Interview by Michael G. Woods, 19 March 2004, interview not cataloged. Rancho Santa
Margarita Project, California State University, Fullerton Oral History Program.
50 Pete DeSimone
51 Ibid.
52 “Rancho Mission Viejo: History” [web site on-line] (San Juan Capistrano: Rancho Mission Viejo, accessed 1 February 2004 – 20 June 2004); available from <http://www.ranchomissionviejo.com/history
/ranching.php#>; Internet

90
The land also noted for scenic beauty, frequently accommodates naturalists, ecologists, and school children. The conservancy is 1200 acres in size.
53 In the past, local historians like Spencer Olin have eluded to this move, by the company, toward a more environmentally friendly development approach as being a hedge against those who favored-slow growth in Orange County.
54
In November 2000, the Orange County
Business Journal reported on Anthony Moiso’s plan to preserve sixty percent of the remaining ranch’s 25,000 acres for open space with limited use for ranching, citrus growing and farming.
55
Additional conservancies have been established in Ladera and
Upper Chiquita Canyon at the time of this writing. These gestures hoped to appease
A recent mailer sent to South Orange County residents illustrating Rancho Mission Viejo’s commitment to open space preservation. Note the area devoted to open space in Rancho Santa Margarita.
56
53 “Donna O'Neill Land Conservancy” [web site on-line](San Juan Capistrano, accessed 7 March 2004); available from < http://www.theconservancy.org/ >; Internet.
54 Spencer Olin, “Intraclass Conflict and the Politics of a Fragmented Region,” in The Transformation of
Orange County Since World War II, eds., Rob King, Spencer Olin, and Mark Poster (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 240-245.
55 Orange County Business Journal (Irvine), 6-12 November 2000
56 Courtesy of Rancho Mission Viejo, 2004.

91 environmental groups and government officials who frowned on the spread of continued urbanization. In the end, Rancho Mission Viejo boasts of a conservation plan that would allow for the preservation of some of the county’s prime real estate, the ability for the family to continue agricultural activities, and the final development of the ranch’s remaining acres.
57
57 Orange County Business Journal (Irvine), 6-12 November 2000.

92
Voices of Development
The following three oral histories speak to the planning, development and construction of Rancho Santa Margarita community by Rancho Mission Viejo and the
Santa Margarita Company. The author and Melissa Potter conducted each. The first oral history in this section is Richard Reese’s, the master architect for Rancho Santa
Margarita. Mr. Reese, a colleague of William Pereira previously designed the communities for the Irvine Company. The interview took place at Mr. Reese’s home in
Rancho Santa Margarita on the Lake in December 2000. Mr. Reese, probably more than any other person, played the greatest role in the outcome of the community. In doing so he laid out not only the locations of Rancho Santa Margarita’s lake, parks, schools, streets, residential areas, and business districts but the over all theme of the community.
The second oral history is that of Anthony Moiso, conducted in December 2000 almost thirty years after his previous oral history. Since his last oral history, Rancho
Santa Margarita has been almost completely built out. Rancho Mission Viejo’s formal association as a builder developer ended in 1995 providing Mr. Moiso the opportunity to comment on the development after years of reflection. Mr. Moiso comments on the creation of the Rancho Santa Margarita Company and the steps it went through to build

93 the community as well as the challenges it faced. Most importantly, he explains the motivation behind building the community, the goals of the company and how the Santa
Margarita Company’s achievement.
Steven Schrank, the Master Developer for the Santa Margarita Company is the third oral history. He was interviewed in April 2001 as he was at work developing the
Ladera Ranch community, which too was part of Rancho Mission Viejo. Mr. Schrank illustrates the company’s desire to integrate the historical legacy of Rancho Santa
Margarita into the community. He also comments on other developments in Orange
County and the role each plays in guiding future development. After Richard Reese and
Anthony Moiso developed the master plan for the community, Mr. Schrank’s task was to bring it to life.

94
INTERVIEWEE:
INTERVEWER:
DATE:
Richard Reese, Santa Margarita Company Chief Architect
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
Rancho Santa Margarita Project
RICHARD REESE
Michael Woods and Melissa Potter
December 1, 2000
MW: This is Michael Woods and Melissa Potter for the Rancho Santa Margarita with the Oral History Program at California State University Fullerton. Today is
December 1st, 2000. It's about 3:20 p.m., and we're at the home of Richard Reese speaking to Mr. Reese himself. I want to thank you very much for making time to see us and just go ahead to start out and say that we became aware of you when we saw the 20/20 "Shangri La" piece, and every time we spoke to someone in the city council or Tony Moiso, they said you have to speak to Richard Reese because he designed the city of Santa Margarita. We're wondering if you'd just, to start out, give us a little background on yourself and explain how you became involved in the development of Santa Margarita and what you did.
RR: How much background do you want?
MW: As much as you feel comfortable with. It's meant for you to just – a free flow of who you are and what you did to make the city come to life.

95
RR: Let me start out by saying I think I had two really extraordinary opportunities in the field of master planning new communities, doing the Irvine Ranch and then doing the Rancho Mission Viejo. That started when I graduated from USC in
1954, had a degree in architecture, but the program at that time was very wise in that they knew that a lot of people would not end up as architects. So it had equal emphasis on architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, urban design, planning and zoning law, and public administration. So it was supposedly preparing you to go into any one of those fields. Little did I realize at the time that I was going to go into all of them, which you do get into when you get into new community planning.
I was a private planning consultant, did master plans for various southern
California communities. The last two I did were Claremont and Covina. Then I went and did Anaheim as a consultant and ended up being offered the planning director's job there. I was there from 1957 to 1964 and had accepted the position to be planning director of San Diego when I got a call from Ray Watson at the
Irvine Company inviting me down, supposedly, to critique a plan for the village of University Park. I came down and spent the day doing that, and at the end of the day they offered me a job to be the master planner of the Irvine Ranch.
A lot of people don't even know that I was ever there. William Pereira, the architect, had been there for about five years before me and did the university community. Then the company made a decision that they wanted to have an inhouse planning group and not have that done through a planning consultant. They hired me, we put together a staff of almost fifty people at over $1 million a year

96 budget. It was the largest privately financed new community in the world at the time, and that was from 1965 to 1979 that I was responsible for all the predevelopment master planning, urban design, planning and zoning, all of the permits, all of that for the Irvine Company.
I have to admit, when we all started that in January 1965, none of us really even knew much about what a new community was. This was a new phenomenon in the United States. You had Columbia, Maryland. You had
Reston, Virginia, and a couple other smaller ones, and Irvine. We had to kind of learn on the job. But we did. Looking back on Irvine, it's really where the concept of villages got its start, in my mind.
MW: Throughout the United States.
RR: Yeah. The whole concept of villages, which then evolved over time into what I call a lifestyle village, of which, I believe, Rancho Santa Margarita is the prototype, it all started with the experience at Irvine. It was just a great fifteen years there and a great fifteen years here. Came here in 1979 and retired about five years ago, so it was about fourteen years here. So about fourteen, fifteen years on each one of the jobs.
When I came to Santa Margarita, I said, well, certain conditions. One is that I wouldn't have any employees, because I'd had fifty employees at the Irvine
Company, and I spent too much time in budgeting salaries and personnel administration, and I wanted to do planning. They said that was fine. Essentially, what I did was I put a consulting team together and structured them in the organization as though they were vice presidents of our company. So they were

97 full-time consultants that worked on no other jobs but ours for that whole fifteen years. Much to the benefit of their firms, I might add. (chuckles) We helped some companies through a couple of recessions.
We started the master planning for the whole ranch, which was about
50,000 acres in 1979, and then focused in on what is now Rancho Santa
Margarita. The original plan was actually to create a master plan, create the value, get all the approvals, and then sell it, and we would all take a percentage of that and go our separate ways. But there was a huge recession when we were finished with that in 1982, 1983, when we had our approvals, and all the people buying new communities were gone. Tony Moiso said, "We can either hang it up and wait ‘til the end of the recession or we can go ahead and start working on it ourselves."
I had just been through the experience of Woodbridge with the Irvine
Company where we dared to invest almost $40 million in Woodbridge in the height of the recession. But as a result of that, when the recession was over, we were the first in the market with product, and it was eminently successful. We did the same thing here. We had almost $45 million invested here.
MW: Look at it when it opens up, it's right as the economy started to turn around.
RR: Exactly. So the timing was perfect, and we were one of the, if not the most successful new community in southern California for a number of years when we came online.
The concept from the very beginning, we started out with an affirmation that it was going to be what I called a "lifestyle enhancement opportunity village."

98
A lot of words, but it just means a place where you had the opportunity to live a life different than any suburban area that you'd ever lived in before. How'd we do that? Starting out we said, okay, the entire concept is based on “people gathering places.” Each one of the schools, the shopping centers, the library were all designed as people gathering places. They have plazas, courtyards, community rooms, meeting places, and then there is what we call the "lifestyle system," which was the trail network, off-street trail network and on-street parkways, which were actually designed as linear parkways, which connect all of those facilities together.
Living here on the lake and looking out, it's a real satisfaction to me to see people walking around the lake and using it the way you hoped that they would.
In many cases, the children are even much more creative than that. They use it in ways that I never thought anybody could do, because I wasn't thinking like a kid.
It's just delightful.
One of the goals that we had – we weren't quite sure how we were going to achieve it, other than having moderately priced housing. The housing prices here were about like 15 percent under the market for the same product elsewhere in the county, because we were very remote and had to give people incentive to come out here. We had goals that it should be cross-cultural, multiethnic, and economically diverse. One way you do that is you make it affordable, and the other way you do it is you make it a balanced community where there is employment for the people who live here, and then all of the kinds of opportunities where people can start out – singles and young couples can move

99 here and then move into the young family category, then the mature family category, then the empty nester where the kids have gone off to school, or wherever, and then the active retired, and then the retired, and then the congregate care, and never leave the community. Those were our goals, and I can tell you, it's a real pleasure to me to look at the community today and see a lot of those things actually in place and coming to pass.
One of the joys I get walking around the lake – a one mile walk around the lake, is hearing all of the different languages that people are speaking, both walking around the lake and on the patios of the housing next to the lake. Every time I hear that, I feel successful, that somehow it happened. I think it happened because you create a place called “community.”
I think the nicest thing anybody ever said to me is when we had the tenyear birthday party in the amphitheater by the lake, many people including the council and myself were introduced to the community, and everybody applauded.
It made you feel real good. A guy came up to me afterwards and said, "I really want to thank you." He said, "I came out here because I could buy a home that I could afford for my family," but he said, "I came and I bought a home, and I didn't realize that I was getting a ‘hometown’ thrown in for nothing." He said,
"This is a hometown. There's a real sense of community here. I really love my neighbors. I know my merchants, I know the people who are here, and I just really feel at home for the first time." That's high praise.
MW: It's common. I live here, and I see other people who have that feeling like that.
It's a nice surprise.

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RR: Me, too. I'm single, and I feel that way. I walk around the lake, and I feel like I'm sort of mingling with my extended family. (chuckles)
MW: I just can't say enough about it. It's just very impressive to see the way the city has become and to actually be able to speak to you, since you were the one who made it all come to life.
RR: I'll give you a little flashback. The first time I ever came out here with the core team, the guys who were going to head up the planning, urban design, landscape architecture, the engineering, the planning and zoning regulations and permits, all that, I came with that core team, and we drove up to the top of the hill called the
“Island Pasture” where all the antennas are. We got out, and we're looking out over this beautiful valley. It's a mile wide, it's five miles long, there is a creek bed on each side about a hundred feet deep up to a thousand feet wide, full of hundred year old oaks and sycamore trees. The whole view, angle, the line of sight, is right up the valley with Saddleback Mountain in the background. It was just an awesomely beautiful setting. It was a barley field where they grazed cattle.
From the Plano Looking at Saddleback 58
58 County of Orange, CA. “Environmental Impact Report #320 General Plan Amendment 82-2: Plano
Trabuco Planned Community.” April 1982. Exhibit 35, 227.

101
I said at that time, "You know, I think we ought to all just stand here for a minute and say a silent prayer that God will somehow give us the opportunity to do something worthy of this place." We all just stood there, very silently, staring at all that for some time.
From Plano Trabuco looking toward the Island Pasture. 59
I can say that I really am pleased. All and all I could point out things that didn't turn out as good as we thought, but the important thing is there's nothing that happened here that would have happened normally had it just been a builder doing it. I really credit Tony Moiso and Tom Blum, who worked for Tony and was my boss, and the family for absolutely unfailing support for fifteen years to do what we needed to do to make this an extraordinary place, with extraordinary opportunities for the people that live here.
When you see the level of improvements and the parks, the quality of architecture in the schools, the shopping centers, the library, all of that cost a few percentage points more than it would have otherwise. The quality of the landscaping, setting up a maintenance corporation so that it all gets maintained
59 County of Orange, CA. “Environmental Impact Report #320 General Plan Amendment 82-2: Plano
Trabuco Planned Community.” April 1982. Exhibit 35, 227.

102 properly, all those things took time, took money, took effort, and like I said, Tony was an absolutely unfailing commitment and support person. There were some real arguments when the economy wasn't quite as healthy, that we should cut back and not do certain things, and they just supported me every step of the way in making it happen the way we had originally envisioned it.
MW: It really is amazing.
RR: It started out with an affirmation that held us together the whole fifteen years.
The affirmation went something like that, “it's possible to design an urban place in such a manner that people will have the opportunity to choose to live enhanced lifestyles that have greater openness, communication, nurture, and opportunities for self-expression and full flowering of the human spirit.” Those aren't the exact words. They're actually written down, though. That sort of became the credo that we followed the whole time, is what we are doing each day, each week, each month, each year for fifteen years furthering the progress toward creating lifestyle enhancement opportunities for the people who now live here.
I think the thing that's really unique about Rancho Santa Margarita – and it was true for the work we did when I was at the Irvine Company on Woodbridge and on Turtle Rock and University Park, Tustin Meadows, Harbor View, the villages that have open space and gathering places and things in them – in each one of those villages we started out with the brainstorming sessions asking, what is it that we want the residence of these areas to be able to enjoy when the master developer is gone? That doesn't happen in builder organizations, but it does happen in a master developer organization. That's the role of the master

103 developer. Tony Moiso and Tom Blum were the leaders of that, and I had the privilege of working with them, and they supported me all the way.
MW: It's just amazing. As you mention these other cities – I apologize. I was unaware you were involved to such an extent. I knew you were very involved with this one and Mission Viejo and that.
RR: Not Mission Viejo. I had nothing to do with Mission Viejo.
MW: Oh, okay.
RR: But Tony Moiso and Tom Blum did. That's one of the reasons that all of this came together the way it did is that the team people, Tony and Tom, myself, the people I hired, had all done this once before, either at Mission Viejo or the Irvine
Company. It all came together. It's like everybody wanted to do something better than we'd done before. And had we done just what we'd done before, it would have been satisfactory. It would have been okay. But everybody wanted to do something even more than that.
MW: You've brought me right to my next question. To what extent, exactly, did the planned community, or eventually the city, what aspects inspired you? For example, one off the top of my head, I'm looking at – Mission Viejo has a lake, and the lake is different.
RR: Quite different than either here or Woodbridge.
MW: To what extent did you look at the things in the past in the other communities and say that doesn't work here in Santa Margarita, and this is the way we can make it better?

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RR: Start with Mission Viejo Lake. That was really created because they looked at the interior valley. Everything they'd had up until then had been oriented toward the freeways, access, ease of access. They did a good job of creating an internal environment. And think about it when you drive through Mission Viejo. They depressed, lowered, the arterial highways so that they were sloped banks along the sides and landscaped so that you had a sense of kind of driving through a park.
And I think they did a very good job of that. There really isn't a civic center, per se, but that part of it was really very good.
The lake was created because they realized when they got into the back end of the community, away from the freeway, that there was no there there.
There was no focal point that would create the kind of values that would command the higher priced homes. As a master developer, your goal is to have product in each price range, in each income group. That's the way you penetrate the market is to have product, housing product, that will appeal to each income group in the marketplace. By building that lake, they created that upper end housing market for themselves. When you do that, the value of that trickles out into the rest of the community, and you actually are able to increase the value just because of proximity. Even if you aren't on the lake, there's still a proximity factor. That was kind of the Mission Viejo story, but they took sort of a Lido Isle approach versus Balboa Island approach to the lake’s shoreline
MW: Some high-end houses.
RR: Yes. Very high-end houses. No pedestrian access around the lake. I actually lived at the Finesterra there for a while. The lake was there as an amenity, but

105 you didn't really ever use it. I guess people used the beach up at the other end, the kids did. It was essentially a visual amenity.
The Woodbridge lake was, I think, a better solution in that it did invite the people of the community to come out and have gathering places. We located the shopping center in the middle of it by the lake, and that was fine until the shopping centers were built on each end instead of adding to the one in the middle. Then that kind of drove down the one in the middle. It hurt that one.
The problem there was that the marketing people didn't want the walkway to go all the way around the lake because they wanted to have housing actually penetrate into the lake. I argued against that but did not prevail. So it didn't go around the lake. One of the reasons they said is, well, they didn't want to attract people from outside the village to the lake, which I never could understand. If you're going to build a lake, everybody ought to be able to enjoy it.
Actually, in the interview that I had with Tony Moiso and Tom, they said,
"What would you be looking for?" I said, "Well, one, that you would support me in the design vision that I have, because I have a very clear design vision for that setting. And number two is that we build a lake and the walkway goes all the way around it, and it becomes a community amenity for the entire community, not just for the people that live next to it." I said, "If you can't agree to that, tell me now because I don't want to be here." (chuckles) Tony said, "If that's all you want, that's easy." (laughs) "No problem. Go for it." So we did that.
Here, the lake really ended up as a total community amenity. It's available to everybody in the community. Even though it is a private facility, I enjoy the

106 fact that a lot of people visit from other areas on the Fourth of July and the concerts we used to have out here. At our ten-year birthday party, there must have been 20,000 people around that lake. I don't know if you were there, but it was magnificent. Just before the fireworks went off, I walked around the whole lake, and you could hardly see a piece of grass because people had spread blankets in order to eat their picnic dinners.
MW: Even Fourth of July last year.
RR: Even Fourth of July.
MW: You really had a sense of community.
RR: It was great. Look at the pointillism painting over my mantle entitled A Sunday on La Grande Jatte [It is commonly referred to as the Sunday in the Park
Painting ].
MW: Is it George Seurat who painted that?
RR: Yes. The Seurat painting of the people in the park on the lake. That picture has been an inspiration to me since I was a kid.

107
The inspiration for Rancho Santa Margarita’s Lake 60
MW: That was in my grandmother's house. I've looked at that quite a bit.
RR: In all of my community planning years, I always said, "Boy, if you could do something like that, you'd really have an achievement."
MW: In American history – that's what I teach, and I grew up when I was younger in
San Francisco, and you had that feeling about the park and Washington Park in
Chicago, New York Central Park, Golden Gate Park – of the center for the community where they were going to build your museums and your aquariums.
That's one of the things I noticed when I came back to Santa Margarita was this central location for people to recreate and just relax.
RR: A people gathering place.
MW: That's been going on since the 1880s. It was, I guess, reinvented here in the
1980s, a hundred years later.
RR: Of course, we don't have the hundreds of acres that other people have, but what we have, we did a good job on. And I credit Tony Moiso because every one of our parks is fully developed and fully equipped. I understand other newly incorporating communities, only had grass and trees and sprinklers initially now they've had to go back and build all those facilities in order to have the recreation opportunities.
MW: That's very interesting. I can't imagine all the things that would have to – and you probably do, but I'm very much a layman when it comes to thinking about how you're going to lay out a town. When you sit on top of the hilltop and look back
60 Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, oil on canvas, 1884, The Art Institute of Chicago, Helen
Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection, 1926.224

108 at Saddleback Mountain and the fields, how on earth do you decide where the lake's going to be and where the shopping center is and where this road's going to wrap around here? To me, as a resident, it all seems to flow together so nicely, and I just kind of turn the key and walk in and open up and see it. I can't even imagine – I'm telling my wife and the people I work with, "I'm going to speak to the person who designed the city." And like, "Yeah, how did they? How does that just happen?" We see it when it doesn't happen well. It happens well here.
RR: Each area that you approach from master planning tells you how it wants to be developed. It just tells you. You know, you start here. The first thing we did is an inventory of all of the natural open space landscapes and terrain features. You had this beautiful valley, and then you have the flat plain in the middle of it called the Plano Trabuco, and you have Trabuco Creek on one side, you have Tijeras
Creek on the other. So, in effect, you have this valley defined by the sloping hills.
Then you have these creek beds coming through, and the trees in those creek beds
– anyone who hasn't gone down into O'Neill Park and walked through those oak and sycamore trees is really missing an experience, because they're timeless.
They're just the forest primeval.
So we said, "Okay, let's start with that." The first thing we started with was to preserve all of that open space in perpetuity. We ended up with a 5,000 acre master planning area and 2,500 acres of that became permanent open space and park and recreation land.
MW: How do you do that? How do you reserve land for – not to be developed again?

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RR: You set it aside, and you dedicate it to the county as a regional park. Again, the
O'Neill family had a history. They dedicated the original land for O'Neill Park, so this was just adding land to their original dedication.
So we started with that, and then we said, "Now, how do we take the landscape influence of that park, of those canyon areas, and bring it up into the community?" And why would you want to do that? Because when you have an urban village –in an open space setting where, in the urban village, human beings would predominate, and in the open space, Nature would predominate. And we set development back from the bluff top so there would be a compatible interface between the two.
So we started with, respecting the natural landscape, which includes the oaks, sycamores riparian vegetation in the canyons, and the chaparral on the hillsides. We set back a minimum of a hundred feet from the canyon edges, so there's nothing right out on an edge. If you're walking along the foot of the slope down below, and look up and you won't see a bunch of houses hanging over looking down at you.
We then took the highways and widened them in order that we could have linear parks, parkway parks, along the highways. Take a look at them. We extended the trees up out of the canyon and into the community. Also, when you come in on Marguerite Parkway, or Antonio, and you get to an intersection between two roads, we had what we called “corner cutoffs.”
I think there's nothing worse in a community to have two arterial highways with six-foot block walls backing up somebody's back yard out to the

110 corner of an intersection So we reserved eighty feet so that there's a mini-park on each corner and planted twelve sycamore trees in each quadrant. Eventually, those trees will grow up, and there'll be this just like a sycamore grove at those major intersections. There are also fifty-foot corner cutoffs at minor intersections.
The corner cutoff at the Antonio Parkway and Santa Margarita the community’s busiest intersection,
May 2001
So, you have the trees coming up in the canyon, and then there's this sort of a splash of trees at the intersections. From an urban design point of view, it's not only esthetic, but it's also a safety thing in that when you're driving, you subconsciously sense when you're coming to an intersection and a people gathering or crossing place because of the trees that are extending up in the air at that point. So it has some safety features, too.
Then, of course, if you look at all of the landscaping on all of the individual builders’ projects, it's way above norm that you'd find in a normal development. Why do you do that? Because you're going to end up with a

111 community that's going to have 40-50 thousand people living in it, you're going to have noise, you're going to have congestion at traffic times, and everything; but one thing you know is that Nature talks to you louder than any urban noise, and
Nature modifies congestion and modifies urbanity, if you will. What we're trying to do is bring Nature off the hillsides, up out of the canyon, and bring it like a virtual landscape carpet over the whole community. Even now, when you come in the freeway from the north while you're crossing the river and you look over into the village, the trees are beginning to grow up so you don't see the roofs so much anymore. Eventually, you'll just see tile roofs and trees, and it's going to be a very beautiful, place to come into.
MW: It already is.
RR: It already is, but it's going to be even more so.
MW: I don't know if you've been to our campus, Santa Margarita High School.
RR: We worked with Blurock and the architects on the design of that. That's where the design program came from.
MW: That's one of our questions coming up.
RR: It didn't look like that to begin with. We talked to them about it becoming a people gathering place, there ought to be a campus-like facility, there should be an entry gate drop-off point, there should be a bell tower as the center of attention, there should be bells in it, all those kinds of things. It was not an easy sell to begin with because they had some designers on that that were very, adamant in terms of their approach. Fortunately, Bill Blurock and I had had a friendship

112 when I was with the Irvine Company, and we were able to achieve a lot of what we hoped for.
MW: It's picturesque. I worked at St. John Bosco in Bellflower, which is a very nice campus, but when friends come in for basketball games – I'm right inside that gate, my classroom, and there's a french door and it opens up onto that. It's like, this is your classroom? You've got to be kidding. It's just amazing.
RR: It's a takeoff on the Spanish colonial or Spanish metropolitan style, but it's designed like a village. Instead of all big buildings, it's a series of buildings that give you a sense of entering into a village. And what do you do when you enter a village, you feel comfortable. You know the people there. You can leave your doors open. You feel secure and safe.
MW: It's not like any high school I've ever worked.
Santa Margarita High School Library and beyond is the area for the yet to be built amphitheater
RR: Did they ever build the amphitheater at the end of the walkway?

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MW: No, they haven't.
RR: Haven't gotten that yet.
MW: It's all reserved.
RR: We were ready to do that when the recession ended the company.
MW: This is away from our original study, but we're kind of put on hold right now by the diocese, and as soon as something gets done at Mater Dei – but I don't want to get too far into it – then some other fundraising can start back on our campus.
RR: You can thank Tony Moiso for that whole facility. He and the family dedicated the land, and he just told them, "Design it and build it, we'll get the money."
MW: He's adamant right now – in a meeting that we were at, he was speaking, he's like,
"I don't care what they're doing at Mater Dei. We have to continue with this."
My room where I work is in the first building there, but if you go up to the building in the back, the third floor, walking up there to sub a class and climbing to the top of the stairs and looking back out over the town, you see all the Spanish roofs and the trees, and it's just beautiful.
RR: That was one of the conditions of my employment. I said, "Every building has to have a tile roof, and there has to be thematic community walls, and we're going to have vines growing on those wall to soften down the highways." And it all happened. The tiered landscaping along the arterial highways is so, very important. You just can't believe it. Because there isn't that much space, so you start out with a ground cover, then low shrubs, high shrubs, and trees. The combination of those in conjunction with the landscaping of the project next to it

114 makes it seem like it's as big as a lot of the stuff we did at Irvine, and it's maybe half as large, just because of the landscaping design.
MW: There's so much of it. It's very lush, and it's well cared for by SAMLARC.
RR: Credit the consultants that worked on this project. I had a budget of over $1 million a year and I was administering over $100,000 a month in consulting fees.
And that's a lot of work, a lot of consulting work. When it was all said and done and we shut down and went our way, the consultants told me that we really didn't have any appreciation for how truly extraordinary the Rancho Santa Margarita experience was. They said they had clients all over the United States, and nothing has ever come together in terms of all of the city planning, the urban design, all of the concepts that were created and adhered to consistently through the entire project. A lot of time ideas come, and they get started, and then they get killed off as time goes but. But they said Rancho was unique, one of a kind, probably never would happen again. But if it only happens once, it's a prototype, and if that prototype serves to inspire others, not to copy but to go and do something extraordinary too, then it's served its purpose.
The best people to represent that are the families who came here and call it
“home.” They are really the ambassadors of this town. The thing that you pray for as a community planner, developer, is that you have this master plan, and you pray that you're going to be able to adhere to it and that things aren't going to kill it off. Of course, we got terminated by the recession before we could do the town center, and that's a whole other story. The fact is, we were able to sustain it as long as it did and create a real sense of community here. All the time you're

115 doing that, you're kind of uttering a silent prayer that people are going to show up in the community who believe enough in the concept, in the plan, to take it over and perpetuate it, because there comes a point in time when the master developer loses control. The people of the community take control, through their master community association, and then eventually, through incorporation and a city council.
We had a real false start at first. We had a group show up that sort of became the pawns for some outsiders who had some very grandiose ideas for a
“Super City” out here. Fortunately, that did not prevail. If nothing else, it awakened the real leadership of the community to come out and represent what they believed in. Fortunately, what they believed in was the concept and the planning that we had done. The people who were the natural leadership of the community evolved the cityhood process and were elected as our first five city council people.
MW: That's kind of been an observation of mine as well.
RR: Absolutely. You could not have had five better people for our initial city council, and we're really blessed to have that kind of continuing commitment. By the time they took office they not only knew the community, they helped create the community. They had actually helped create the community. Who else better to serve as your elected representatives?
When I retired five years ago, I felt I had accomplished everything I ever wanted to do in the field of urban planning and community development, except for the town center. Like I said, that's another story.

116
MW: Could you tell us about that?
RR: We had a really magnificent plan for the town center. Unfortunately, the recession caught up with the company. It was the longest recession southern
California had experienced. A master developer creates its income by selling improved land to residential builders, commercial builders, and industrial builders.
MW: So, we're talking about the recession approximately eight years ago.
RR: Right.
MW: That would be like 1992-ish?
RR: Early nineties. Had it not lasted so long, we would have sustained ourselves like we did before and would have still been still building out the city. The personal disappointment to me, because everything you do on a unique village like this, was in order to get the opportunity to get to ultimately do the town center. That was really the heart of the whole community. Everything you'd done up until then was for the purpose of building that central gathering place, the heartbeat of the community, the place where everybody would come together for celebratory events, and all the good things that happen when people come together to celebrate their community.
The company lost it, they went broke, and the financial institution,
Metropolitan Life, took it over and put people in who were good people, but they were no longer a master developer. They were just a real estate company whose goal was to dispose of the property, pay off the debts, and make money if they could. I think they did very, very well, because the recession ended right after

117 they took it over. I think there's a good argument that they never had to take it over, but they did.
MW: They could have held on a little longer.
RR: That's right. I think another six months and we'd have been out of it. And we had created all of these plans, including a central plaza and a central park. The Target
Center and Plaza Antonio developed. They were there. They're representative of the original plan. Then you can see what's happened since then is it's fragmented.
What amazed me, just amazed me, is that the company that took charge and took over would never permit me or us to come in and make a presentation of the planning for the town center. They received phone calls, they received letters.
They absolutely refused to have anything to do with the planning for the town center. That's when I really retired.
If you look around the town, you can definitely see the facilities that were built during that era. The tile roofs are different, the architecture is different. The consultant who was the head of my urban design team consulted with them for a while. He had a positive influence on it, but somehow, without there being the consistency and integrity of a master developer, you couldn't quite pull it off as well as it could have been.
Fortunately, in the last few months, planning commissioners had the last commercial piece of land and the central park before them, and I got a call from the chairman. He said, "Would you please come down and present the planning program for the town center? We've never seen it. We have major projects here being proposed. We have no idea how to evaluate them." As a result of that

118 presentation, they did delay those two projects until the consultant who had been the head of our urban design was able to get involved with the proponents. It slowed it down for a couple of months, and essential improvement out of that process. It'll be okay, but it will not be as great. But it'll be okay.
MW: What exactly in that town center did you envision, and what wasn't part of your vision there?
RR: Well, the park kept shrinking, for one thing. The central park shrunk from about twelve acres down to nine, then lost some of that for parking. A roller hockey facility was put in there, which is a team sports facility, which is totally contrary to the concept of an informal traditional central park. You should not have any organized team sports activities there at all. It was a tragedy because there is a site for that facility right over here in the Arroyo Trabuco community park. They just refused to put it there.
MW: I read something lately they're talking about getting rid of that.
RR: No, no, no. That was a misunderstanding. That occurred as a part of my presentation.
MW: Oh, okay.
RR: No. The facility is there.
MW: It doesn't seem really well used to me.
RR: Well, when it's used, it's almost an impact on the park because you have this surge of team sports people who descend on the park, take all the parking spaces, and super-use it during that time. I'm not putting it down because if you're a roller hockey fan, you're as zealous about that as I am about trees. I'm not making it

119 wrong. I think what's going to occur in the park is okay, but not great. Because that facility took up so much of the land that other essential facilities were eliminated.
The work our consultants originally did and the concepts designed for the central park were unique. They were one of a kind. They were a collection of the best things they had actually accomplished and time tested in other locations in their career, and it was going to come together and be an absolute world class park. Even on nine or ten acres, it was still going to be a world class park.
We did a lot of research in terms of levels of human activity, from intensive to passive on five different levels, identified all of the activities that people could engage in at each one of those five levels of human activity. Then we said, okay, now what are the facilities that would be required in order for those people to engage in those activities at that level of human activity? Like real active to totally passive. Then we said, okay, how much land and how much acreage would each one of those facilities take? Well, you add it up and it's like a hundred acres, and we had ten. Okay. So what that meant was that every acre, every facility, every use in that park had to be designed in such a way that it could be used in multiple ways by different age groups and different levels of intensity of activity. It was a masterful job. That was a real challenge for any landscape architect, and they did a heck of a good job on it.
We'll probably pull off 50 percent of it, which maybe 50 percent more than anybody else ever has. But it would have been nice to have 100 percent of it.

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MW: How soon do you think some of that will be developed? I was just driving through there last night about nine o'clock saying, "I'll be glad they're finally starting on this."
RR: They're getting ready to do the grading right now. And that was a problem because the people who owned the land used the site to put all their excess dirt on so they wouldn't have the expense of trucking it away. So now you've got to deal with all the dirt that's on the site, and as a result, there's going to be less flat, level areas that are multiple-use areas, and more slopes, which, hopefully, will turn out okay.
MW: You had mentioned some things about incorporation and the super city. The super city, I think, was the big catalyst for motivating the people to move to incorporation. Probably the bankruptcy of the county plays a little role in there.
RR: I think so.
MW: Last year, Santa Margarita became a city, and today I think about 40,000 people live here. In your opinion, what accounts for this population growth of about since 1985 to right now, in the last fifteen years?
RR: Well, we planned for it. We just planned for it. It's just that simple. The growth occurred because we planned for that growth, but it won't exceed 50,000 because we planned for that as well. Even that, with an expanded border, is good for the incorporated area.
MW: Was that surprising to you?
RR: No.

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MW: When they finally put it together, that they took in Dove Canyon and those places?
RR: No, no, no. Actually, I took the LAFCO people on a tour. They told me they wanted to see the area that I felt was naturally oriented to what we call Rancho
Santa Margarita. Essentially, what ended up in Santa Margarita was that area.
Because, essentially, Rancho Santa Margarita is that area, defined by the enclosing hillsides that defines the Plano Trabuco. It's a single drainage basin, it's a tributary area, it's a visual thing. When you're in Santa Margarita, you can see
Santa Margarita. You can see the extent of it and the limits of it.
These are the things that create community values, creates a sense of community. If you start adding remote areas that are visually detached, that aren't in the same drainage basin, that aren't in the same tributary area, that functionally are not the same, it just weakens the overall community. What we ended up with,
I think, was perfect. It could not have been better. There might have been an argument that Las Flores could have been a part of it, but there's enough open space separation between the two that it could have gone either way.
MW: That's something I've wondered about. I guess Mission Viejo kind of has their eyes on Las Flores, if that could have been included at the time.
RR: The reason I say that is the ridgeline that separates the Plano Trabuco area and the next canyon over the hill, if you follow that ridgeline down, it proceeds down in one swoop, but then it turns abruptly and goes toward Mission Viejo. It actually separates Ladera from Las Flores and the rest of the lands up this way. So just from that geophysical point of view, I'm saying that Las Flores could have been,

122 geophysically, visually, a part of Rancho Santa Margarita, but we haven't lost anything, and they haven't lost anything, by being their own area. And as Ladera goes, Las Flores will probably go as well. And that's fine.
MW: Do you think your plans here in this city have influenced the building of Ladera down there?
RR: Well, the same people who worked on the design and development of Santa
Margarita are doing Ladera.
MW: It's very village oriented there. I've gone through the model homes and taken the tours.
RR: Yes. I would say just as we learned when we did University Park and Turtle
Rock and then Woodbridge, and then came out and did this village, the team that's doing Ladera now learned from everything they did here, and they're doing what's next down there. They're creating a lot more diversity. There's a lot more architectural thematic neighborhoods kind of thing that I think will have its own enrichment. Turtle Rock had a great influence on that. I don't know if you've been back up in the canyons in the back end of Turtle Rock.
MW: No, I haven't.
RR: They're magnificent. They're these beautiful greenbelts or canyons. They look like they've been there forever. And they weren't. We designed them and built them and landscaped them. Yet they look like these canyons that God put on earth. So Ladera's going to turn out very, very nice.
MW: It does seem to be very nice. The architecture in some of the houses is really interesting. We've looked at some of those.

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RR: What's really unique here in Rancho, though, is the concept of people gathering places. If the town center comes off okay, the central plaza, the multigenerational community building, the city hall, and the central park, those are all one civic center area. If those come off okay, then this really is going to be one of the most unique planned communities ever built. In fact, the urban design consultant, who did this has now become an expert on town center design and goes all over the country consulting on that. To his credit, when I got in trouble with the planning commission because I told people what I thought about what was going on, he called me and he said, "Look. If there's anything I can do to help, I will do it. We worked too long, too hard, and that's too precious just to let go away." He actually is volunteering his time, pro bono, to the city and to the developers, without charge, in order to bring back in a lot of those planning concepts.
MW: Like the Intergenerational Community Center?
RR: That was always a part of it, but the way they were going about it was totally wrong. They had a central plaza with a parking lot around it and then the buildings behind that so that the buildings weren't on the plaza. Hopefully, that's getting turned around. He really stepped in and filled the void. His name's Steve
Kellenberg. He's someone you ought to talk to.
MW: Steve Kellenberg?
RR: Steve Kellenberg. He's somebody you ought to interview, too, because he was really the last hope I had for the town center.
MW: I hope it comes together like that.
RR: I sure hope it does too.

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MW: I have a vested interest in this as a resident. Is there anything more about the incorporation process? Did you play a role in that at all? Did the five people who eventually became the city council people, did they speak to you or ever look for advice from you about the cityhood?
RR: I had really retired then because I was so upset about the roller hockey facility, which I thought, was destroying the potential of the central park that I really just backed off from it and said – when no one will talk to you and no one will support you for a cause like that, I felt abandoned. So I decided that's fine, I'm really going to retire. It's like every generation has to do what they do in their own image. My day here is past, and it's up to these people now. It's their community.
It's up to them to do what they feel is right, and it's up to me to just see that as being just the way it is and not lose sleep over it and give them my blessing. I offered to help. They said, "Anytime you want to make a contribution, come."
But in effect, the romance was happening between the new landowners and these new people who were trying to incorporate, and the last thing they needed was controversy. The last thing they needed was a problem, because they were just getting to know each other. And I became a problem, so I sort of became persona non gratis . Nobody wanted me to show up because I had issues.
All and all, I think what we lost is too bad, a unique opportunity that lost.
Hopefully, they'll be able to pull out the town center and the central plaza and the central park and the design of the city hall. Steve Kellenberg is my only hope right now for anything that's going to happen consistent with the original concepts, because he lived through the original design process and has a feeling

125 for what the opportunity is. They simply don't know what the opportunity is.
Even the new architects and all of the people working on it don't understand the nature of the opportunity, the one of a kind, extraordinary opportunity that was set up there to occur, that just slowly gets diminished and evaporates as time goes by.
If anything, that'll be the sadness that we look back on. But guess what. There isn't anybody going to know it but me. (laughs)
MW: I don't know if you remember seeing the movie Patton . At the end, when he's talking about there aren't going to be generals like me anymore, our day is gone.
RR: And when I think of the great people who participated initially I think of Jack
Wynn. Have you talked to Jack Wynn?
MW: No, I haven't.
RR: Jack Wynns was the first person in the very earliest years that walked into my office, introduced himself, and said he'd moved down from Davis, California, where he and a group of retired professors had bought a little valley and tried to put together an ideal community, and it didn't quite work the way they'd hoped it would. He said he read about what we were trying to do here, and it sounded like exactly what he was looking for, so he came down. He said, "I want you to know
I have copies of everything that you have in your information center, and I'm keeping all of your ads, and if you don't keep your promise, I'm going to file a class action suit against you." I just laughed, and I said, "Well, you are my newest best friend because everything I have is open here." In fact, I had a large office with a conference table for a desk, and the walls were lined with all of the current planning that was going on. So anybody who wanted to come to the

126 company and find out what was going on just came into my office, and when they left, they knew as much about it as anybody in our organization. Totally open.
Jack was so impressed that he created El Campanero , the newsletter.
What he would do is come in, get briefed, and then tell the community about what he had learned in these briefings to keep them advised of what was going on in the community. He was the editor of that monthly paper.
MW: I remember I got a copy just last year.
RR: The last one.
MW: In fact, we archived it, and that was one of the names on our list to speak to Jack
Wynns now that you brought that periodical up.
RR: I think the two of us had a similar experience. We kept showing up and trying to contribute, and nobody wanted to hear it, nobody wanted to hear it anymore. So we just both said, "You know what? We did our job, and these people are here now, and they have to pick it up. They're going to do whatever they're going to do. That's perfect. That's just perfect." Fortunately, it's far enough along I don't think anybody can ignore the concept. It's not that it isn't going to turn out good, because it's going to turn out really good and people are going to love it. It's more a case of lost opportunity of what it could have been.
MW: In looking at the incorporation process that occurred last year, would it have surprised you if it never became a city, if it never incorporated?
RR: Yes, beacuse. Everything we did was designed for it to become its own city.
MW: So it would have.
RR: Absolutely.

127
MW: That's what I see.
RR: Otherwise, why do you create employment? Why do you create retail? Why do you create the tax base? That's what makes it different. We've really created this as a community with a town center, people gathering place, a tax base to where it's economically viable. All of that was intentional. Why? Why would you do all that? Because the ultimate goal you have is that out of this sense of community, out of this natural emergence of leadership from the fabric of the community that a new form of self governance emerged that is also a prototype that can make a difference in the world.
Ask yourself, What does the city council and the planning commission do when they meet when they're in a totally master planned, totally built community, and they don't have to spend 90 percent of their agenda on planning and zoning matters? Literally, maybe 10 percent of their time will be occupied by planning and zoning matters. What do you do with the rest of your time? What you do is you take all of the aspects of wellness and well being and what it means to really create a sense of community, and you set up groups in the community. Like there's a group now working on the city hall and the multigenerational building.
You find out who are the people in this community who are interested in different aspects of wellness, different aspects of well being, different aspects of community celebratory events, all of those kinds of things that are lifestyle enhancement opportunities.
The lifestyle that people are living here now is different than what occurred in suburbia. The lifestyle that can occur in this master planned physical

128 setting with all its people gathering places, with all its interconnecting network and its lake and walks around the lake and the access to regional open space right next door for hiking and biking, all those kinds of things. The opportunities for enhanced lifestyle living are unparalleled. That's the payoff.
Out of all that could evolve a form of community governance – and I use that word, not govern ment , that's the institution, but governance, which is a participating governance kind of thing to where governance isn't some abstract thing that five people are doing in a city hall somewhere. Governance is literally the pulse beat of the community that everybody's involved in. It would all have been worthwhile if it could end up with something like that.
MW: Yeah. You think about it, they don't have to worry about the zoning. They can worry about people.
RR: Exactly. People, their lifestyle, and how do you enhance people's lifestyle?
That's what the central park and the central plaza and the whole town center thing was all about was creating a core place for that to occur. When I hear all these people speaking different languages, you talk to people who are newly here from
Japan, from China, and different places, and what do they want to learn? My version is what they want to do is learn how to live the “California lifestyle.”
People all over the world have heard of California. When you travel – I went around the world. I spent four months doing a Millennium 127-day cruise around the world. You talk to people, "Where are you from?" I'd always say
California, not the United States, not America. I would say California, and they would just lighten up. What people want to know is what is the California

129 lifestyle? How do you live that California lifestyle? And the central park, the central plaza, the city hall, and the Intergenerational Community Center building, if they are designed appropriately, could be the California lifestyle center, could be the prototype for a California lifestyle center that is committed to the people of the community learning how to live a self-expressive lifestyle that results in a full flowering of the human spirit. Have you ever seen the credo we came up with on our tenth anniversary?
MW: No.
RR: I think I've got a copy of it right here. I'll read it to you. This was our ten-year birthday celebration, and a copy of this went into the time capsule before it was buried. It was sort of a challenge of here's who we are, here's what we believe in
1986, and when you open this fifty years from now, measure us against this. If you want to measure whether or not the people who started this all did a good job, take a look at where you are then and say, how much of this came true? And this is what it is:
It says, [reading] "Celebrating the vision, Rancho Santa Margarita,
California. An urban village, self-sufficient and self-governing, with all of the opportunities of city life combined with the sense of community and companionability of village life. An inspiring human settlement honoring the heritage of the land within the natural and urban setting that lifts the spirit and evokes a strong sense of place, of belonging, and civic pride. A healthy community organized for the well being of all, providing the conditions needed to

130 inspire people to achieve their highest human potential and the full flowering of the human spirit."
MW: That's beautiful. And they'll be able to look back at that and say how close did they come.
RR: Yeah. We had a committee that met for a whole year on the chairs over there in my living room putting that together. And Jack Wynns came up with the final language on it, pulled it right together. So, measure us against that.
MW: I'm really glad we had this opportunity to interview you. Some of the interviews that they have back there – they have one from Tony Moiso in 1971 talking about the land and how important it was. Now here we are almost thirty years later sitting down talking to you. And in another few years, they'll have this to archive so we can go back and look at. Is there anything else about the building of the city or the incorporation or things that you could share with us that we may not have asked you today?
RR: I've been talking my head off here.
MW: Oh, it's been great.
RR: You've been very tolerant listening to it all.
MW: I didn't get to ask you any of my questions because I'm going through, and you've hit every single point that we had. You went right into the high school, the incorporation process, the original people, how you get people to rise up and say,
I want to build a city. You've answered all that.
MP: Maybe you could touch on the public high school.

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RR: We originally had a public high school, but when working with the school district, they said they really didn't need another one. And it worked out good for the
Catholic high school.
MW: Oh, it did.
RR: They got a free site.
MW: The monopoly and the name on it. Everybody thinks it is the local public school.
RR: They really lucked out on that because I'm not sure they would have gotten a free site otherwise. Now, you take a look at the junior high school. We knew we weren't getting a high school. Show me another junior high school that has full track and field facilities, that has an auditorium for 350 people, that has a full gymnasium, that has an outdoor food serving facility, and is designed with a complete separation for the students and the faculty. The faculty facilities are all on the second floor, so they actually can get away from the students during the course of the day to do their other work. Very valuable from a faculty point of view to get some relief from that stress.
And the entire academic core is designed so it can be fenced off at the end of the academic day. All the track and field facilities, the auditorium, the food service facilities, all become an extension of the central park and civic center.
The central park goes right up to and combines with the junior high school, and the community trail runs right through the middle of the junior high school and park.
MW: I see that a lot of grade schools have parks adjacent. I live right by Arroyo Vista, and there it is.

132
RR: Exactly. There's an agreement where during the school hours the students get to use that community park as part of their school facilities.
MW: I think that's wonderful.
RR: It is.
MW: There are so many in other communities that take the attitude that this is our land and this is the rule and this is when we conduct business.
RR: The school districts here were really pretty darn good.
MW: There are two different ones. There's the Saddleback and Capistrano.
RR: Well, Saddleback, the facilities turned out a lot better. Saddleback, each of the community facilities is designed as a people gathering place. In Capistrano, they were not. I don't know if it was by intent or necessity. I think some of the laws changed, and financing changed at a state level that limited their ability to do a lot of those things.
But the architects that we dealt with in the schools here, in the Saddleback district, the architect we dealt with in the library facility, everything you see there absolutely came right out of the session when he said, "What is your vision for this library?" Talked to him for a couple of hours, and he came back with a preliminary design I couldn't believe it. Every concept we'd talked about was in there. It was just absolutely beautiful, even the terrace on the north end facing the park so that there could be spillover activities between the park and the library.

133
Library courtyard in the Town Center, Spring 2001.
MW: I don't know whether you're aware of this, but right adjacent to the school is the parish. I'm a member of the parish. They have a joke about Catholics. I just sit in the back of the church rather than the front. I was sitting in the back of the church one day. I'm sitting there and looking out, and there's this glass window there that just follows along the ridgeline to Saddleback Mountain. I'll never move up to the front row now. It's just nice to be able to kind of look over there and how, esthetically, it fits everything.
RR: They could have put a few more trees.
MW: Yeah. They don't have any there.
RR: On the end of the site there.
MW: And it's hot. In the summer, it's really hot.
RR: If you're going south and you look in there, and they could have had more of an indoor/outdoor relationship where the walls are more transparent. And they had

134 patios outside and things that could spill over. That was my intent and hope for that. But nobody asked me. (chuckles)
MW: It is hot there. They built some other buildings, so it's kind of closed in more there now.
RR: I have a concept for architecture, whether it's a church site or a junior high school site or a house, the same concept. If you take a look here at this place, your home is everything inside your property line. From a landscape architecture point of view, you start and you design the floor plan of your home, without any thought of the structure. It's how does the circulation flow, and everything, on your home, which goes out and includes the entire patio. That's your private open space, and then you have semi-private between here and the walkway, and then you have the public open space out there. That's all part of my home. It's all part of the home environment that I have. Then the house is nothing more than that portion of the home that you choose to shelter from the elements.
MW: You've got to talk to my wife about how we're going to redo our house. (laughs)
I'd love you to, because in terms of the backyard it’s not well integrated into the living space.
RR: You want the inside and the outside to just flow right together, absolutely flow together. You really want that.
From the church point of view now, if they'd taken the entire east side and designed – forget about the structure for a minute and just decide how they would
– you take all of the functions that you would ever want to be performed in that church, and then you draw the floor plan of that and how they relate to each other

135 and how one would go with each other. Then all those little side buildings maybe never would have happened. They would have all been just part of the floor plan.
Then you say, okay, now what part of this landscaped floor plan do we want to enclose from the elements, and let the structure rise out of that.
MW: You sound like Frank Lloyd Wright. I keep thinking of Ken Burns's special on
Frank Lloyd Wright that he did. It's great when he's referring to function and how
– I don't know anything about architecture – but how he went ahead and he designed all that.
RR: I had a trip to Phoenix a few years ago. All my life I'd wanted to go, so I drove over there full of anticipation and excitement and got on the site and found out that it closed at three o'clock in the afternoon. Well, I'd waited too long and come too far to be dismayed, so I just started walking around. I was going to give myself a self tour. Some guy came tearing out of a classroom and just gave me the wherewithal and literally kicked me off the site. The lady who took me out there was so embarrassed that she wrote a letter to the chairman of the board, and they sent me an apology, invited me to come back anytime, and gave me an honorary subscription to Frank Lloyd Wright Magazine.
(laughs) That was a real turnoff for me, the end of a dream sort of.
MW: When I was a little kid, we – all the time we'd head back down from Napa to the city, and we'd go through San Rafael and that civic center that was built by him.
And even before, when I was a little kid, probably five years old, my mom would always say, "Look at that weird building there, that different building. It's special.
It was done by Frank Lloyd Wright. He was an architect of the first order." I

136 remembered the building, and then going back, I remember driving one day with my wife as we were coming down from Sonoma. "See that building." (chuckles)
"That's Frank Lloyd Wright's."
RR: If you think about what was unique about Frank Lloyd Wright is he really was a one-man master developer, because his architecture –he didn't end at the site in the building. He went in and did the furniture, he did the dishes, the silverware, everything. It was like an absolute total environment. He had the continuity and the consistency from beginning to end all the way through, and he was just an absolute master at envisioning how all of those things fit together. Full credit for him.
MW: Yeah. Have you ever been interviewed by something like Sunset Magazine as far as – that's one of the magazines we subscribe to, but when you talk about the
California lifestyle and the village and this being one of the first, I would think they'd be –
RR: I wrote a paper on that at one time. How did this California lifestyle emerge?
One of the comments I made in there was a combination of Asian-Oriental influence brought to us by Sunset Magazine . (laughs) All of the landscapes and the architecture and everything. Sunset Magazine was magnificent. It really brought us a lot of that lifestyle quality.
MW: A lot of the things that you talk about seem like they'd be – as far as design and people action and what they do and how they live. It seems like it would be perfect for them.

137
RR: You know it applies. After I left the company, Don Koll, who had Koll
International and had the the master planned development down in Cabo San
Lucas and was very well connected with the Salinas president and government.
The governor of Quintana Roo, which is the Caribbean half of the Yucatan
Peninsula down to Beliz, and the governor of Hidalgo, which is the next big growth area out of Mexico City, the federales district of Mexico City, both wanted master plans done for their areas. Don Koll was talking to them and said,
"I know a guy who really knows about master planning."
Low and behold, they hired us, me and my team of consultants, to do their master plan. We master planned Hidalgo all the way from the border of Mexico
City, which was about, oh, forty-five minutes beyond urban sprawl, and then there was a valley that was ten miles wide and twenty-five miles long that was uncannily like inland Orange County from John Wayne Airport to Capistrano
Beach. Just an amazing thing.
So we came up with a master plan for that 250 square mile area, with a new international airport, a transportation system and urban design concept where people would perpetually not have to have automobiles and could still go home for siestas.
It was all based on a thing called a vecinal . I did a lot of research, and I asked people who were Mexican, "When you think of the essence of what it means to be Mexican, what comes to your mind?" And they all said, “Family.”
The family is the most important quality of that essence of what is Mexico. I said,
"Okay, and how does that express itself?" And out of that came this word

138 vecinal . The vecinal is your home and your neighbors that are part of your extended family. Like the local merchants at the end of the block and the patrones, people who are either relatives or patrons of you and the members of your family. And that's your family. It's not just like us where we live in a house in a subdivision. They actually go beyond the walls of their home and have this thing called a vesnial . So that became the core unit that we designed an entire
250 square mile metropolitan area on.
MW: Oh, you had your room there for the parks.
RR: Yes. The governor, he loved it, and it was great. Unfortunately, the whole
Salinas’ government expired after that. I have no idea what they've ever done with the plan.
MW: Someday I'll go there, and I'll think of you.
RR: The governor of Quintana Roo, had a master plan for the area from Cancun to
Telum, that called for 50,000 hotel rooms! It's like Las Vegas by the sea, without gambling, an opportunity for international people to go to that climate – the middle third is an international biosphere preserve. He wanted a master plan for the southerly third of the Yucatan Peninsula that was totally opposite that, an ecoplan that preserved the whole ecological features of the entire area. So we did that, and that was really fun.
MW: I've read about that.
RR: On southerly third, the plan we came up with only had 2,000 units on it, and the rest of it was all eco-camps and fishing camps and scuba camps and just people really living on the land. But then, for nothing, we threw in two other

139 alternatives, one which had about 5,000 units, which introduced hotels, that were introduced in such a manner so that they would be a Caribbean opportunity for the citizens of Mexico to go to the Caribbean coast and enjoy what the international tourists were enjoying up in Yucatan.
Then there was an alternative with about 20,000 units, because when you got over those few thousand, then you had to create villages to accommodate local people living there who would provide the services to the hotels. There were the three alternatives. We delivered that plan to them. It was really good. At the end of those two master plans, I said, to myself, "There's nothing more professionally for me to do. I'm going to take down my shingle and go play." So that's what I'm doing now. I'm just playing.
MW: Good for you. Melissa, is there anything that you could think of?
MP: No. You have probably two minutes left on your tape.
MW: Okay. Well, we better finish up then. Thank you very much for speaking with us.
RR: Well, all I'm doing now is doing research on the nature of being human and writing about that. I have no idea what I'm going to do with all that information.
(chuckles)
MW: I noticed some of your books there. I'm going to turn the tape off here.
RR: Okay.
END OF INTERVIEW

140
Anthony Moiso, CEO of Rancho Mission Viejo & Santa Margarita Company
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
Rancho Santa Margarita Project
INTERVIEWEE: ANTHONY MOISO
INTERVIEWER: Michael Woods & Melissa Potter
DATE: December 13, 2000
MW: This is Michael Woods and Melissa Potter working the Incorporation of Rancho
Santa Margarita Project with the Oral History Department at California State
University, Fullerton. Today is December 13th, 2000, at about 4:05 p.m. We're at the Rancho Mission Viejo Company, and we're speaking with Mr. Anthony
Moiso about his company and his involvement in Rancho Santa Margarita.
Mr. Moiso, I want to thank you very much for meeting with us today and point out that we had an interview that you had done back in 1972 about the company here and various companies in the area. You left off thirty years ago at the very end of your interview saying that there was land to the east of Mission
Viejo, what became the city of Mission Viejo today, that possibly was going to be developed. Today we know that that became the city of Rancho Santa Margarita

141 just last year. We want to talk to you to see if you could explain some of the things that have occurred since that time.
AM: Thank you for the opportunity to share a little bit. I hope that this is informative and interesting. It's hard to believe that it's been thirty years, or almost thirty years, since this interview, which interview I cannot remember, but that doesn't mean much because there's a lot of things I don't remember anymore. We were talking a little while ago about the date of that interview, which, again, was April
20th, 1972. In September of '72 we closed the sale of the Mission Viejo
Company to Philip Morris, which then and still is a good company, it's a great company. It makes – in those days it was Marlboro cigarettes and Miller beer, and it hadn't made its move into the food business. It's a strong New York Stock
Exchange Company. It bought the Mission Viejo Company, and we were still part of the Mission Viejo Company because what had happened is we sold them the land. Ten thousand acres for Mission Viejo was to be developed. And incidentally, Mission Viejo began in 1964, and it was completed. It may be the only master plan community – well, now there's a new one. Rancho Santa
Margarita is actually just about – it's completed in that all the land has been sold.
Also, Mission Viejo Company, it lasted thirty years, '63 to '93.
What happened is that we sold the company. Then we had the opportunity to look to the rest of the ranch for additional development, or continuing development, and that was the beginning of the thoughts about the five thousand acres of the Plano Trabuco that became the community of Rancho Santa
Margarita.

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To share a little bit about the fall of 1972, when we sold the Mission Viejo
Company, we actually sold the company and all of its employees. So all of a sudden, when we wanted to step across the fence, if you will, and start again, now
I was on Philip Morris's ticket. I actually stepped away from the Mission Viejo
Company and had to put together a whole new employee team. When we owned the Mission Viejo Company, members of our family, then I could run the ranch and I could do anything in the development company. But it was theirs now, and that was a rude awakening and an enlightening experience that all of a sudden you sell something, such as the Mission Viejo Company, to somebody else and they give you more money than you'd ever believed existed in the world, but it belongs to them.
At any rate, we stepped across the line. I asked a man by the name of Jim
Toepfer, T-o-e-p-f-e-r, who was the planner of the community of Mission Viejo, for some help in finding a planner. So he went into his division at Mission Viejo
Company and asked a fellow by the name of Tom Blum, B-l-u-m – Tom, he might be someone you might enjoy talking with, too, because Tom still lives in the area – to help me find a planner because Tom was Toepfer's assistant. After three weeks of diligent searching, Tom offered himself to the job. It was a great blessing because all of a sudden, if we were out to plan another portion of the ranch, to have a man who was by education and experience a planner, having
Tom on the team was great.
The effort started in 1972. On the master plan development side it was myself and Tom Blum. We took an inventory of where we were. This is what I

143 was going to share. And the inventory was we were in a wonderful place, but there were no roads, no access. There was no access. There were no utilities.
There was no water. There was no entitlement or zoning. We had no staff. And you could probably build a case that we probably had no hope, either. What we really had was the opportunity to do it, and we had garnered some experience through our years at Mission Viejo Company. I was blessed there because I think that – Donald Bren of the Irvine Company was our first president at Mission
Viejo Company. There was Don Bren and another man who was executive vice president, who was Donald's lawyer, Philip Riley. Both of those men gave me a tremendous opportunity after I came out of active duty in the army to work at
Mission Viejo Company, and I learned a lot from them. So at Santa Margarita, I had the opportunity to be the leader, which was a great joy and opportunity.
Throughout the seventies, then, with Tom and a building organization, we tried to solve the problems or challenges that we had: no access, ring water. The
Santa Margarita Water District built a pipeline from what was called the Diemer
Filtration Plant – it's now called the Allen McCulloch Line. It's where water comes from the Colorado River and the California –
MW: Is this the one that broke last year?
AM: Well, the pipeline broke. But there was no water. There were thirteen or so water districts from Yorba Linda all the way to San Clemente that participated in the construction of this water line. Tom headed that effort, and we were the catalyst to bring all these agencies together to design a line, get the authority to build the line, sell the bonds, and brought water to the county or there wouldn't be any of

144 this going on down here. So we brought the water. We worked with the county.
The only way you could ever get to Coto de Caza was all the way up El Toro
Road to Cook's Corner, down Live Oak Canyon, by the Trabuco Steakhouse, across the river, and up. So we had to work on access and all of the utilities.
Those are the things we did in the seventies as we headed toward putting together a team. Then in the late seventies, we beefed up our financial capabilities by hiring a real financial guy. His name is Dana Empringham, E-mp-r-i-n-g-h-a-m Dana's no longer with us, but he was with us during all those times. Really a good guy. Dana brought a lot of financial skills to our organization. Then we did reach out to Richard Reese, who had been at the Irvine
Company as a wonderful planner. Much of what had occurred on the Irvine
Ranch after the plan that was put together by William Pereira, the implementation of that plan was headed by Richard. Richard is a wonderful planner, and he helped us. So we started to do some preliminary planning. I hope this is all helpful.
MW: Oh, it's perfect.
AM: We started to do some preliminary planning, and we got really lucky because in the late seventies the County of Orange did a study. It was called SEOCS, the
Southeast Orange County Study, I guess it was. But it was SEOCS. What it did was analyze future growth in the county, what was going to happen. The result was that when the study was completed, it pointed out that the Plano Trabuco, the essentially five thousand acres, which became Santa Margarita, would be the – could be and should be the urban core, if you will, of what they call the "fertile

145 crescent" or the backbone of Orange County. If you took all the ridgelines and the mountains, there was this flat area that made sense to be an urban center. So that happened.
Then the other thing we did – actually, Tom did this – in 1975 we did an analysis that talked about future traffic challenges, and it was determined twentyfive years ago in 1975 that there had to be ulterior roadways, alternate roadways, other choices than the 5, because as population would grow, it was going to turn into a standstill, which it in fact did. So we started working at that time on planning in anticipation of the challenges. What happened to all that? Those efforts and the teams of people that worked on that – the answer to those challenges was the toll roads. We have a fellow who works still with us. His name is Al Hollinden, H-o-l-l-i-n-d-e-n, who is the guru, and it was Al who created the whole scheme of the roadways here in the south county.
So now, in this rapid fire chronology of events, now we get to the late seventies, early eighties, and then we went to the Planning Commission of Orange
County with a plan and the board of supervisors. Actually, we divided what became Santa Margarita in two. Part of it was approved in 1981, I think, and the second part was approved in '82. The key there was – and again, it was choreographed by Tom Blum and Richard Reese – is that we had a working relationship with the County of Orange staff and our people, and what we tried to do was to remedy some of the problems that were starting to happen in Orange
County. What were those problems? People were living out in Moreno Valley east of Riverside. The Inland Empire started to erupt because people could not

146 afford to live in Orange County, but they were employed in Orange County. So the 91 traffic even started then. So what we thought was, if we could provide homes for essentially the same price that people were paying out in San
Bernardino County, they'd live in Orange County. That was part of it. That dream was part of the magic formula.
The other thing we did is we had a party out here on the ranch where we invited all the county staff. It was a milestone day. It was a pretty good afternoon, and there was a lot of beer. Then we got a giant map out. I wish I could find it now. The county staff was given the colored pencils and given the opportunity, if it were theirs, what would you design. What was on that map at the end of the day was not only essentially what our plan was, but it became the plan for Santa Margarita with the business park, the town center – even though we weren't there to complete it, it tends to be there – the golf course, the living areas, the schools, and so on.
So in a quick overview, that's what happened. We can get into the eighties later, and I can share with you the more specifics of some of the things that we thought about. When you talk about incorporation, CASA and some of the other opportunities for the residents to get involved were established early on so that there would be leadership identified. Because all the developer can do is create the place, and then the community belongs to the residents, it doesn't belong to
Moiso or the other developers. I hope that helps.

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MW: That's perfect. We have that on tape. A lot of that is kind of where Richard
Reese left off. He said you do all this building and then the city government rises up out of the foundation.
AM: Richard was really very helpful. I think it was from his experience with the Irvine
Company, as well as his involvement in the Urban Land Institute – the Urban
Land Institute is the coming together of developers from all over the country – that it's wise that the master plan community developer provide the opportunity for leadership to emerge but also nurtures that leadership and provides a way that people can become involved and a way that people can, in fact, influence the continued development of the area. That's what I think has sold it. I think some of those people, or most of them, who were on that first city council are from that initial leadership group. What's the next question?
MW: Were there companies, such as Philip Morris, to come forward and help finance the building of Santa Margarita, the development of that area?
AM: Oh, thanks for that opportunity. Yes and no. Philip Morris was not part of Santa
Margarita at all. The Mission Viejo Company owned by Philip Morris – if I ever have a chance to write the book, and maybe this is the book. We went our separate ways, and in many ways the Mission Viejo Company, which was once ours, became our chief competitor. There were some difficult times. There's a street out there called Melinda Road. Melinda's my wife. And the Mission Viejo
Company wouldn't complete it because it would help us. Alicia Parkway, who is my mother, it wasn't completed. So with the help of the county and the demand for emergency services and stuff, we were able to cause them to be completed.

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Here's what happened. How did we do all this? We did it for a long time with debt. In other words, our entity – and I'm not going to lead you through all the different ownerships, and so on – but the ranch, if you will, Rancho Mission
Viejo, under various legal entities, we started to do this planning. And how did we do that? We garnered, or obtained, a line of credit with the Wells Fargo Bank.
There are two men at Wells Fargo Bank. One's now with another bank, and his name is Jack Rundoffer(?) . Another man's named Charlie Johnson . Wonderful bankers here in Orange County. They were bankers to the builder-developer community. Charlie's retired now. But we had a line of credit, so we borrowed money. Eventually, we borrowed lots of money. First we had a four million dollar line of credit. Then it got extended to thirteen million, nineteen million, thirty-three million, forty-something million. What happened was we didn't spend a lot of money to get the land approved, to get the zoning, to get it entitled, but when you start to go build bridges and roads, and you have to spend a lot of money, we started spending a lot of money.
Eventually, Tom Blum and I and the finance people, we decided that if we had a hundred and twelve million dollar line of credit, everything would be perfect, so we asked them for a hundred and twelve million dollars. It wasn't the last we ever heard of the Wells Fargo Bank, but we never got it. Fortunately, there's a fellow who works here now who is the chief operating officer. His name is Don Vodra, V-o-d-r-a. Don was with the bank at that time, and he moved to the Crocker Bank from Wells Fargo, and when he moved to Crocker Bank, they gave us the line of credit, the Crocker Bank did. What happened was, I couldn't

149 sleep at night. I was waking up at 3:10. I wake up at 3:10 now, too, but that's for another reason.
What we did is we went out to find a partner, an equity partner that would relieve this burden in case anything went wrong. So we did, we found – the group was called Copley Real Estate Advisors. You asked about was there a financial partner. Our first partner was the Wells Fargo Bank, then for a short time Crocker
Bank, and then Copley Real Estate Advisors.
MW: Copley, that sounds familiar.
AM: From Boston.
MW: Like Copley Plaza?
AM: Just like Copley Plaza. And the man who was the leader of the Copley Real
Estate Advisors, a good guy named Joe O'Conner(?) . Joe O'Conner was a wonderful partner. In June of 1985 we closed a deal where Joe O'Conner, for fifty million dollars, bought half of our deal. By this time I had formed Santa
Margarita Company, and if that's of interest, I can lead you through that. We formed a partnership. It was called the Rancho Santa Margarita Joint Venture.
Fifty percent the Santa Margarita Company and 50 percent Copley Real Estate
Advisors.
What was Copley Real Estate Advisors? It was just an investment pool of money. The investors were the insurance company. It escapes me right now. It was Mass Mutual, whatever it was. And the endowment fund at Harvard
University for fifteen million dollars and a few others. So for fifty million dollars they got half. And they also provided us with another line of credit. We took

150 the fifty million – we had not spent the hundred and twelve. We'd spent about forty-seven million dollars. So we hotfooted it down and paid off the debt that we had done already. We built the bridge and Santa Margarita Parkway, and we'd started to build the lake. We'd started to spend the money. So we now have a fresh piece of paper, if you will, and that's how we got going. So yes, we did have a partner, Copley Real Estate Advisors, and they were a great partner.
Then I think you know that we had the – we built the bridge, and it opened in 1984, and Santa Margarita Parkway was extended, wound its way up toward the high school in '84. In the spring of '85, we had the groundbreaking. And some of the pictures I'll show you on the wall out here of the groundbreaking ceremony, where we literally launched the building of the lake and the first builder pads. Then we made our first sales to builders in the spring of '85. That's where all of a sudden we reversed cash flow. Up ‘til that time money was going out all the time, and finally we created money coming in.
The great help there was General Lyon of the William Lyon Company because not only did he step up and buy land to build homes and give us credibility way out in no man's land, because he was and still is one of the great builders of all time, but the fact that General Lyon went along with us told the rest of the world that what we were doing was positive. And, of course, that's when he stepped up when we were building the high school, and we were out raising money. He gave us one and a half million dollars.
MW: Did he live in Coto de Caza?

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AM: He lived in Coto, and we got kind of lucky, too, because his son was going to have to go to high school. But on the other hand, he stepped up and made that kind of a gift, which told the rest of the world that what we were trying to accomplish at Santa Margarita Catholic High School was very positive.
Therefore, when we went to other people, we could say that General Lyon's giving us a million and a half. All of a sudden it raised the sights of everybody.
Building begins at Rancho Santa Margarita in 1986 courtesy of Aerial Eye, Inc.
I've rambled on, but you asked me did we have a partner. We had Copley
Real Estate Advisors. And we could all sleep at night. We were a huge success.
We sold fifteen hundred homes, I think, the first year, when we opened in '86.
Although there was no toll road at that time, and all of a sudden people – it's just like Ladera now. We've already sold almost eleven hundred homes, but we have five hundred people living in them. Not bad, but all of a sudden – and we're going to open Crown Valley Parkway here on February the 9th, so people are going to be able to go west, get on a freeway, and leave. I used to drive to Santa

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Margarita in Santa Margarita Parkway from El Toro Road, and I'd just hide my head because people were just at a standstill trying to leave. I didn't want them to recognize the guy who was responsible for this mess. What's the next one?
MW: The next one is, this came out of what you said. In terms of the county plan and the fertile crescent and this urban area, is that what they had in mind? Because I don't see the city of Santa Margarita as a big urban area.
AM: That's a great question. The original thought was, if you think about the roadway that now has become the toll road, if you start over there on the 91 by Green River and you go all the way to San Onofre, the Plano Trabuco, or Rancho Santa
Margarita, is almost equidistant from each end, believe it or not. So the initial approved plan called for a lot more office space than has been built, as well as there were four buildings – there's a street called Avenida Banderas.
MW: I live on it. I live on Antonio and Banderas, right there.
AM: Okay. If you go up Banderas to where it hits the toll road coming across – this is supposed to go across – and on each corner there were to be four buildings not less than six stories. So there was a goal at first of having really a more urban area there than finally happened, because all of a sudden things changed. There was less demand for office. We went into the recession. So it's changed a little bit.
MW: In terms of what you originally had in mind for the community and what it turned out, were there differences in that? When you look back in the seventies when you're planning this and thinking about developing a new area?

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AM: That's a great question too. I think that the community of Rancho Santa Margarita as it has happened is fabulous, and it really isn't much different than what we had dreamt about when we started. Certainly, as we talked, the real urban feel is not there. It's really not the urban core of the fertile crescent. The only thing that's a little bit different is that some of the dreams we had for what was known as the town Center – I think it's two hundred and thirty acres – didn't happen. There's a street, El Paseo, and El Paseo, at one time, we had plans for – and I don't know if it would have worked – but it was going to be retail down below and then residences above. It was really going to be "Main Street." And the central park was a lot bigger than as it finally happened. Other than that, the business park did happen. The world caught up because the toll road came, and it wasn't way out in the middle of nowhere. Therefore, users then raised their hands and said, "We can, in fact, buy this property and we can get the goods out of here quickly enough."
So the four hundred and fifty acre business park, two hundred and thirty acre downtown area, the range of homes from apartments all the way up to some pretty expensive houses, we called it a fine grain mix of housing opportunities for the first-time home buyer. It all happened. The one thing that wasn't there, there was going to be a public high school, but then the school district, Saddleback
Unified School District, determined that they didn't need two. They didn't need
Trabuco Hills and one in Santa Margarita, so they just kept Trabuco Hills. The high school, of course, has been more than anything we dreamt about.

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One of the keys to Mission Viejo, when we built Mission Viejo, we established a high school right off. Again, it was in the middle of nowhere.
There was just nothing there. But to be able to call Mission Viejo High School
Mission Viejo High School helped. To have a high school called Santa Margarita
High School told the world that we really did care about education. If you think about it for a second, if people can buy a house for a reasonable price – I don't know if it's affordable, but reasonable – and then you've got good schools and more fields than the ordinances call for so that you can have Little League. In
Ladera we have a twenty-three acre park.
So you can live, recreate, have a job nearby, be able to go to a church or synagogue or whatever, and raise your people in a safe area. Those are all the ingredients that prove success. That's what upsets me when there's a whole gang of people that don't want anything to happen. It's pretty neat to be able to impact people's lives, and there's a lot of people, like the fringe element of the environmental role, that would have you keep it – and it's wonderful. So it looks like it does here all the time. But think of all the people who's lives – Mission
Viejo, Santa Margarita, Las Flores, and now all on the Irvine Ranch, were affected. We were able to provide places for people to live, super. So, yeah, I'm sure –
MW: I sure do appreciate it. It turned out great for me, for the Mike Woods family.
AM: There's a woman, Sherry Butterfield, she was the mayor of Mission Viejo. We have a joint cities meeting, Capistrano and Mission Viejo, every quarter. She was here yesterday. She's stepping down now as mayor, and she's lived there since

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1972. It was great to have – maybe it's an ego trip – to have someone say thanks.
You built this house and I live in it. She's lived there since '72.
Anyway, yeah, I think it turned out pretty darn good. The modestly named Antonio Parkway. When I was growing up, we had a Jacaranda tree in the backyard. That's that purple tree. So we put jacaranda trees, you drive it, it's beautiful. I think it's fabulous.
MW: Right in the spring, with the Lilies of the Nile coming up from the bottom.
AM: Oh, it's wonderful. And Reese is responsible for this. In Woodbridge on the
Irvine Ranch, there's some wonderful lakes, but you can't walk around them. We built the lake at Mission Viejo, Lake Mission Viejo, a hundred and twenty-five acres. You go to Tortilla Flats, you think you're in Mexico. But you can't walk around it. Richard said, "We need to be able to put a sidewalk around this lake so people can walk around it." It's only thirteen acres, but you see people walking around that lake all the time. It's great. I'm very proud of what actually happened out there. What's the next one?
MW: The next one is, to what extent did the development in Mission Viejo impact or affect the Rancho Santa Margarita community? Did they look at things like the lakes and say we need a lake here? Like you mentioned Richard Reese's lake.
Were there other things like that?
AM: The answer to your question is yes. At least on this ranch, subsequent developments have benefited from the previous one. In Mission Viejo, we did things that were not called upon any developer to make happen. That came out wrong. But in order to get people to drive through the Irvine Ranch and come all

156 the way down here to Rancho Mission Viejo, you had to have more parks, baseball fields, median strips. We had street lights that looked like bells. And also we had prices of houses that were a lot less money than they were on the
Irvine Ranch. So we took that to the next step in Santa Margarita. But if you look at that aerial photograph over there, you'll see that Mission Viejo has some open space, but not much. In Santa Margarita, we have five thousand acres.
Twenty-five hundred of it is permanent open space. So it's half. So we learned the lesson.
And the times changed, too. We had this O'Neill Park that was the first two hundred and thirty acres donated fifty years ago. But what we've done, because the Arroyo Trabuco, all those bridges across, comes all the way, and it's right outside this building, just one ranch over, we were able to expand the park as we continued the development. And in Ladera, we've even done more. We've got trails. You learn from every one.
MW: That's interesting to see. I think the lake's done better in Santa Margarita than in
Mission Viejo for swimming purposes, paddling around, walking, and that.
AM: It really has. Although the one in Mission Viejo – I have some friends in Mission
Viejo, and they love it because you can go fishing, and you have volleyball tournaments. It's the same thing. But we did it on thirteen acres in Santa
Margarita.
MW: In looking at the process, you mentioned one and I'm guessing that it would have to be – what were some of the frustrations in putting together the city of Santa
Margarita. Things in my mind, the different recessions.

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AM: I really enjoy sharing all this stuff. All of it's positive. Even today when we have problems with environmentalists, it's all positive. But there are day-to-day business challenges that you can describe as frustrations. There's always the frustration of managing people. The biggest frustration that I personally experienced was, of course, the recession, the one in the early nineties. What happened there, we're supposed to be smart, but I don't know if anybody ever really anticipated how bad it was going to be. It was an unbelievably difficult time, because here we were this huge success, and we had built a wonderful team of people. Then what happened is, all of a sudden the economy dried up. I say we cleaned the paper off in '85, but we had borrowed more money. So all of a sudden, when there's no cash, or relatively little cash coming in, and you've got a lot of debt that you still owe and you've got things that have to be done, that was a very difficult time.
And as I think you're eventually aware that my great friend Joe O'Conner at Copley Real Estate Advisors, we had a parting of the ways in 1995. That was difficult because we personally couldn't live up to our share of the additional dollars that were needed. Then, of course, when things start to go wrong, there's a lot of finger-pointing and blaming that may or may not be – I didn't remember it just as Joe remembered it, too. So we had this huge success and this wonderful partnership, but when things went bad – and properties and a lot of other things were going bad because they were in real estate nationwide, so it was a very difficult time. We had a parting of the ways, and we had to restructure the deal.
The good news is that the good market that we've enjoyed since '96, especially

158 now, makes everybody think they're smarter than they are. So we've done very well again.
The venture of Santa Margarita has done well, but what happened specifically to me was that, in somewhat military terms, I was relieved of my command and Copley – or their successors, because they went out of business.
We survived, they went out of business. But at any rate, that was the biggest frustration. The frustrations of building the place were never really frustrations.
You're always trying to control legal expenses and consultant expenses, and we studied this and studied that. We spent a lot more money than you ever have to spend. But the only real disappointment was the fact that personally we did not have the opportunity to see the plan to the very end.
MW: Like the town center.
AM: The town center. I had a chance to be with my successor, a good guy. Have you talked to John Kelter(?)?
MW: No, I haven't.
AM: John Kelter was a friend of ours. In fact, he was the one who helped me find Joe
O'Conner. Eventually, John ended up managing the Rancho Santa Margarita
Joint Venture. I saw him Sunday. We share in the profits, and he was happy to report that the last piece of ground had just closed. That's why I say it's almost over. Anyway, those are the frustrations. Does that help?
MW: Yeah, that does. In talking to Mr. Reese, he said that personally he wanted to do the town center, and he had all these visions for it. Then with the economy slow down, it didn't happen.

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AM: It was too bad. It was going to be the crown jewel of the whole thing, and it's not going to be there. But a lot of people who live there and love it – and it's a wonderful place to live – don't know we had that plan, so therefore, they're not disappointed.
MW: Like when you mentioned about El Paseo being underground houses. I drive down El Paseo all the time and say, "When are we going to get going on this –"
AM: Let's see. If we opened in '86 – in '96 there was a tenth anniversary celebration.
It was a Sunday deal and it was out by the lake. I went there, and I had an opportunity – although I was now technically gone, I got to talk, and it was really enjoyable. Then afterwards, I went to TGI Fridays for a beer. Now there was a bar. This was a real city. And then a sports bar was over there, too. This was a real town. And that was kind of fun.
MW: When I moved in there, to get a pizza, you had to drive over by where Claim
Jumper is now, over by Trabuco Hills High School, in '95. That was a long way for a pizza.
AM: Have you ever been to Valentina's?
MW: No.
AM: If you're in that are – I've never been there, but I went to Bishop's house for dinner, and the cook that night was the chef at Valentina's. If the meal I had is any indication of what Valentina's might be like, it –
MW: Where is that?
AM: It's at the shopping center where the Edwards Cinema is, over by the high school.
That's what I was told. Okay. We'd better go back to this.

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MW: We'll talk about restaurants later. Do you think incorporation was part of the original plan? You said as a developer you could only take it to one –
AM: What it was – and again I take my hat off to Richard Reese. We created a place where the community, the residents would have – it would be their option. I think in the back of our minds we always knew that the people would rise up and seize control, and we wanted to provide the opportunity. What does that mean? We wanted to have the commercial tax base there so that they would have that option.
That's why there's the business park and they can pass all the fiscal standards one has to pass to incorporate as a city. So I think it was always – it was there, but the people are going to have to want it and they're going to have to make it happen, as opposed to the developers leading the way. I don't know if that's still going to be the case in Ladera and the rest of the ranch because now the county starts to ask,
What is your governance plan specifically as you get things entitled? We didn't have one. We just said we want to pave the way to the opportunity's there. And that's where we early on created the opportunity for people to get involved in the various activities.
MW: Did you have anything to do necessarily with the incorporation process?
AM: Not necessary.
MW: You were done by then?
AM: Personally, I did not. And I know that my successors didn't do much. We did provide some monies to help fund the study that would help them nurture the incorporation effort along. I got a hunch if you were to ask the people on city council, Did Moiso and the ranch provide the money, a sufficient amount? We

161 didn't give them as much as they perhaps had hoped for. I kept sending them back to my successors, and they didn't get much from them, I don't think.
MW: Really?
AM: I don't know. But they did well, they made it happen. Again, I go back to – I applaud the tenacity of the leadership group and the dedication they displayed for the years that they waged the battle to make it happen. But I think we were – we as Tom Blum, Richard Reese, and others – we provided the foundation on which they could build.
MW: It was almost something like you could just kind of walk in and create the city.
The town was in place, and if you listen to the city councilmen, there were people when they were trying to educate people about incorporation, that didn't realize they weren't in a city. It had all the services that cities have through the county and the stores.
AM: All those things. I suggest, with great respect for everybody, that Orange County has too many cities. There was a time here, and it wasn't that long ago, but all of a sudden it's thirty or forty years ago, where the board of supervisors ran the whole deal. And much of the services were provided by the county, and you just subscribed. They provided the police service and the trash – all the stuff, all the services. Now, more and more people want to govern themselves.
[end side A, begin side B]
MW: The areas of Dove Canyon and Rancho Cielo and Robinson Ranch, were those part of the property that you mentioned on the Plano Trabuco? Some of them are older. How did they come about?

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AM: The answer is no. But that's a no with an asterisk. The area of Dove Canyon and
Coto de Caza were part of the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las Flores, the big ranch, the original ranch, two hundred and thirty thousand acres. After the war, there was fifty-two thousand acres, Rancho Mission Viejo. In the late thirties, the area that was Coto de Caza, forty-five hundred acres, was sold by the big ranch.
It was sold for twenty dollars an acre, and think about that price. And the area that became the Audubon Wilderness and Caspers Park is about twelve thousand five hundred acres. It was also sold at the same time. But across Plano Trabuco
Road where Robinson Ranch was, that was the Robinson Ranch. It was something else. The ranch ended right there at that road. Where the high school is, there was – I think I used that line when we first met. But we had citrus trees up there, and there was one white house where Juan Carrillo, who still works here, lived with his family and the greatest array of illegal aliens ever assembled.
But it was a long, long way away. The answer to your question is no, they weren't. They started – I guess they started about the same time.
MW: Is there anything else that you could share with us about the development of the community and how that came about?
AM: Gosh. What else could I really share with you?
MW: I feel like there's so much information. I'm just trying to get it all in a nutshell here.
AM: There is, there's a lot of – the blessing was that we started at Mission Viejo
Company, and there was no such industry as master plan community development. Led by Donald Bren, and after Donald left by Phil Riley, we were

163 fortunate enough to be in a business that became – it became real. So we had a chance to work with the people at the Irvine Company early on, and I was lucky to be in the room. So we learned how to do it. I think, because there's so many facets – and it's much more complicated now. In Mission Viejo, we submitted a seventeen-page plan to the county and it was approved, and that was the end of the game. Now, of course, you know all about environmental impact reports and all that stuff.
I'm struggling here to try to share the other things that we did. The rancher would be that – there was a lot of planning, but not just physical planning.
There was planning for the emerging population, there was tax planning, there was ownership – the ranch was owned in one way, and then we tried to transfer it to other ways. We have an estate plan here. If somebody dies around here, I don't know what's going to happen, but we've got it solved. I've been working on it for thirty-five years.
One of the things that we did, and this may be of interest. In 1978, in anticipation of all this stuff – I told you about the seventies that we borrowed this money, and we brought all the water, and we did all this stuff. Then I took my family – we had a family meeting, and I said, "Okay, gang, now's the time to really go make this happen." So we had a meeting. We had it at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. I wish I could find the ten points I had on the wall that said I want to do this, and I will get all the money and I'll get all the people, and we'll make it happen. What we'll do is, I'll buy the land, I'll get it entitled. We'll get it appraised. Because I didn't own anything. I turned to my mother and my uncle,

164 and I said, "What I'll do is I'll go get the land appraised, and then I'll go get it entitled, and then we'll think about – we'll see the difference, and then we'll take a step. We'll either develop it or we'll sell it.
So what happened was, we had it appraised for twenty-one million dollars, the five thousand acres. And I formed this partnership with them. If we ever sold it or developed it, they'd get twenty-one million dollars plus interest, and then the next – if it's worth more, if we get more money, then I got 75 percent of that and the landowners got 25 percent. But then I turned around and gave the 75 percent back to everybody so that no one would think I was cheating anybody. So what happened is, after we got it entitled, it was appraised at fifty-six million dollars, so there was a run – we'd invested a little money, and it was a run that made it worth fifty-six. Okay. Now what? That's only on paper.
Then we ran around, and I thought I had a fiduciary responsibility to all these people to try to find someone who might buy it. Well, nobody would buy it, nobody would pay that. That's when I raised my hand and said, "Okay. I'll buy it. You're all part of this anyway." So that's how we really got into the – the
Mission Viejo Company was our first effort. That's how we got into it. So that's another thing. The financial planning is what I'm trying to tell you. There's one thing about putting the streets in the right place and getting the right builders and build a nice park, but the backbone of the whole thing is the financial planning.
Then we did it all with debt.

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I'm kind of rambling here, but I'm just looking for other things to share with you. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes. Sewer treatment is another thing. We have a sewer treatment plant here.
MW: Where is that?
AM: If we were to go out here to the canyon – I could show you on a map real fast.
MW: Okay.
AM: But if you put the sewer treatment plant where it should be, it'd be right behind where you go to class, in the Arroyo Trabuco right down the hill because everything with gravity flows to it. That's the first place we wanted to put it, but then they found out about it and it didn't work. So now we're going to build a golf course there, which would be wonderful. So we have it in Chiquita Canyon, and we built a sewer treatment plant. Those are the things that happen. If you go buy a house and turn the water on, okay, we build a pipeline to bring the water. You flush the toilet, somebody had to build something where all that goes, and that was all part of what we had to do behind the scenes here. So we built the sewer treatment plant, and being able to expand it so it would accommodate additional development, Las Flores and now Ladera. Another highlight. When we had the groundbreaking for the sewer treatment plant in 1984, we had what was known as the Sewer Stomp. The Sewer Stomp was one of the greatest parties ever held.
I'm kind of rambling here and probably saying too much. But it was a great joy. Santa Margarita was a great joy. You go back and you look at the – in the Information Center, we had a video – now we're going to have a new
Information Center in Ladera where you can get on a bike, and you can ride the

166 trails, and all this. But there it is was really neat. It was a video that ran all the time. I got to stand on the top of a hill like a Chevrolet truck guy in Monument
Valley. It's fun to see because you look out and there's absolutely nothing there but this green flat area, and the helicopter comes zooming in, and I say something about – and in this beautiful environment, there will be a wonderful place to live.
And the fact that it's actually happened, and you can go and see all the kids that go to the high school, you can see all the kids that go to all those schools. It's pretty positive. It was a wonderful experience. It's hard to believe that it really was thirty years ago that the whole thing started. And now it's almost over.
MW: It doesn't seem like that.
AM: It doesn't. We've said a lot here today, Michael. Maybe when you go back and digest what we've said, maybe there'll be some other questions.
MW: I think there might. And I really appreciate your time. I know you're busy and made time to us, and I'm indebted to you for that. There are other things maybe for the future that I thought of. Of course, our school and how that came about and your involvement in that. Then perhaps something a little bit more along the lines of your first interview with your family history and –
AM: I'd be more than happy to do that for you. The school's a wonderful story, I think.
And the family story is a great one because we just got real lucky. The guy came in 1882 and bought a ranch. He didn't buy it. We have a ranch in northern
Nevada. I mean, nobody's ever going to build a freeway through it. It's under snow right now. We got real lucky. And unlike the Irvine family or the Moulton family across the street, or the Whitings where the Foothill Ranch is now, they all

167 left. They sold the land. When I was with the Mission Viejo Company, we bought the Moulton Ranch where Aliso Viejo is now. We've had a wonderful run at it, and we've made some money. We haven't made as much money as people might thing, but we've made more than any reasonably – I guess anybody's really entitled to. So it's been a great thing. I'd like to share that, too. That's a great story.
MW: Those would be potential in the future if you had time. Also, you mentioned something about master planning communities and a little bit of what Mr. Reese said, his idea of the village or using Santa Margarita as an example for other communities.
AM: The terrain here on this ranch lent itself to what he called "urban villages." And if you think about this place – and again, we should go to the map – but there's a series of north/south hill masses, ranges. One's right behind the school. It comes all the way down, it's right out here. So in between all those, Ladera's in Orno
Canyon. It's got mountains on both sides. Santa Margarita's on a flat that's got hills on both sides. So the urban village idea is pretty good, I think.
MW: It is. And then you mentioned some things about land usage, and then you just brought up the financial planning aspect of it, which is very foreign to me. All those things, I think, if time was available to talk about those and anything you'd like to share. We appreciate just having the opportunity to have you speak and record this.
AM: Today's the day that we passed out the Christmas bonuses here. We try to do a good job of doing that rather than just walk up and saying, hey, here's your bonus.

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There's three men here, and there's another guy you might want to talk to who was at Santa Margarita with us, who without him, it's hard to ever – his name is Steve
Schrank, S-c-h-r-a-n-k. He's here. Steven is executive vice president/ development. He's the guy who on a daily basis makes sure that the job gets done. He built Santa Margarita. Reese could think it up, but Schrank built it.
Schrank's the guy who – he's overqualified. His father was a builder. He grew up in a building family. I think his undergraduate degree from SC is in business. He went to business school and law school. No, no. His undergraduate degree is an engineer. But he's really a skilled person, and he was there all the way. Then he took a break in 1989. He was smart. He took a break and went to Mexico to learn how to speak Spanish. Then we brought him back to help us with Ladera.
The point being, so you think about all the people, all the skills, all the caring and dedication of human beings that you have to bring to bear to make something like this happen, whether it's the woman who answers the phone here or those who are in the sales office or those who are out – when you go up
Antonio Parkway and you see that grading that's going on, and we've got a wonderful man by the name of John Markel(?) , who was with us in Santa
Margarita, who's out there making that happen every day. It just doesn't happen.
In my ivory tower, I get to go have all these wonderful dreams, but these are the guys that make it happen. I guess the point is, it's very exciting. You go back to
Ft. Benning [Georgia], it's almost like an army in the field that you have to keep going, and you've got to motivate them and have skilled people. We're very fortunate we've got great people here.

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MW: You have so many great stories, and it's not just stories, it's history that you're involved with.
AM: I had to laugh. I told my wife what I was doing this afternoon, because every day we make out a little list so you can find the guy. She said, "Why are you going to
Cal State Fullerton?" "I'm not going. They're coming. You remember the book about John? I'm so old now, they want to talk to me." (both laugh) Oh, God, is this perfect?
MP: We walk through your pavilion every day.
MW: Yeah, Moiso Pavilion, at the school.
AM: Oh, at the school. That was a great joy to be part of that – that was really fun, to be part of the school, to be able to help make that happen. The biggest story there, though, is where the parish is, that's the girl's field, that's a softball field.
Bishop McFarland stole it. I gave the land –
MW: He was my mom's religion teacher at Lone Mountain at San Francisco College for
Women. He used to teach there, and he was a – what's the term? Canonical lawyer?
AM: Yeah. I love him. But what happened was that I tried – we had one shot at it, and before we had this Joe O'Conner here, we gave the land away. Now we had a financial partner, so I couldn't give the land for a parish. We asked him to consider buying it. Well, he didn't. He took the part of the school. I was up there one day working on – I don't know what I was doing at Marywood there, but I looked up on the wall, and here's the school with a parish just carved out of it.
But that's what they chose to do.

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Now, in Ladera, in what we call the Urban Activities Center – it's kind of a cool area – the church is buying seven and a half acres to build a new parish, which is desperately needed with the crowds that they have at Saint Kilian's and that they have at – there's a lot of stories there.
MW: I'd be interested in those stories. I know the school is, too, having that recorded.
AM: I used to love to try to raise the money with Michael Harris with me, because you walk in to ask somebody for money and you bring a priest with you, it's a little different than me just going my myself.
MW: His personality's so dynamic.
AM: He was great. But anyway, there's some great stories there, too.
MW: That'll be terrific. If you have the time.
AM: Well, we can't do it all tomorrow, but we certainly – we've got a lot of years ahead of us.
MW: Melissa and I, we're going to continue this project through the next semester, until
May, so maybe there's some time in there.
AM: And there's another fellow you might want to talk to, and his name is Gilbert
Aguirre, A-g-u-i-r-r-e. Gilbert's been here for thirty-four years.
MW: I've seen his name somewhere.
AM: If I represent the leadership, as well as the development end of this act, Gilbert came in 1967 as the, quote, "ranch manager."
MW: That's where I've seen his name.
AM: Okay. So Gilbert was the ranch manager. That's a glorified name for being the cow boss. Now, Gilbert's title, I think, is executive vice president/ranch

171 operations. When you go back to fifty-two thousand acres and just the very beginnings of Mission Viejo, this was a real big ranch and there were lots of cattle. He tells wonderful stories. We have a place called the Cow Camp. Cow
Camp's the cowboy headquarters. It's three miles down the street. You'd get on horses, and you'd have to ride all the way to where the school is, or all the way to where Trabuco Hills High School – those were all pastures, and there were cowboys that took care of those places. Then you'd ride back. It's not that long ago, but all of a sudden, it 's thirty-four years ago. It was a wonderful ranch.
What Gilbert has experience in is the diminishing of the ranching operations. We still have cows here, but we don't have two thousand cows. And if it rained, we would bring in three to five thousand cows that just eat grass. Gilbert has grown
– we still plant citrus trees. Nobody else plants citrus trees. They all rip them out.
Well, he's in charge of all that, and his story's a great one.
MW: That would be interesting.
AM: When the San Martin Winery opened up a tasting room in Dana Point in the midsixties, we wondered why we couldn't find any of our cowboys after three o'clock.
That's just another highlight. We owned the Swallows Inn in San Juan
Capistrano. That's another story. And the El Adobe Restaurant, that's even another one.
MW: The O'Neill family owns the El Adobe Restaurant.
AM: That's the same family.
MW: Is it your side of the family or another cousin or –

172
AM: No, it's mine. My uncle's name is Dick O'Neill, and my mother – Alicia Parkway
– is Alice O'Neill, so that's where – this is the O'Neill Ranch. And that's where I got lucky. I get born here. And the great opportunity was to go do this stuff, and
I just got real lucky.
MW: Well, if someone's going to do it, you've certainly not sat on your hands in terms of development. I mean, I've benefited from Santa Margarita. We went through, personally, a period in our time where we'd have bought any house if someone told us we could. And we took a drive out one day, and someone said, "Well, you could buy this house. Why not?" We had a really young daughter and one that was two years older than that and thought that realtor was crazy in the Kaufman
& Broad Development. With, literally, a five thousand loan and a retirement plan and a thousand dollars out of our checking account, we had our first home.
AM: That's what's wonderful. There's ways that people can buy a home that they can afford, and it's a reach for a lot of people, and lots of time the landscaping isn't going to get in quite on time. But it's wonderful that you can create those places.
I remember – well, we'll get out of here. But one of my favorite –
MW: You can tell stories as long as you want to talk.
AM: I want to say it was 1989. I was riding my bike. We were building the golf course at the Tijeras Creek. I went up there and rode out – I lived in Laguna
Beach, and I rode out there, and I rode around the golf course. Then I had to go to the bathroom so badly that I went into the Information Center. Do you know where that is?

173
Tijeras Canyon before Tijeras Creek Golf Course 61
MW: Yes. Now it's the Arco there.
AM: Exactly, which was kind of hard to do. Anyway, I parked my bike, and I ran in to go to the bathroom, and that video was on, and some little kid turned around and says, "There's the guy!" That's an ego trip. (both laugh) That was kind of fun.
At any rate, I hope that this has been helpful.
MW: It's great, it's terrific. Melissa, do you have any questions or anything you want to add?
MP: No.
AM: What do you teach at the school?
MP: I teach world history, psychology, and sociology, sophomore, junior, and senior.
61 County of Orange, CA. “Environmental Impact Report #320 General Plan Amendment 82-2: Plano
Trabuco Planned Community.” April 1982. Exhibit 35, 227.

174
AM: That's great. It's a wonderful place. Our fourth daughter, Frannie, was in the second class. The three older ones, it didn't exist, so they went to Corona del Mar
High School, which was a fine place, but it's not the same. She's a fourth grade teacher now at Saint Joseph's. It's a Catholic school in Cupertino. It's up in the
Bay Area. She's the only one I think really goes to church, unless we're going out to dinner. And I think it's all because of the school. It's all because of the school.
It's a great place.
MW: It is. We teach with Andy Sulick. He's a teacher there.
AM: Oh, yeah. She's in his class.
MW: He speaks very highly of you. We were nervous about meeting you, and he said,
"Oh, no, not this guy. He's very down to earth."
AM: I just remember him.
MW: They share a room together this year.
AM: Please say hello to him. I don't know him, obviously, but I do recall – a lot of those guys are – Frannie's twenty-six now, almost twenty-seven, so it's fun to have been part of it all.
MW: What gives testament to the school is when you see people like Andy who come back and want to teach there. I know sometimes it takes a little bit of time to teach and see the rewards of your teaching, but that's probably the best for the school when they see those guys come back.
AM: I would sure think so. It's a great sense of satisfaction the few times that I ever go out there anymore to know that you had a small part in helping make this happen, because certainly now the school's community has taken over and provided the

175 leadership to continue or to perpetuate what was started there. And that's appropriate. One thing we've never gotten done, though, is the amphitheater.
MW: I know. Richard Reese was talking about that.
AM: The people that gave us the money, I think, are still waiting for the ribbon cutting.
MW: How much was that –
AM: It's not much. A couple of times – I mentioned John Markel, the guy who's in charge of all the grading. Well, he's really a good guy, and when the parish was built, Markel stepped in and worked with Father Petrich to make sure that – he's a great construction guy. He'll help you, Markel . How much is this going to cost? Believe it or not, you go in and you – you know where the hillside is – and you create seating, and you have to put the concrete in, and you have to – it's about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It's not much, but on the priority list, it tends to always fade, although it was going to be the focal point for the whole school gathering.
MW: It's sort of like for school rallies for football teams, or even a Mass outside in the spring.
AM: The whole school sits the way it does because that was going to be it. That was it, and somehow we'll get it built. Somehow we'll get it built. I think – oh, what's that family's name? I can see him.
MW: I'd be pretty mad if I donated money for something that never happened.
AM: I would too. One thing the school did, we had a lot of people involved then. A lot of people really cared. Now the school has a real development office, and I hope that it can grow to somehow bring that group back into the school's

176 community, because they were very enthusiastic about it. That group was lost because there really wasn't the follow up – just the mailers or a newsletter, just stuff that goes out from the schools, I had always hoped would continue to go to those people, and we kind of lost them. But we'll get it back. The day I was out there, when we first met, those women I met in the development office, I think they're pretty –
MW: There was one they had there before, in terms of having background in fundraising and connections with people, she left and now she heads up the juvenile diabetes organization for the county. My daughter has diabetes. So it seems like that's their career.
AM: Oh, it is. We have a deal now called Mission Preservation Foundation. We're trying to complete – you've seen the scaffolding on the mission. We're trying to get the money, get it propped up once and for all time and fix it. Anything I've ever been involved in, you have to have that professional fundraiser helping you, because you can't do it by yourself. There has to be an administrative backup to make it work.
MW: I think they're kind of – I don't know what's going on with the building and what they have planned with Mater Dei –
AM: What they have to deal with, I think, and then we'll wrap it up, but the bishop appropriately said time out. When Santa Margarita was built, in what's now – you know, that annual campaign? What is it? Pastoral Services.
MW: Pastoral Services, PSA.
AM: Okay. Bishop Johnson put South County High School on the list, so –

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MW: He used to be Unity and Growth.
AM: The parish in Los Alamitos, the guy –
MW: Saint Hedwig, that's where I went to grade school.
AM: Okay. They're helping pay for Santa Margarita, twenty-five million dollars. We raised half, and the world raised half, so now it's Mater Dei's time. Okay, time out. No more until Mater Dei gets its money. And they're doing a good job. Do you know those guys? Murphy, who runs Mater Dei, and Solatt?
MW: I have never met them, but I know who they are.
AM: They're really good guys. That's another story. At Queen of Angels Parish in
Corona del Mar, Michael Driscoll, who is now the bishop in Idaho, he's the pastor. Father Donohue's at St. Kilian, he's second in command. And Solatt's just out of the seminary. Now he's the rector at Mater Dei, and it's perfect. He's such a good guy. But he used to ride a motorcycle. Maybe he still does. He's a priest and he's riding this motorcycle. The clincher was when he took the gang to
Mammoth for the ski trip, and a guy kind of forced him off the road and they both slid off the road. And he, the priest, jumped out of the car and grabbed the other driver by the neck. . . . All the kids looking out the window. All right. Enough.
I'm going to go listen – Al Gore's on at six o'clock.
MW: Okay.
END OF INTERVIEW

178
Steven Schrank, Santa Margarita Company Developer
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
Rancho Santa Margarita Project
INTERVIEWEE: STEVE SCHRANK
INTERVIEWER: Michael Woods
April 5, 2001 DATE:
MW: This is Michael Woods with the Rancho Santa Margarita Project with the Oral
History Program at California State Fullerton. It's April 5th, 2001, at 3:00 p.m.
We're at the Rancho Mission Viejo headquarters speaking with Mr. Steve
Schrank. Mr. Schrank, thank you very much for meeting with me today. I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Moiso last December, and at that time we were studying the incorporation of Santa Margarita and how it became a community.
He explained some of the workings of Rancho Mission Viejo and how they went on and created other companies, like the Santa Margarita Company that developed that. He told me at that time that you had literally built Rancho Santa
Margarita. Would you explain to me your role with Rancho Mission Viejo and the development of Santa Margarita or communities like that?
SS: Certainly. I was contacted in 1983 and asked to see if I would want to be involved with the actual physical development of Santa Margarita. It wasn't

179 called that at the time, but it became later known as Rancho Santa Margarita. I actually joined the company, which was the Santa Margarita Company at the time, in March of 1984.
The idea was that most of the entitlement work had been completed.
There was still substantial planning work that needed to be done, but more at the village level, not the concept level. Most of that had already been completed during the planning and entitlement process, the five-year period of time prior to my joining the company. Richard Reese led that effort, and he, I think, joined the company in 1979. It took him and his team of consultants in the company five years to plan it and get the necessary entitlements.
I was asked to form a team of people who were familiar with the actual physical implementation of Rancho Santa Margarita, so my first assignment was to go try to find those people. There were some key positions that we were trying to fill. There was the position of marketing, which was filled by a gentleman by the name of Donald Moe, who had been at the Irvine Company and now again is at the Irvine Company in the year 2001. Another gentleman, Ron White, who became the vice president of development, joined us in 1984 as well. We then later hired, in 1985, a gentleman by the name of Michael Babbitt, who was vice president of construction.
Those are the three key people who I used in forming a team of other people, whose goals were to take the land, take the plan, and go implement it.
Then again involved other consultants that were more on the implementation side,

180 several engineers that weren't doing planning work but were doing design work.
All types of consultants. And eventually we began the physical development.
Our role in development was the master developer. We were not attempting to try to build all the things that were out there, but to put in the major infrastructure and then invite in various types of merchant builders, if you will, whether they be a home builder that's selling homes to residents, or apartment builders who were going to rent apartments, or shopping center developers, or other things. Our job was building the infrastructure and the main community amenities that were going to be the basic network that supported that development, whether it be parks, whether it be lakes, whether it be other types of facilities. That was our job is to work and try to create those and then create development enclaves for these other types of builders in this process.
MW: I have a couple of questions that came up from that. Could you briefly explain your background prior to starting with the Rancho Mission Viejo Company?
SS: My background has been, in large part, development most of my life. My dad was a builder, so I grew up in the development business and always thought about being in real estate development. I originally sought and got a degree in civil engineering and then later a degree in business administration, and then also a law degree. All those which are specific professional degrees that have a lot of application in real estate development.
I worked in construction as well as in development. I did work at one time with the Irvine Company, and that's where I met Mr. Reese. So I had both small

181 scale land development experience as well as very large scale land development that you would get and gain that experience if you were at the Irvine Company.
MW: I'm familiar with the Irvine Company, growing up in Orange County, but other than that, is it unusual in California where someone who owns a large area of land would actually be so involved in how that land is developed into a community, or is it more typical that they would just relinquish the land in terms of the sale and allow a developer to make all those decisions?
SS: I think the history is probably more that the ranching and farming families of the past didn't choose to pursue those types of businesses. They didn't transform themselves into not only being ranchers and farmers but developers. There are a few exceptions. The Irvine Company is one, Rancho Mission Viejo is another.
The Tejon Ranch, which is just actually beginning to develop is another. There are some other families, like the Bixby family, the Segerstroms to a lesser extent, all started as ranchers and farmers but became developers as well during their ownership of the land. Many others chose to sell and move on. I think that's more the rule than the exception.
MW: The thing I notice, living in Santa Margarita and working there and in this area, it seems that there's quite a bit of historical continuity, or at least a desire to continue that ranching aspect or that idea of Rancho Santa Margarita or Rancho
Mission Viejo, incorporate that in the development of the community. Is that correct in that assumption?
SS: There was a very conscious effort to try to embody in the planning of Rancho
Santa Margarita something about the heritage of the land. We thought that that

182 had real meaningful value to people. People want to have roots, they want to understand a little bit about the history of the land, they want to relate to the land.
We were very conscious about that in the naming of it, of some of the design themes, of things that we felt were important and that represent important values that exist in the O'Neill and the Moiso families about something which is authentic, which is friendly, which is hospitable. And those things which we did in a lot of physical design ways tried to foster that.
MW: I just can't help but be struck by the efforts that were made and that. In speaking to Mr. Reese, he was saying how the city was laid out with the architectural schemes and plans. It was extremely well thought out in that area. Have you been involved in any other developments, like Ladera and Los Flores, with the company?
SS: To a very limited extent, Los Flores. I left the company in 1989 to take a year's timeout, which became a seven year timeout, and I rejoined the company in 1996 with the idea of helping in the initial development phases of Ladera Ranch, and that's what I've been involved in in the last five years in a somewhat similar capacity, but in this situation I have both the planning responsibility that Mr.
Reese had as well as the development responsibility.
MW: When they went ahead and developed Rancho Santa Margarita, did they take a look at Mission Viejo and examine what worked and what didn't work? And did they do that, to a certain extent, with the next communities that they built?
SS: Each time we have tackled a new planned community, we do inventory what other master planned communities have done, what's been successful, what's

183 worked, what hasn't worked. There are some wonderful laboratories around in this part of the world. Mission Viejo is an example of development, and there are things that can be borrowed upon. There aren't a lot of original ideas. It's really how do you put them all together in a way that makes sense and applies in this particular circumstance.
We looked closely at many of the things that were done in the villages that the Irvine Company has developed, such as Woodbridge and others. We feel that just because it wasn't our idea doesn't mean it isn't a good idea, and it's mainly more how do you put all those ideas together in some kind of a cohesive way?
And, yes, we absolutely did. We looked at things that were done. We had tours of various planned communities to see what we felt worked and didn't work in this particular context.
MW: Do they ever interview people who live in an area and find out what they like about it, what seems to work or flow naturally?
SS: There had been some consumer research done. We did also contact other people who were involved with how things worked. I'll give you an example. We were very interested in the village of Woodbridge and contacted people who were involved with the administration of the community associations, tried to learn about what kind of parks the people liked. Do they small parks? Big parks? Do they like program parks? What were the recreational needs of the community?
So there was a lot of that research that we did to see if what we were programming was consistent with what people's current experiences were, with people who had generally similar demographic backgrounds.

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MW: I can't even begin to imagine all the things that must be thought of in terms of developing a city. I know when we started looking at the building of the community of Santa Margarita, where you place a street, where you place a building, and that. Could you share some of the challenges that you came across in figuring out the lay of the city, or lay of any of the communities that you've been involved with?
SS: There was already a master plan, so that master plan did delineate in general terms where the uses would occur, where residential villages were, where the business park would be, where the town center would be. That was in large part driven by the physical constraints and opportunities that each property presents.
For example, there was a desire to want to have a transportation corridor that needed to go along the foothills. That would be, logically, if it were going to run across the Plano, which is was designed to do – the exact alignment at the time wasn't known – that that would be something that would probably run through the more urban area of the core. That's why it was created there and in between a town center district and the business park, because those are the types of uses that are probably more compatible with being adjacent to – not only compatible, but reinforcing for signage and other reasons, and visibility. That's why those are there. Residential areas were further away from the corridor.
So there were a number of physical opportunities and constraints that a planning team and a marketing team will go through to say, What did those tell you as far as how you array the uses? Where do they go? What's the most appropriate? Then it gets down to not only that but also, What kind of

185 adjacencies work? What type of uses are more suitable and complementary working together, side by side, intermixed?
Those were all the things that are just basic planning principles that you apply on a much larger scale. You wouldn't have adult businesses next to a school, or a liquor store. Those are not earth-shaking ideas, and it's just through experience and study about what does work and what seems to make sense so you have a good fit.
MW: I know one of the things that impressed us with our interview of Mr. Reese – I don't know to what extent you can comment on this. He said that there was a great effort to incorporate the natural beauty of the area. He mentioned that the trees were brought up from the ravines and up into the town and that as you approach an intersection, each intersection's cut off by a cluster of trees, and thoughtful things like that. Were there any that you're aware of?
SS: That's a good example. We also wanted to have trails that ran the perimeter of the community so people could relate to the open space that was set aside and surrounding it. The choice of colors. We wanted to use earth tones. The colors at the edge of the community were darker and more akin to the open space. As we got into the interior, the colors became lighter. There was trying to be a sensitivity to the setting, that you're creating a fairly urban place in a network of surrounding open space. How do you allow some of that to come into the community so that people can relate to where they are in a physical sense?
There were a lot of techniques like that. The choice of trees. If we're on the edge or near the arroyo, you might introduce sycamore trees, which were

186 indigenous to the riparian areas. So a lot of thought given to that so as to have cues and suggestions about the surrounding open space.
MW: I know he had mentioned that in an urban area the thing that always drowns out human involvement is the natural environment there. We found that to be real interesting. It seems like it makes a lot of sense, but it's something that the average person doesn't think of in terms of how well planned out the city was, the use of trees and parks and plants and such.
You mentioned once before the village and this concept. Could you expand on it a little bit? I know, having been marketed to in terms of buying a house, they always mention that a concept would be to create a place, or Santa
Margarita, where someone could live and work and recreate all in the same area.
To what extent did the development company contribute to that or have that as a goal to provide for homebuyers and merchants?
SS: The original plan tried to have a balance of housing and jobs in mathematical ratios that, let's say, theoretically, everyone that lives in Rancho Santa Margarita could work in Rancho Santa Margarita. So that's how it was determined that there would be four hundred acres of business park, looking at how many jobs would that generate compared to how many jobs would the people that live in Rancho
Santa Margarita need if it were totally a self-contained community, knowing that, in fact, not everyone is going to choose to work and live in the same place or even have the opportunity to do that.
We knew that over time, the percentage would rise. It would start low because people would be mainly living in Rancho Santa Margarita but working

187 elsewhere, but at some point when businesses began to locate there, they would have the opportunity to begin to think about working and living in that place. I hope that answers your question.
MW: It does. It seems kind of strange or different to me. I grew up in the north part of
Orange County, and my father was a schoolteacher also. It seemed to be everybody in my community had a commute. They drove twenty miles or thirty miles, or maybe even further. It seems that that's a natural part of the development of the whole Los Angeles area with the freeway system and ease of transportation. Then comes this small town idea where you're going to have almost a self-contained community. To me, that seems refreshing.
SS: It was responding to a number of needs. There was certainly a need in the county, because during the late seventies and early eighties, there were a number of jobs being created, but the housing was not keeping pace, so the price of housing was going up. People who would have wanted to live and work in Orange County were being forced now to live in Riverside and San Bernardino County and then having to commute back.
The transportation system during that period of time really didn't keep pace. There were actual policies at the state level that discouraged the building of freeways. It was during the Governor Brown administration. So there was not the level of infrastructure, and particularly freeways being built that could take the traffic that was now being generated by the commutes that people had, commuting from Riverside or San Bernardino County into Orange County. So there were very long commutes.

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The idea was that we needed to deal with that. You couldn't build the freeways fast enough, and there wasn't enough money locally or statewide to do that. The County of Orange hadn't been the most successful county of counties in trying even to garner the money that was out there. San Diego County was much more successful in doing so.
So if Rancho Mission Viejo was going to be successful proposing a new planned community, they had to demonstrate that if they were going to do this community that it had minimal impact on the regional transportation system. The real practical way of doing that is having a jobs-housing balance so you didn't have to, on a daily basis, export all the traffic to employment centers far away from where people live. That was one of the underpinnings in the planning of
Rancho Santa Margarita, to have a balanced community, to have job attractors or traffic attractors be located on-site rather than having it be exclusively a residential community, which was, in large part, what Mission Viejo represented.
MW: That's interesting because of the results of the census that came out recently in terms of more people living in Orange County than in – the second largest county in the state. Do you anticipate that that will change in terms of transportation or money allotted for Orange County and the fact that it's now grown in population number, to surpass places like San Diego?
SS: Orange County is rapidly running out of developed land, because of the ocean on largely the south and west. On the north you have the County of Los Angeles.
To the east you have, in large part, the Cleveland National Forest. On the south you have Camp Pendleton. It's very constrained, so, although there's going to be

189 additional growth that's going to take place, Orange County is, in large part, reaching buildout. And there are studies – the SCAG [Southern California
Association of Governments] and other agencies – that would indicate that.
There has been a substantial amount of infrastructure that has been built in the last fifteen years. There was finally a realization in the mid-eighties by the residents of Orange County that the building infrastructure funding of freeways and other arterials had fallen behind the pace of development, and regional traffic growth, a lot of the growth and burden on the freeways, wasn't even being generated by Orange County traffic. The people who choose to go from Los
Angeles to San Diego have to go through Orange County. You can see it on a
Saturday.
So what happened? There was a realized need, and the people of Orange
County decided to tax themselves with a sales tax override, which has done a tremendous amount to improve the condition of the arterial and road systems and freeways of Orange County. On top of that, there are also the corridors that have been built as a result of that same need.
There are still some facilities that need to be built and that aren't fully funded, and there is probably going to be an extension of that tax override at some point which would continue to address transportation needs in Orange County.
Consider, this was a very conservative county; it isn't as much. But to agree to a tax itself, the people realized that there was a serious need to build facilities and it wasn't going to come from state or federal funds totally, and they agreed to tax themselves.

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MW: In terms of the original plan for the development of Santa Margarita, to what extent did it really match up to the original plans? Were there changes because of the economy where plans needed to be pushed aside or things couldn't happen at a certain time?
SS: One thing about any master planned community by its definition – well, not by it's definition, but a large master planned community takes a long time to develop. It was envisioned to be at least a twenty year project, and it became approximately a twenty year project. In any twenty year period of time, there are going to be recessions, there may be boom times, and certainly Rancho Santa Margarita went through several of those. I think given that, that did affect how Santa Margarita was developed. The goal of having more jobs. Residential raced forward with a very strong market in the mid- to late eighties. The land for the business park and a town center didn't absorb at the same level.
In some cases, the uses of the town center, those are local and subregionally driven demands, and you can't build some of those facilities until you have a resident population that's adequate to support the uses that are necessary from an economic standpoint. We knew from the get-go that there were certain things that couldn't be built. Large shopping centers, large subregional malls. You have to have a certain resident population, threshold population, that needs to be reached before those can be made economic and that you can then attract the type of anchor tenants that are going to occupy those spaces.

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The recession certainly slowed down the ability to sell more homes and create that threshold population, as well as this was a time of contraction, and businesses were not relocating. In many cases, they were shrinking, they were laying people off, they were not looking to move and expand. So that did affect the development of the business park, and it did cause a slowing down of that.
On the other hand, things in the mid- to late nineties that did help, and as the county was coming out of the recession, or the state was coming out of the recession, is that there were a number of major transportation projects that were underway that took a number of years to complete. That helped in making
Rancho Santa Margarita more accessible to the central part of the county. So those are all energizers working positive to the negatives that were being traded by the recession.
MW: The community today seems as if it's complete, very little area in Santa Margarita yet to continue and build. Is the Rancho Mission Viejo Company now completely
– have they turned that land over to separate developers? Are they removed of any continuing development in that area? Have they moved on to their other things entirely, like Ladera Ranch or Los Flores?
SS: There are a few remaining parcels that aren't developed. Really, the management team has moved on to focus subsequently on Los Flores, and now into Ladera
Ranch. That's just a normal evolution. There's a spooling up of development activities as your starting, and towards the end, then there are a few residual parties remaining and it's a wind-down. It's no different than the Mission Viejo
Company went through with Mission Viejo and that we did. And we've moved

192 on to other parts to concentrate our development activities on other parts of the ranch.
MW: Mr. Moiso explained this to me, and it took a couple times for me to listen to it on tape before I finally understood. You have the Rancho Mission Viejo Company, and when they think about going about developing an area, they create a company that purchases the land from Rancho Mission Viejo, and that separate company goes about the development. You mentioned that they did that in Mission Viejo and then a partnership with Philip Morris. They tried to do it on their own pretty much with Santa Margarita and Santa Margarita Company.
SS: Right.
MW: As I pass through, I see the signs for the Ladera Company Ranch. Is that still the continued plan of how they go about development of communities?
SS: Well, there's the land. There's the land which is generally known as Rancho
Mission Viejo. It's the larger piece of land. And that has historic significance that
Mr. Moiso may have talked to you about. But we generally will – the people may be employed by an employment entity. Think of it as a development company whose major resources are the people. It then we would apply those talents to a specific piece of the ranch, and for marketing and other reasons, or historical reasons, we may choose to give it a name.
In the case of Rancho Santa Margarita, it was an historic name that was associated with the larger ranch holding. Ladera Ranch is a piece of property that was historically called the Orno. Orno means oven. We didn't feel that it was the best name for the property, so because Ladera means hillside, and it's a hillside

193 piece, and it's a Spanish name, and there's a lot of Spanish history and Mexican history related to this property, we felt that was something that borrowed back into the ranching and farming era and also the historic nature of the property.
Then there was a development company formed that owns that asset. The people are employed by an employment company, a development company, and then they apply their talents and skills to develop that. That's a pattern that's generally been followed, starting first with the Mission Viejo Company that was formed. Santa Margarita Company was involved with the development of
Rancho Santa Margarita. And this is the pattern also with Ladera Ranch. There may be another company that will be formed that will own the land. They'll retain management services from an employment entity, probably Rancho
Mission Viejo, the employment entity, not the place. And that has been the pattern.
MW: That seems very interesting. It was a little vague when we started our research and how that system seemed to work.
SS: It's done for financial, marketing, and other types of reasons.
MW: You mentioned in the case of Ladera also and in Santa Margarita the historical content. Is it just based on family tradition in terms of incorporating those ideas for the accuracy of historical context? Like in, for example, Santa Margarita the old ranch was south of here, and then that was part of Trabuco and Rancho
Mission Viejo. Then the idea to keep that. What resources did they draw on?
Material that the O'Neill family and the Moiso family kept, or where do they go about finding out information about the historical significance of the area?

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SS: There's an archive of photographs. There are several histories of the ranch that we have referred to. Then we think it's very powerful for people who want to come to an area to be able to understand about what the history of that area is so that they can put down roots quickly and relate to that land. It's not like they were born here and the town is a hundred and fifty years old. You're creating something out of raw land. And how do you do that in a way that the people can feel a sense of belonging, that they can begin to create the social institutions that otherwise take many, many decades to do?
There's a lot of things that we think when you share that historical perspective, and the values that were surrounding the development of the property, and who the people were who lived on this land, and what kind of people were they, and what were their attributes. We think that's something which resonates with people and that people hold at high value and can help them early on in feeling a sense of belonging.
Some of the traditions of the ranch, we've used as a catalyst to help foster social interaction. We think that's a way of getting people to know other people and getting to know your neighbors and getting to work together on common things. We think that's what helps make a community a community as opposed to just a group of homes. Not everyone has children, and not everyone the day that you move into your house, when your children are off down the street making new friends, and all of them have those opportunities, and we think that's a way to get people together and create a real vibrant community that has social institutions.

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We can't create all the things that make a community. We can create the physical things, but the interaction is ultimately up to the people, and what we're trying to do is give them an opportunity to do that in an environment that encourages it.
MW: This is so interesting to me, because I teach high school, and right now, at this time of the year, most high school history teachers in American history are on that period of time in the 1950s, the postwar years. Just today we were going over with our students trying to convey to them the idea of the security that was needed in the postwar years, the idea of having come through the Depression and then the war, and then the suburban growth that was created. It's funny in that you'll open up a history book, and you'll see examples of communities that have sprung up.
SS: Levittown.
MW: Levittown was one of the answers on my test on Friday, in fact. But you'll look at this and you'll ask the students, "What seems strange to you about this?" And they don't see it because they grew up in a community like this. Many of the same things that you've mentioned right now come up in history books in the
1950s, so it seems like as if that feeling is reinventing itself. It seems, to me, that in this suburban area that there's a real effort to create a sense of security and belonging in a very new place.
It seems almost unique. It seems like a lot of the communities in Orange
County, when they were developed in between these two periods of time, like the
Long Beach area where you didn't have that suburban growth like that and this area out here, there's been a break as Los Angeles has grown, and somehow the

196 companies in developing have come back to that idea of creating a really – planning and well thinking out a community and building a village where people can feel like they moved in, and they instantaneously have roots and have a home and that it isn't something that's brand new, that it's very steeped in tradition and in history. I think that that's been something that we've uncovered in looking at this a little bit more in depth in terms of the development.
MW: That was a conscious effort on our part to try to help that, because we think that if people care about their community, there'll be less crime, there'll be – there's a whole bunch of social problems that are associated with people who don't have roots and don't feel like they belong. And we thought that was an important aspect.
SS: Do you find that that makes your company unique? Or did other companies have that – the Irvine Company with the village, but you can't help but when you travel to places like Fullerton and Anaheim, it doesn't seem as well planned out.
MW: Well, it may not have, because when some of those – well, Fullerton is a town probably at least a hundred years old, or Orange, or Anaheim. Those just sort of grew up, and I don't know if there was any formal training and development as a profession, and master planning was not really formalized. They just occurred based upon natural population migration and economic forces that were at work.
They did, over a long period of time, develop many important social institutions and traditions, clubs, the Elks, all the types of social interaction and organized groups for people that share common interests. But it took a lot longer.
It took a hundred years for a Fullerton to become a Fullerton.

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But also, they didn't have the opportunity to do it at the scale because there were multiple owners of the land. When you own a great deal of land, you have the ability to master plan it at a scale which is of the size of a small town, in
Orange County. But in many places, because of the land grant acts, these lands were broken up into smaller parcels, and not any one individual, in many cases, owned enough land to be able to paint on a canvas as large as we've had the opportunity to paint on. It's somewhat unique that you have large ownership of parcels of land that have been held together as long as these have and that the
Irvine property has. It's provided an opportunity to do things you couldn't do with the multiple ownerships that existed in these other places.
So you can decide that that's going to be the town center, and this is going to be the residential, and this is going to be this, instead of saying – each landowner says, I'm going to have a gas station on every corner, or I'm going to have a shopping center where I want it. It doesn't have the same cohesive nature.
SS: Many of these things happened in these communities you point to before your cities incorporated around them or before cities, even if they weren't incorporated, began to exercise overarching planning authority.
MW: From what I know about history, was Levitt pretty much the first in terms of a master development for a community?
SS: I can't answer that. Certainly, Mr. Levitt was one of the first to do production housing on a mass produced basis. There were people here in this part of the world that also were doing it, like Mr. Kaiser and others that were after the war because of the demand. Population was exploding and people were moving to

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California, and there was a need for that. There are planned communities that took place before World War II, but they're probably not of the scale that
Levittown was.
MW: It seems very unique in terms of somebody, as you said, having the ability to retain the land for so long and then successfully and thoughtfully orchestrating developing areas and still maintaining the ranching aspect that the company's involved in and gradually allowing for that building to occur.
SS: It's a unique opportunity that we have the chance to be able to do that. Because we control all this land.
MW: Can you think of any other places in the state, other than Irvine, that have had that opportunity?
SS: Valencia is an area, with Newhall Ranch. They have been able to do the same thing. That goes back twenty-five or thirty years. There are smaller areas in –
Acosta is another place in San Diego County. There are some large planned communities that go back a number of years, but generally, it is some entity that has held onto that property for a long, long period of time, and as urbanization and population has moved close to it, it has begun to transform itself into something more than a ranching and farming operation. That's what we have done. That started here with the freeway coming through along the side of the ranch. It happened with Valencia. It happened with the Irvine Company the same way.
MW: Will it continue to happen with Rancho Mission Viejo or the O'Neill properties?
Do you think eventually it'll all become one city? Are there ways in which they

199 try to maintain the rule or ranch-type components? Or do they want to hold onto that in perpetuity?
SS: I think there's a strong affinity for the land. I know that the family isn't intending to sell the ranch and go some other place with the money that someone might pay them. There will also probably be other development activities on the remainder of the ranch, but also, for all time, much of the ranch will be left in very much the condition that it's in now. There'll be a lot of open space, there'll be some farming activities, probably some ranching activities that will continue because the family has a very close affinity to the land.
MW: It seems to be a great history for California because it reflects the needs of the ever-evolving state, even back to the original ranch and the grant from Mexico and then the Forster v. Pico court case to this, and then they gradually go through agriculture with the state, and then today as suburbanization happens, it's also involved in that. It's almost like a different sort of growing or farming. They're growing communities and not just agricultural pursuits.
That pretty much encompasses all the questions that I had planned. Is there anything that you'd like to mention or that I left out in terms of the overall development of these areas like Santa Margarita, but not limited to just Santa
Margarita, that you could share or think may be valuable?
SS: I think we covered it.
MW: Okay. I want to thank you very much for your time. I know it's valuable, and this really is valuable to us at Cal State Fullerton in terms of this. We're probably going to compile these all together in terms of an oral history of the people

200 involved in the development of either Santa Margarita or all the communities out here.
SS: Okay. I'm happy to participate in it.
MW: Thank you very much.
END OF INTERVIEW

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Voices of Post Development
In an effort to balance the account of those integral to the development with those critical of development, the following two oral histories were conducted. Pete DeSimone is a biologist who manages Starr Ranch Audubon Sanctuary adjacent to the City of
Rancho Santa Margarita’s easternmost boundary. His oral history was conducted March
2004 on the porch of the Starr Ranch headquarters by the author. Starr Ranch in many ways remains untouched by development in Orange County. Mr. DeSimone has been working at the sanctuary since 1985 and has witnessed the development entirely. In his account, he explains how the development has affected the preserve and urbanity has threatened the natural condition of the land. To counter this encroachment on the natural environment Mr. DeSimone has focused his efforts on educating people as to their impact on nature.
Ray Chandos has visited the Plano Trabuco since he was a boy. In his oral history conducted in March 2004 by the author, he tells of late night visits to the plano for star gazing after his family moved to Trabuco Canyon from Garden Grove. Mr.
Chandos, a resident of Trabuco Canyon, has also witnessed the build out of Rancho Santa
Margarita. He is a community activist cited frequently by Orange County newspapers

202 and a supporter of slowing urban growth in the area. In his account of the Rancho Santa
Margarita’s development, he speaks to the effect that the new community has had on rural areas of Orange County like Trabuco Canyon.
The final interview in this section speaks to the changes development has brought to the ranching operations at Rancho Mission Viejo. Gilbert Aguirre’s, Vice President of
Cattle Operations for Rancho Mission Viejo, oral history was conducted by the author and Melissa Potter in April 2001. Unlike the previous accounts, Mr. Aguirre’s account is not critical of the development but rather reflective and acceptant of these changes to the land. In it, he speaks to the ranching and agricultural pursuits of the company prior to development and the cattle industry. He recalls the land before homes and ranch life since 1967.

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Pete DeSimone, Biologists and Manager of Starr Ranch Sanctuary
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
CENTER FOR ORAL AND PUBLIC HISTORY
Rancho Santa Margarita Project
INTERVIEWEE:
INTERVIEWER:
PETE DESIMONE
Michael Woods
DATE: March 9, 2004
MW: This is Michael Woods, and I'm with the Rancho Santa Margarita Project for the
Center for Oral and Public History at California State University, Fullerton.
Today is the 9th of March 2004, and it's approximately 3:25 in the afternoon.
We're at Starr Ranch Sanctuary, and we're speaking to Pete DeSimone. As I've previously mentioned to you, Mr. DeSimone, the focus of this was to study the development of the area of Rancho Santa Margarita, which later became a city, the building of the community. Before we get into this, could you please tell me a little bit about Starr Ranch and the type of work that is done here.
PDS: Starr Ranch is part of a ten thousand acre property owned originally by Eugene
Starr, an oil man who came out of Tucson, basically had an independent oil company, Universal Consolidated. Bought this place up in pieces over the years during the twenties, thirties. Passed away in the early sixties. He used it mostly

204 as a vacation place, hunting. Ran cattle on here, a low key farming operation, just a getaway place. Mr. Starr died in 1963. In the early seventies, after the property had gone to a development company – the Macco Company I believe it was called, which went bankrupt, and then the property reverted back to Mr. Starr's estate – five thousand acres were sold privately to the County of Orange, four thousand acres was given to the National Audubon Society, and approximately a thousand acres was sold privately and is now the Dove Canyon community outside our gate, which is approximately eight hundred and sixty-two acres.
Audubon's had Starr Ranch, the four thousand acres, since 1973, and we operate it as a wildlife preserve. We do wildlife research out here on plants and animals. We do a lot of educational programs for kids right up through adults, where all age ranges get to work with real biologists, get to do things in the real biology world and then associate it with an educational approach.
That's pretty much it. It's a very active place in a lot of ways.
Researchers, education, and we're doing some restoration of habitats out here that were impacted by artichoke thistle and some other cardunculus, very invasive species. So that's pretty much what we do.
MW: Could you briefly give us a little bit of a biography about yourself? How did you end up here and what your background is?
PDS: I'm fifty years old. I grew up on the East Coast, went to school at the University of Maine and got a bachelor's degree in wildlife management. I've been working for the Audubon Society since about 1979. Came to California to be assistant manager at Starr Ranch in 1985 and became manager in 1988 when the former

205 manager left. I've been the manager ever since. During that time, my wife Sandy, over the last six or seven years, has taken on the responsibility of research and education programs here and runs all that. I am also currently the Director of
Sanctuaries and Stewardship for Audubon California, which makes me responsible for another half dozen sanctuaries in operation throughout the state.
MW: That's terrific, because you can probably attest to the building from the groundbreaking, or whenever they did that. When you look at the city of Rancho
Santa Margarita, it's hard to imagine a time before homes and parks and schools and various businesses, when the land was undeveloped. It's hard for people who live there, who have recently come out here. That's why you're such a treasure to find, because you can comment on all that. That's about what I'm ready to do.
You've been here since 1985. What do you recall? What have you seen change in the land?
PDS: In 1985 you could drive up to Preusker Peak, which is the highest point on Starr
Ranch, it's seventeen hundred and fifty-two feet. It's called View Rancho, on, I believe, the Santiago Peak quadrant. If not, it's just at the northern end of the
Cañada Gobernadora quadrant. From View Rancho, you could look west/northwest, and the only signs of houses that you could see were the original village in Coto de Caza, which had fairly large houses, in some cases, on one unit per four acre zoning. Beyond that, I think there was a little pump station out on the Plano Trabuco, a huge, incredible grassland mesa that is now Rancho Santa
Margarita. But beyond that, as far as you could see, there was not one red tile roof in sight. In fact, if you look at any topographic map, the plano sticks out as a

206 huge mesa that you'd find hardly any other place. You won't find another place like it in Orange County, and you might not in Southern California. It was where you have the no topo change for probably a half, three-quarters of a mile across a flat open area. It's just amazing. There was nothing out there. Pretty simple.
The Plano Trabuco in May 1985 just prior to development courtesy of Ariel Eye, Inc.
MW: I know at one time in a previous interview talking to Anthony Moiso about it, someone had approached him in the 1970s about an airport there, so I imagine that that must be the case.
PDS: Yeah. In fact, that place and then actually the original plan for Dove Canyon – I don't know how much this issue is confined to Rancho Santa Margarita.

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MW: It extends into Dove Canyon.
PDS: You've got Coto, Dove Canyon, Rancho Cielo. You have Robinson Ranch and out to Rancho Trabuco, basically. So, I mean, all those communities are part of the whole development here since the middle eighties. And Dove Canyon was one of them. The previous owner of Dove Canyon wanted to do a community in there with an air strip, smaller key, not international like a John Wayne, but still, air travel was thought about not only out on the plano, I guess, but in some of the smaller areas. Dove Canyon had some flatter areas out there too.
MW: To gain access to Starr Ranch, you came out the road kind of by O'Neill Park there?
PDS: In 1985 there was a two-lane blacktop. There was a bridge across the Arroyo
Trabuco on what is now Santa Margarita Parkway. You could get – but probably,
I would say, if I have my dates right – I wasn't here yet – '82, '83. The first time I came to Starr Ranch was in 1982, and I was only here for two weeks. I don't recall going out across the Arroyo Trabuco on any road out where Santa
Margarita Parkway is. But the road, Live Oak Canyon Road to Cook's Corner, was always there, and that was the main access. For us at Starr Ranch, we either go out this way or we head down the canyon about seven or eight miles to the
Ortega Highway through Caspers Park, straight south down Bell Canyon.
MW: I know off Ortega Highway there is a sign for Star Ranch, that corral area there in
Caspers Park.
PDS: Yeah. It's called Starr Mesa, I think. It's just a name for Eugene Starr, it's just one of Caspers Park areas, because it was originally part of the Starr Ranch.

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MW: Did you ever have any opportunity to kind of walk the mesa? Do you recall these areas where the golf course is, the town center, and the lake?
PDS: Oh, yeah. I have video of what it looked like driving in here, mostly when they were starting to rough grade the area at the intersection of Santa Margarita
Parkway and Antonio Parkway. That area was just being rough graded. And points further, I guess, west it would be on the parkway, it was still open grassland, grazed grassland, where you have ground squirrels and burrowing owls. I recall seeing a golden eagle kill a ground squirrel in between two big earthmovers. That was probably about 1986 or so. Kind of was an indicator of what was to come.
MW: For the eagle. Not just the squirrel. The squirrel met its demise.
PDS: The eagles still have good nesting habitat in upper Bell Canyon, but they have no hunting habitat left anymore out here. The birding – I'm trying to think if I have it right. There was a species of longspur, which is a bird, that you could find out on the Plano Trabuco. I remember seeing longspurs out there, and it's been fifteen, eighteen years now, twenty years. It was a little unique in that way, because in wide open grasslands – you look around most of the areas here, and you have coastal sage scrub mixed with grasslands, and then the oaks occurring. You don't have wide open acres of grasses. It was a very unique habitat.
And what it spills now to the surrounding watersheds. Everything from
Rancho Santa Margarita drains into the Arroyo Trabuco, pretty much all of it.
Maybe some goes into the Cañada Gobernadora, which is in Coto de Caza. But most of the drainage has to go into the arroyo, and that in and of itself is – the

209 impacts of the footprint of that development you can see already spill way over in the development itself. Things have changed just with the water.
MW: That kind of leads me to my next question, about the development and the effect on this area in terms of people, plant life, various animals that lived in there. Are there some things, other than the ground squirrel, that used to be – we still have ground squirrels, but I don't ever know of anybody who's seen a hawk come down and get one in the city. What could you attest to, or is there anything that you've seen here in the sanctuary, and your job is to kind of preserve this. What is no longer in that part? How much was the sanctuary like Santa Margarita?
PDS: A portion of Rancho Santa Margarita probably had areas that looked like Starr
Ranch, but the uniqueness of the Plano Trabuco, that huge mesa, was very – it was just a distinctive characteristic out there. That's gone, and there's nothing that's even close to that, of that size, left. You can't recreate that. I think what you had out there – and whether it was degraded grassland because of heavy grading, or not, it presented an opportunity to maybe restore some native grasslands and have something that was truly unique. There's no opportunity to do that now because we don't have an area of that magnitude left.
MW: No big flat area at all.
PDS: No. There's this mesa on Starr Ranch that's probably one-sixteenth the size of – even smaller. Maybe one-twenty-fifth or one-fiftieth the size of that area. So in that regard, it was the habitat, I think, that was probably lost. I'm not sure that there are species that are gone.

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On the other side of it, it's not just the species that may or may not have been lost there, but what's in its place. The amount of non-native plants that are put out in these communities is outrageous. Not only because when they escape they tend to compete with native plants and then change over areas outside the development that they're originally intended for, but they also use an incredible amount of water, and we don't have water. There's no natural water around here that's of enough volume to really sustain people, let alone the kind of landscaping that's used around here.
MW: So when they import plants from the Pacific and from Africa and make the yards look nice, those –
PDS: Yeah. You can see it. They need a lot of water. They're not drought tolerant.
And they're invasive. It's just not right. The native plants in this area are beautiful. I'm not just saying that because I'm a biologist and I like being outside and stuff. They truly have the colors that people like, and people need to take the time to notice that and know how to raise them. It's a matter of discipline. The reason you get the stuff you have landscaped now is because that's what the landscapers will sell you. If more people had native plant landscapers –
MW: Probably the landscapers got there about three months before the rest of us in terms of their business.
PDS: Yeah. And they're better at doing this. They know how to take care of the plants that are out in a place like Dove Canyon. They might not be good at taking care of the ceanothus or some kind of native species that could do well. You just need a different set of skills to keep them going.

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MW: Sometimes you'll pay attention to ads from the water company about using native plants and how much sense that makes. I know in terms of fire protection, they talk about that, and ways that they can decorate houses or landscapes without having to bring in too many exotic types of plants.
PDS: This swings into the philosophical, it's not really historical at all. In my mind, I would say the lion's share of people out there are only going to realize it when they turn the tap on and no water comes out. The bill is never going to be too high. There's enough affluence out there, it doesn't matter how much water costs, people will pay for it. But when it's just not there, then they're going to go, "Huh, maybe we should think about this." That time's going to come. We're going to get cut off from Colorado River water. We're in drought. We've been three or four years in drought here. We're right near Bell Creek, there's water in Bell
Creek. That's a drop in the bucket, though. That water gets put back in the aquifer, and that doesn't last very long, even if it is captured downstream. But, no, there's going to be a rude wakeup call. A lot of the development that comes in needs to be based on realities. A lot of times they'll just assume – how do we deal with the water issue? Well, we deal with it by saying we'll be able to pay for it and bring it in, and we'll put big enough pipes in to get it here. Nobody's addressing whether the water's going to be there or not. There are some people saying it's not.
MW: When you apologize for being philosophical and not historical, to a certain extent, a lot of California has always argued over water and whether we'd have enough in terms of Mulholland bringing water to Los Angeles or Hetch Hetchy for the Bay

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Area. That's always been a part of kind of California's geography and land usage.
It's important that we recognize it here, too. It speaks to kind of what we've always had, and I guess, ultimately, that day's coming. You said, we'd turn on a faucet and there just isn't.
PDS: You know, it's interesting. It's not a direct correlation because it's different quality water, but you go up into Colusa County where you're paying seven bucks an acre foot for water, seven bucks for three hundred and twenty-eight thousand gallons of water. Down here, reclaimed water – at least, the last figure I got – reclaimed water is five hundred dollars an acre foot, and domestic treated water is a thousand dollars an acre foot. Seven dollars or a thousand dollars. Okay, it's untreated, it comes out of canals and stuff, it's used to irrigate stuff. Yeah, it's probably some expense to treat it. The expense to treat it cannot be nine hundred and ninety-three dollars an acre foot. There's something wrong. It's supply and demand and all that, but those big water mains coming up Santa Margarita
Parkway to bring water here, and one day –
MW: I remember a few years – I read these transcripts, and it seems like it's last year, but it was probably like three years ago, one of the water mains broke. Someone turned a main switch and the water collided. Everybody was saying conserve water in Rancho Santa Margarita because we only have five days left. Those challenges and problems happen, and at what point do they continue to build?
They're kind of limited, and they can't really go any further back here, I wouldn't think, in terms of preserves and –
PDS: Well, you talked to Tony Moiso.

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MW: Yes, the rest of the southern part of the ranch.
PDS: They've got twenty-two thousand acres down there. They've got a fourteen thousand unit proposal in front of the county right now, and they're putting eighty-one hundred homes in Ladera. There's an example. I remember the approval process for that. Maybe I'm wrong on the dates, but maybe that got approved five or six years ago, Ladera, eighty-one hundred homes on five thousand acres, twenty-five hundred acres of development, twenty-five hundred open space. That was a fifteen year, three-phase project – five year, five year, five year. I think we're into about year six. It's almost built out. They can't build them fast enough.
MW: It's amazing. I moved to Santa Margarita in '95, and I lived there almost where the toll road ended. I used to walk down into that Riparian area before the toll road was built, and now it's kind of closed off, and walk along the streams. Then
I saw the grading come and the toll road shortly following. How fast they put that together. But as you walk around the neighborhood, kind of behind those condos there, you look out on an unspoiled area. I think even someone who isn't as involved with biology and ecology as you realizes the sadness of that being gone.
PDS: If I'm thinking about where you're talking about, it this down near where the
Pavilions [Antonio Plaza] is?
MW: Well, by Antonio and Banderas, that street there.
PDS: That whole area used to – Antonio, it's about a twelve hundred acre conservation easement that I was involved with getting set aside. Myself, Dan Silver with
Endangered Habitats League.

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MW: Yes. Dan Silver kind of led me to you.
PDS: Okay. Then Joel Reynolds from NRDC [National Resource Defense Council] and Elizabeth Brown from Laguna Greenbelts. A few other players there just sat down with the TCA [Transportation Corridor Agencies] and the – it was the Santa
Margarita Company back then, now they're Rancho Mission Viejo. There's a long track record of litigation and opposition to projects and back and forth stuff with them. We sat down, and we were able to negotiate. If the toll road went through, then that had to be set aside as open space, and that's why it is. There would have been a golf course and homes in there otherwise.
MW: You look back and you'll see the windmill and where the cattle used to drink.
PDS: Everything north of Oso Parkway and Chiquita Canyon, north of the high school now? It was just about a handful of us that made that happen. I'm kind of proud of that. That was a lot of work.
MW: I certainly appreciate walking through there. I know with our family and kids walking down in there, above Tijeras Creek, above the golf course, in that area, which is on the other side, I guess, of that. It's like you're in a totally different world, and it's really nice that that's preserved as an element.
My first awareness of Rancho Santa Margarita was, I grew up in northern
Orange County, and I always looked back to Saddleback Mountain and wondered exactly how you got there, and I'd see it from the beach. It seemed far away. I went to the University of San Francisco, and I remember reading the Wall Street
Journal one day and opening it up, and there was a picture of those mountains.

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Almost a full-page ad about the building of this new community and new city that they had in the Journal .
PDS: Yeah. “Where the West begins . . . Again.”
MW: Yeah, exactly. It was just like on the license plate frames. I felt so far away from
Orange County, but it was something that I recognized. It's funny that I should end up living there years later after getting out of college and such. We look at places like the southern part of Rancho Mission Viejo, and people talk about preserving that. Was there any resistance to development of the land in the area that became the city of Rancho Santa Margarita?
PDS: Oh, yeah. But back then, the environmental community, I don't think, was as well organized as it is today. I know that there are several people, probably Ray
Chandos and Sherry Meddick, were probably there challenging the EIR
[Environmental Impact Report] for the Rancho Santa Margarita project. I really just got involved when Los Flores was approached, which is not in the – it must be in the sphere of influence. It's not incorporated with RSM.
MW: Geographically, it's kind of within the same ridge as RSM, but it's not in the proper city.
PDS: Right. It's just further on down the arroyo. But, no, there was opposition, but it was more individual and not as well organized. After that, we litigated the company on Los Flores, and we won the case. Then the judgment got changed during a weekend, which was always suspicious to me. Anyway, we won basically on the traffic issues, which is another thing. I've often mentioned this to a number of people. As an environmental representative and a conservation

216 person, et cetera, often I don't even have to bring up biological impacts and issues to show that some of these projects are ridiculous on the face. A lot of that around here is not only water, that we already talked about, but traffic. I mean, come on, just go out here. You can see what's going on. It's nuts. At certain times of the day it's just like downtown L.A. And building more roads? There's pretty clear evidence that building more roads does not relieve – it might initially relieve congestion, but more often than not, it promotes more development and you're back to where you were again. Transportation, air quality, water quality, noise, all those issues are just as good a reason not to develop like we've been developing.
At some point, too, you're starting to affect the climates here. Look where we are. It's a beautiful day out here at Starr Ranch. It's cool. There's something to be said about the open space that contributes to that. We don't get this kind of nice climate – I mean, certainly it has to do with where we are longitudinally and latitudinally on the earth and that we're in a Mediterranean region, and they're very unique in this world. But these urban moonscapes out there where you take open space and turn them into asphalt and concrete and red tile roofs does not lend itself to contributing to the niceness of what we have here. They take water from it, they introduce bad air into it. It can only be a load on the open space that gives us this nice ambience, this nice quality of life. More people need to realize that. You may not want to go hiking and bird watching, but you have to appreciate the fact that this open space that's out here is very important to what you do every day in town, and you can't carve it up.

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MW: It is. And I think that's important. I kind of see this project as almost a microcosm for the rest of California and the other areas that are being built and preserved, and that argument that takes place in the form of public policy in terms of ecologists and environmentalists versus development and where people will live, or how big urban areas will get.
How would you describe the environmental movement that, you said, became more organized as opposed to back in the early eighties that it wasn't, particularly in our area? In what ways has it become –
PDS: Well, I think there's more people who are developing a level of understanding and intelligence that sort of is based on what I sort of just alluded to. The open space around here is very important to the quality of life for people who enjoy the open space or people who are in town, and we just don't have enough left here. Enough people are starting to realize that these Southern California habitats that we find out here are, in some cases, found nowhere else in the world. There's an intrinsic right for them to be protected, and at some point, you have to back off and say, hey, we're not just deciding on this piece of land out here, we're carving up the last sliver of the pie. A lot of times we're faced with that argument where you go into an area and, well, it's going to be 50 percent open space and 50 percent – well, we're 50 percenting ourselves to death here. We're taking half of a half of a half. Give me a break. At some point, the cumulative impacts are profound, and we're running out of habitat.
I sat for a while on the steering committee for the Orange County Housing
Authority, where they had to kind of redo projections and all that. I finally got off

218 of it because I was really frustrated with the horizon that they were setting. So many houses are going to be needed by 2005. My question was, What happens when you reach 2005 and build those houses? Are you going to stop building?
No. You just make a new horizon. So what is the horizon? The horizon is when we run out of land. That's it! I mean, come on. What's the point here? I don't understand the exercise. Either say that you're just going to keep doing this and all you're doing is trying to pace yourself, or get real and be a little cutting edge here and realize that it's not a NIMBY thing.
People who live out here, who care about this – a lot of folks get attacked because they got theirs, they're living in a wonderful part of the country, and they don't want anybody else to move in. But at some point – because beyond
NIMBY, it's just what it is. You just have to stop sometime. Deciding when that is is kind of – I don't know. I don't know if there's going to be a turning point or – when I said people are going to realize when the water stops coming out of the tap. When it comes to habitat loss, I don't know if there's anybody that's going to
– it's just going to be done with, and that's that.
MW: At the preserve here at Starr Ranch, you have something special back here. I see on your web page that you have educational programs, and I saw tours for people who lived in Coto to come back and enjoy this. Could you expand on this, some of the things that you do to preserve this very special part of Orange County?
PDS: The program here that my wife Sandy leads is really based on taking the research on wildlife out here and the restoration programs, like I mentioned the artichoke thistle, and trying to restore – she's working on seven hundred acres of impacted

219 area to restore it to some natives, whether it's grassland or coastal sage scrub, doing non-chemical removal of artichoke thistle. Those projects are ongoing as part of the stewardship of this place, what we feel is important to do to try to get as much of it back to a natural state.
At the same time, she's created educational opportunities for kids to come out as junior biologists or home-schoolers or Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts to come out and do programs led by real biologists, who take them out into maybe a situation like the artichoke thistle and show them what restoration is. Or take them down into the creek and show them stream biology and let them participate in, say, a stream survey, where they're doing real research.
It's that kind of approach that's taken here so that people maybe get a unique experience with nature education, instead of going someplace and getting shoved into a room and shown a canned slide show with a soundtrack. We just try to make it unique, and the feedback's been great. We're trying to reach a whole different range of people. Today we had – I don't know, there were probably sixty or seventy high school kids in here doing various programs with several of the biologists. We do open houses for the community just to bring them out and do general wildlife workshops, take people for hikes. The local
Audubon chapters come in and do field trips, just taking what's here and trying to present it to the public in a way that makes them understand it's important and to have some fun and really get into it.
MW: You mentioned pollution from the suburban expansion in terms of noise and light and waste and exhaust. We talked about the climate and the way of life, this

220 natural area. To what extent has it had an effect upon Starr Ranch? Other than you mentioned about foliage and that.
PDS: The clearest impact that I could even show you is water. We get, I would say, close to 100 percent of the runoff from the Dove Canyon community, comes down into this canyon. Dove Canyon empties into Bell Canyon. Bell Canyon starts in the Cleveland National Forest, goes through Starr Ranch, through
Caspers Park, and empties into San Juan Creek into the ocean. Probably about a mile down from the headquarters area, Dove Canyon empties into Bell Canyon, so we get all the washed cars, all the drained swimming pools, all the irrigation left on too long, all of that comes down the storm drains and into here. What that brings with it is water three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
There's two issues here. The quality of the water is one thing. But the fact that it's there every day of the year is another. The typical streams around here are not flowing year round, and that, in turn, creates the kind of riparian vegetation you see out here where it's dry some parts of the year and it's wet some parts of the year. When you have water all year long, you get exotic plants that need water all year long and can survive in that situation. You also get bullfrogs and mosquito fish and crayfish. These are all non-native species, whether they're vertebrates or invertebrates, that put pressure on the natives, like the tree frogs, like the native invertebrates, like the arroyo chubs and three-spined sticklebacks that are native fish. They get eaten by the bullfrogs and the competition with other fish species, or whatever. Those are just secondary impacts, to say nothing

221 of Diazinon and some golf course pesticides and stuff like that that are starting to show up in the creek.
That's a typical situation for any development. The water goes downhill somewhere, and in most case, it goes to an open space, out where we are. Rancho
Santa Margarita, just go down to O'Neill Park, you see the shopping carts and the tires and stuff in the storm drains.
MW: Does RSM drain into O’Neill Park, that area there?
PDS: Yeah. A good share of it.
MW: How about beyond Tijeras Creek? Where does that eventually go?
PDS: The Arroyo Trabuco goes way the heck down. Everything. Mission Viejo drains into the Arroyo Trabuco. Having said that, all about this drainage out of Dove
Canyon, I'm currently working on a project to get that water collected and pumped back and using the reclaimed water system. We're trying to solve the problem. And everybody's cooperating. There's also some water laws right now that are requiring attention to this kind of nonpoint source pollution. I've been wanting to do this for years and finally have a mechanism where we can do it.
And I have all the people who are party to it cooperating. I'd say by the end of the year we're going to have it happen.
MW: Do you think such a thing would be written about in the newspapers when that happens? I would consider that to be very important.
PDS: Yeah. In effect, part of what I'm doing here has to do with a grant from the state to do it, and part of my obligation under the grant is to publicize it, which we're doing. I mean, that's what we do.

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MW: Draw attention to it.
PDS: Yeah. We're educators here, too.
MW: I must admit I'm a little bit more familiar with the other aspects of the project, but this is a very necessary – ecology and that, I don't know anything about. I enjoy going to national parks, and I enjoy vacation and that, but I am kind of at a loss in terms of more questions. But I'd like to offer you the opportunity to just kind of add to this record of the changes that development has brought to areas in
California, the changes specifically that Santa Margarita – if elements are lost. To record that for people who, in forty years, eighty years, a hundred years, open up this book and read about it and, oh, that's what that was like.
PDS: Well, all I can tell you is I knew what it looked like. I'm sure there's aerial photos that people can look at to see what it was like out there. Back then it was a little different feel. There is a real sense of the increase of population here, just in the short period of time I've been here. To drive out of Dove Canyon – we drove in on a road that up to our gate is single lane. It was like that all the way out to
Plano Trabuco Road. There was a bunch of eucalyptus trees out there and a crappy little wooden gate that we'd go through. Then we'd be on Plano Trabuco.
The entrance to Coto would be on the left, and we'd go up there and either go down toward Live Oak to Trabuco Canyon or turn left on the two-lane Santa
Margarita Parkway and drive to what is now Stater Brothers out on Trabuco and
El Toro Road. That was the closest grocery store.
That was in '85. Then it got closer and closer. The volume of people and even the noise here, I mean, it's peaceful back here at Starr Ranch at night. Once

223 in a while on a Friday there's a wedding or something, you can hear the boom of the stereo just blowing up from over the ridge. And there's clearly a light skyline to the west of this place now. You can see all the time at night. I can take you out into Crow Canyon, the back side of the sanctuary, we'd go down in the bottom and it's pitch black. But here the light pollution you're starting to see. It's slow.
You kind of get used to everything. I don't know. People should realize that they're living in a very, very, very unique place in the world.
MW: And elements of that are being lost, as you said.
PDS: The coastal sage scrub communities found here are nowhere else in the world.
There's Mediterranean regions in Chile and South Africa and Australia and
European Mediterranean and us, and they're very small, relatively speaking. But the stuff we have here is not found in those other areas. Similar stuff but not the same species all the time. It's impressive to me. It's kind of profound. Geez, this is unbelievable here. It's just such a beautiful place for a human being to live.
Let's just not screw it up anymore. If we keep doing what we're doing, it ain't going to be a nice place to live.
MW: Just from the sake of a resident, and I'm one of those who moved out here. You used to be able to get to the freeway in so much time, and there were arterials instead of stop lights, and you used to get off the toll road and see nothing built south of that. It is amazing the rate at which development happens. Los Flores being the example that I saw from start to finish. We had friends who came out and saw us when we bought our house. Three years later, they came out and got lost because Los Flores was built. They're like, "Where is this?" I think when I

224 was a kid in the seventies and Boy Scouts and that, we'd ride our bikes out to
O'Neill Park and we'd camp there, and for a long time I hadn't been back out there and I always wonder where that place was. I knew I could access it on my bike, but I go out there now and I don't recognize it. It's just changed so much.
PDS: Also, the kids have changed, I think. There are not a lot of kids who are riding their bikes and camping at O'Neill Park anymore. Or throwing on a backpack and just bushwhacking up into Cleveland National Forest and sleeping out. Kids just don't do that anymore.
MW: None of them ride their bikes to school, let alone do that.
PDS: Yeah. They're not doing that, so maybe there's not a connection there where they feel it's important to save it. They're not experiencing it. What we're trying to do is kind of let them get their feet wet, just let them get a taste of how it's fun, it's nice, it's great stuff to be here outside.
MW: Yes, it is. Well, thank you very much. I really appreciate your time.
END OF INTERVIEW

225
Ray Chandos, Environmental Activist and Trabuco Canyon Resident
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
CENTER FOR ORAL AND PUBLIC HISTORY
Rancho Santa Margarita Project
INTERVIEWEE: RAY CHANDOS
INTERVIEWER: Michael Woods
DATE: March 19, 2004
MW: This is Michael Woods, and I'm with the Rancho Santa Margarita project from the
Oral History Department at California State University Fullerton. It's March 19th,
2004, and it's approximately 1:05 p.m. We're at Santa Margarita High School in
Room B108, and we're speaking today with Ray Chandos. That's spelled C-h-an-d-o-s?
RC: Right.
MW: As I previously explained to you, Mr. Chandos, my study is focused on the development of Rancho Santa Margarita, but before we get into that, could you please tell me about some of your interests in the area? Perhaps where you live, and why you have an interest in this area.
RC: Well, as a kid I would come up here with my telescope because it was the darkest area around. It was away from the city lights at that time. That would have been in the 1950s and 60s. We'd come up to Plano Trabuco Road. At that time it

226 ended in a gate, so we'd come up to that gate and set up the telescope. The Plano
Trabuco is a very flat area and was elevated above all the hills, so you could get a view down to the horizon. But at that point it was just a flat grassy plain, as I recall.
The North Plano 62
I moved to the area in 1983, the area of Trabuco Canyon, which is less than a mile from the present city limits of Rancho Santa Margarita. At that point I got involved with land use issues because the area was developing. For one thing, the County of Orange was trying to punch a four-lane highway through Trabuco
Canyon that would have spanned from the existing dead-end of Antonio Parkway through the canyon, over a huge bridge over the Arroyo Trabuco, and through
Trabuco Canyon, coming out around Cook's Corner. I got involved in a land use
62 County of Orange, CA. “Environmental Impact Report #320 General Plan Amendment 82-2: Plano
Trabuco Planned Community.” April 1982. Exhibit 4, 19.

227 fight with the County of Orange, and eventually that became a major campaign.
In 1991 the county took that road off the map and made other arrangements.
That got me involved in land use issues, including other things that were going on at the time, one of which was the approval of Rancho Santa Margarita, the first phase, and then – I kind of missed that because that went down just before I moved to Trabuco. The company has been working its way south, and the next phase, which was called Los Flores, I was involved in that and actually filed a lawsuit against the company and the county to try to stop or modify that.
MW: You said that you came up here in the fifties, and it was the darkest area. It was perfect for stargazing. Can you speak to anything, or do you recall anything else unique to the area besides this large flat plano that was unique in terms of how far other buildings and structures were away from Santa Margarita? How remote was it back then?
RC: Well, it was totally remote. You couldn't see anything, any sign of any habitation from where we were right at the edge of the Plano Trabuco. Trabuco Canyon has had cabins in there since the 1920s, that old area. But other than that, pretty much when you left the city of Orange, there was nothing, so we came up that way.
MW: It must have been beautiful, with Saddleback Mountain and then the rolling hills.
RC: Yeah.
MW: Prior to all that building. Could you briefly tell us a little bit about – a biography of yourself, what you do for a living and your background in some of this – is it right to say environmental activism?

228
RC: Sure. Well, I grew up in Orange County, Garden Grove. My background is pretty much unrelated to the environmental work. I teach community college, technical subjects, and electronic technology. But coming up here – I wasn't a member of the Sierra Club. I'd come up here, this area, on hikes and things on weekends. O'Neill Park is adjacent to the Plano Trabuco, so I was there as a kid camping out and things, but really didn't get into this land use environmentalism much until I came to live here. That was around 1983.
MW: Since 1983, you mentioned the project that you were involved with in terms of a bridge going through Antonio to Cook's Corner. Then you mentioned that you're involved in Los Flores, in a lawsuit there. My study today focuses primarily on the city of Rancho Santa Margarita. Was there much of an environmental movement to stop the building or to encourage building to be a certain scale at that time?
RC: No. It was –
MW: I remember there was with Los Flores, it would come up, and certainly with the new developments today down in Ladera or future ranch development.
RC: No. It was amazing, but they pretty much took everybody by surprise. A neighbor of mine later told me that he and one or two other people were the only people at the public hearing. It went down in one public hearing in Santa Ana, and as I understand it, the EIR report, the environmental impact report, was very thin by today's standards. It was remote enough. I mean, I think the company had masterfully used this leapfrog development strategy. They jumped away from opposition, where there would be opposition, and it was remote enough where I

229 think people nearby – there weren't many people nearby, and of those, maybe only two showed up for the hearing. Considering the magnitude of what it is, it's amazing that there wasn't more controversy or opposition.
MW: What was it like living in the area? I guess almost on a daily basis you'd see grading and bulldozers and surveyors come out. What was that like, or what do you recall about that?
RC: Well, first they punched a road through there. Well, first of all, there was no road.
All of the cars had to come through Trabuco Canyon. That was a major problem.
The road was just overcrowded with cars in the morning when the construction crews would come up and then in the evening when they'd go home. Eventually,
I don't know the exact year, they opened up what's now Rancho Santa Margarita
Parkway, so there was another access to get up to this area from El Toro and
Orange. It just gradually sprung up. Fortunately, it wasn't a lot of bulldozing because it's so flat. The problem with Mission Viejo and other areas in the foothills is the massive destruction of land forms. Here it was fairly accommodating to building because it was so flat, so things really sprung up fast.
MW: I remember at one time – and I guess I've read it on numerous occasions – people had even spoken of building a small airport there, it was so large and flat.
RC: Right.
MW: Do you recall what the areas were like? Or was it fenced off where, for example, the golf course is today and the lake and those areas? Did they change much?
Were they flat, primarily like it is today?

230
RC: Yeah. It was pretty much all just grassland. I think they had grazed cattle, so there wasn't anything other than grass, with barbed wire fences, as I recall.
MW: One of the things you had mentioned there was – and it kind of went into a question later on, so I'll remove it – but you mentioned it. Do you think that the environmental movement in California has changed? It seems a lot more active today with Rancho Mission Viejo than perhaps what I'm hearing from you with the building of Rancho Santa Margarita. So we're talking – probably the planning stages were in the late seventies for RSM. Do you think it speaks to a more active environmental movement?
RC: I think so, definitely. When I first started, I felt very isolated. There was just a few people who were active in the canyon. Now we've got a lot more people.
But the reason is we're running out of natural resources. At the time, I think,
Santa Margarita, in the late seventies, early eighties, people probably didn't feel the loss as much as now. With Rancho Mission Viejo, the southernmost thing that you mentioned, that is getting down to the last natural open space that’s not part of the Cleveland National Forest in Orange County. That would pretty much be it. So I think that explains the concern. We're just running out of natural resource areas, so they become more precious and more people are more concerned about losing it.
MW: How have you seen this development in terms of altered – you know, people, you mentioned traffic once before, but things like plant life and animal life and various types of plants and animals in the area. Have you seen that change in the canyon there?

231
RC: Well, yes. You mean biological?
MW: Yes.
RC: Well, unfortunately, we still have quite a buffer between us and the national forest, but in terms of the animals, there's been – when the Santa Margarita
Company first started building, we had coyotes like you wouldn't believe, that I think were being driven off. So there was a major readjustment in the large mammals, and mountain lions coming down. Now I think it's probably the bird life. We get the scavenger birds that there wasn't any support for. We have sparrows and starlings and crows and seagulls that scavenge the human-type trash from up here and then kind of venture down into the canyon a little bit. I did notice that.
MW: I remember seeing about eight years ago – I don't know if you've seen this – 20/20 did a piece on Friday night television on ABC on the building of Rancho Santa
Margarita and how they'd planned this master planned community, and they compared it to Xanadu off and on in terms of its –
RC: Yes. I remember that. The other guy in the organization that we started was featured on that.
MW: I remember there was one piece toward the end about shopping carts, or things like that, in that creek area down by O'Neill Park.
RC: Oh, yeah. Well, O'Neill Park really took a hit from development of this project.
First of all, there was a campground – part of the park is up on the Plano Trabuco.
The rest of it is down in the canyon, which is about a hundred feet below. They probably covered that. The Plano Trabuco abruptly ends at Arroyo Trabuco and

232 then drops a hundred feet, and there's the creek and there's O'Neill Park down there. They had a campground up on the upper regions there, and they had to close that because of conflict between the campers and the new residents. The new residents complained about the campfires, I guess, and the noise and the smoke. And the campers, it kind of spoiled the natural experience to see people right across the street washing their cars, and street lights, and that kind of thing.
So they shut that down it became a day picnic use area.
MW: That was probably '86, sometime around there?
RC: Yeah, that's right. And also around a little bit later, '91, the same fellow that was featured in the 20/20 , Bruce Conn, and I, we collected some water samples from
Trabuco Creek because it seemed that when they designed Rancho Santa
Margarita, they didn't treat the effluent at all. Now, of course, the standards have been tightened up. There are just giant pipes that come out, and everything from the streets that gets washed down the gutter comes out down there. We found shopping carts, pieces of bicycles. The water quality was very bad. So we took a sample and brought it in to the Board of Supervisors to show them, I think in
1991, the effect that this had had, because we were trying to get them to do something different with the next phase of Las Flores and throughout.
MW: Okay. It's funny you mentioned the campground. I was walking once with my family, and we were riding bikes along there and then down that hill, and it was almost like being an archeologist. You'd see these old – we'd camp a lot. We'd see these old fire rings or something like that. And I'm thinking, because I was a young kid at one time and I remember we lived in Los Alamitos. In Boy Scouts,

233 we would ride our bikes out to O'Neill Park and then camp, but it was – for a long time, I'd forgotten where that area was since I was fourteen and then moved out here to Santa Margarita probably when I was thirty-five or something, and you're wondering, you know, it looks vaguely familiar, but it's changed so much since the 1970s to today.
Going back to one other question, and it may seem like these aren't in order, but you've provided me with such good information, I just want to make sure that we aren't missing something here. We had spoken a little bit about opposition to building, and you had pointed out about water pollution. Whatever happened to some of the people who voiced their concerns for the development of
Rancho Santa Margarita? Do they still live in the area, in the Trabuco, or are they like yourself and maybe active in other developments and environmental causes here?
RC: You're talking about opposition to the original 1983 –
MW: Yeah.
RC: Well, that guy that I mentioned was a neighbor of mine.
MW: Bruce Conn?
RC: Well, no. See, Bruce and I got involved after it had already been approved. We didn't even know. We moved into Trabuco, and then we looked up on the plano and they're bulldozing. We were just babes in the woods at that time. We didn't even know about the land use process and how all these things, environmental impact reports, worked. But later on, when I was more aware, I did talk with another neighbor, and he ran Lico's Restaurant down there.

234
MW: Oh, yeah. That just recently closed, the Mexican restaurant down there.
RC: Yeah, and that's now something else. Lico Miranda was my neighbor there in
Trabuco, and he told me that he and another guy were the only ones at the public hearing. He wasn't an environmentalist. I guess he got a public notice, and he thought, oh, my God, this is going to change everything, so we better get down there.
MW: So you really were just concerned citizens about your neighborhood.
RC: Yeah, that's it.
MW: It isn't that much different from other areas when they have other neighborhood things happening that they don't like, either roads or noise or any of that. In terms of things like light. You said that you were an astronomer, I don't know if you still are. We take things like light pollution for granted. For astronomers, they don't, but how has that changed?
RC: Well, the canyon before Santa Margarita went in, it was dark at night. It was very dark. And you could see all the stars. You could see the Milky Way, which requires a nice dark sky. But now, if you look over from Trabuco Canyon in this direction to the east and the south, it's definitely changed. It's this light haze because of all the street lights and commercial lighting that's there.
MW: How about changes with regard to traffic?
RC: Well, as I said, that was very pronounced at first when Trabuco Canyon Road was the only route up here. And that went on for another year. Finally, they put in
Santa Margarita Parkway, which led down into Mission Viejo and El Toro. Then

235 they put in the toll road, which alleviated that. Of course, the regional traffic has gone up as a result of this.
MW: Are you familiar with any pollution with regard to water, other than your sample that you did? Have things like – I know that our water is very seasonal down by
O'Neill Park. Much of the summer months it doesn't look like there's ever been any water in there, and then in the winter there is. Has that changed over the years?
RC: Yeah. Now there's what they call a nuisance runoff, urban runoff, from this Plano
Trabuco into that creek, so there's flow down there all year round, which changes the natural environment. It favors species that are non-native, things like bullfrogs, that wouldn't be able to survive. Then they prey on the natural indigenous species. It does upset the balance of Nature.
MW: Are you familiar, or do you know any of the residents, who – if you read some of the works from some of the early historians in the area, they used to keep bees way up in the canyon, and there's Holy Jim Waterfall up there that I've been to once or twice. It's a tough road to navigate in a Honda, so you really need a truck to get up there. How has their life changed? Do you know? Do you have any contact with them further up the canyon?
RC: Yeah. I know Jim Sleeper. He has a cabin up in Holy Jim Canyon. Well, the use has increased because the kids from up here come down there in their parents' cars, I guess, or trucks. They drive up there. Kids have always gone up there. It's a nice place to go. I guess the ambience is the thing. You're not isolated anymore. You look up from there, from the Arroyo Trabuco, from the dirt road,

236 you look up and you see pink roofs as far as the eye can see. If you climb up
Holy Jim Canyon there, up the trail, and you look out, it's just this sea of red roofs.
MW: It's been changed. Are those cabins up there, are they second homes, or do people live up there all year long? Is that a primary residence for some of them?
RC: Yeah. It's a mixture. There's a few that are there all the time, and some it's a summer cabin.
MW: One of the other things that you had mentioned – because part of this project is the development of the community, and then the other half of the project – there's really two foci, and the other part is the movement by the people in the community to make the city of Rancho Santa Margarita, the incorporation movement. I've interviewed also many of the city councilmen. I will have four of the original five, and then the subsequent city councilmen, and why they incorporated the area. I am familiar that toward incorporation there was talk by the county to want to incorporate the area down where you are. Were you familiar with that, or do you have any thoughts on that?
RC: Oh, yeah. They wanted to incorporate down to the road. They wanted to pick up the park [O’Neill] and down to Trabuco Canyon Road. The local residents, some of them were very vocal in opposition to that. I was involved negotiating with some of the founding people here to scoot the boundaries up a little bit so that, basically, the line is now right at the edge of the Plano Trabuco, and the park is – now, personally, to me, I didn't see it as that big of an issue, but people freak out with the word cityhood. They think city means curbs, gutters, police, the

237 urbanization. For us, eventually, someday means getting control of your land use.
Prior to incorporation, land use was in the hands of the Board of Supervisors in
Santa Ana, and local people had to go down there with their hat in their hands, and they had very little authority. These people, you only vote for one of them, and the other four are insulated politically from you. Whereas, if you have a city council, you vote for all of them and you can recall them with a reasonable number of signatures on a petition. So it was a good thing, I think, that they did that. Of course, the developers have built the place out pretty much.
MW: I think, as I recall, cityhood followed almost the insolvency of the county and the bankruptcy. I know the county was probably trying to take all these incorporated areas and clump them together in a city, I guess for some of the management of that cost of having to provide fire service protection. You can imagine if – there could be an accident down in O'Neill Park, and they needed a paramedic up here with all these new residents and there would be the logistic problems of moving people back and forth. I was aware in some of my study that there was an opposition of people that didn't want to be put in with the rest of the city of
Rancho Santa Margarita.
I'm also familiar with – the development of Irvine, that's a different type of animal in terms of the development and a ranching company, and perspective was a little bit different. From what I've seen, and maybe you can comment on this and tell me if this is true with areas in Rancho Santa Margarita, the city of Irvine is sometimes a critic of the Irvine Company and further development. The city that came out of the Irvine Company, which was grown out of that, it made me

238 think of this when you said people vying for local control. They actually have a greater political power once they've incorporated to put the nix on further development or roadway development or congestion in terms of population.
RC: That's right.
MW: Have you seen anything like that in Rancho Santa Margarita? As far as you know, has the City commented on some of the things like the toll road or toll road expansion or further development southwest of RSM today?
RC: Well, I'm not aware yet. Those battles are shaping up with the extension of the
Foothill toll road and Rancho Mission Viejo. Now, they did comment on the county trying to expand the Joplin Boys Ranch, which is a youth detention facility that we were all involved in opposing. We eventually challenged it in court and were successful, and the county withdrew the plans and moved the project downtown to Juvenile Hall. But the City there was concerned, the council was concerned. They commented on the environmental impact report. They sent staff to the public hearing on the project and said, "We're concerned about the traffic coming through our city." Well, that's a good thing. There are people out here that are looking after the future.
MW: These ideas came up as I'm speaking to you. I don't know if you're familiar, but I recall reading things in the newspaper about the possibility of a tunnel through
Saddleback Mountain to connect the inland area.
RC: Right.
MW: Which would come right out there, I guess, at the toll road. From what I've read, and again, this may have changed since I read that, Santa Margarita was opposed

239 to such a tunnel; whereas, Mission Viejo was more leaning toward it. Have people in these unincorporated areas – I'm sure if you live down in Trabuco, you're saying, What's next coming here? if you see something like that. Have you heard of any neighbors or any comments about such a thing?
RC: About the tunnel?
MW: The tunnel.
RC: Yeah. We're following that, the issue. The County of Riverside, of course, they want it, and it's going to be a question of whether they can get three votes on the
Orange County Board of Supervisors. So far, we don't really know. The previous supervisor in our district moved to the assembly, Todd Spitzer. Now we have another guy in there, Bill Campbell, and we don't really know where his head's at on that, but we're going to find out pretty soon.
MW: It's interesting. I teach government, so we're always looking at our congressman,
Gary Miller, he sits on a committee for transportation, and I can't help but think that, since that 42 nd
District stretches on up into Riverside and L.A. Counties, that he has a vested interest in terms of all his constituents with such a thing.
RC: Punching that thing through, you mean?
MW: Yeah. Or at least being there in the federal government one way or the other. If the majority of constituents don't want it, or they do, where he's going to line up on that. But at least he's involved, it appears, in the committee in Congress that would help make that decision.
I've gone through my list of questions. Is there anything else that you think would be important to this study with regard to Rancho Santa Margarita?

240
Maybe speak to things that we may have left out in terms of the way it used to be.
It's easy to see the way it is today, but it's hard for the majority, I think, of the residents – over forty thousand people here – probably to imagine what you saw when you were here in 1983. So your input is really valuable in terms of your perspective, in terms of things that have changed. Is there anything you can recall about the development or the way that this portion of California used to look before it became a suburban area?
RC: Well, you can get an idea if you just go south and then east. If you take Ortega
Highway, which is the remaining portion of the Rancho Mission Viejo, and just look out over there, minus the hills pretty much, the hills in the background. But flat grassland, remote from everything, and very beautiful from a natural point of view.
MW: Have you seen any people that have moved out? I imagine when you came out to live with your family in Trabuco Canyon, people lived out there, and I think they still do, to be away from Orange County as most of us understand Orange County to be. They want to live in an area that's more remote or country or rural. Have people moved out and gone to other places as urbanization has encroached upon them?
RC: Oh, I think so. The people we get in Trabuco Canyon proper are probably mostly that way, recluse-type people. They just want to get away from it, all the way to the point of antisocial people that just don't want any neighbors, they just don't want anything to do with their neighbors. The funny thing is, the first people that came here – because I worked with them on some other projects – they thought

241 this was that type of isolated area. They came out here to get away from the city, and it was marketed that way, too. Moiso used to have these bumper sticker frames that would say, "Where the West Begins Again." The first units, they put them right along the park there looking out over Trabuco Canyon, along Plano
Trabuco. Those were the first ones, the pink boxes that went in.
Those people living in there thought – I don't know how they felt about what came after, but I do know that we were trying to – one of the campaigns we had was a gravel mine proposal to go right down where O'Neill Park ends and the wash road begins there, where the switchbacks are. Five property owners there wanted to make that into a gravel mine. The county shot it down. They refused to approve it. Gaddi Vasquez was the supervisor at the time. We didn't really have the troops to beat that off, but what did it was the people from Santa
Margarita. They came on board. They said, "This is our view, this is our backyard, that's our park. You can't make that into a gravel mine. Tony Moiso told us this is where the West begins again. We were going to look out over those mountains. And you just can't do that to us." So anyway, they made enough noise where that all went away.
MW: That's an interesting perspective. Well, is there anything else you'd like to add to this oral history or anything you can think of in terms of your interest as someone who's environmentally concerned and the development of Santa Margarita? It's probably a story that – it's kind of told over and over throughout California as suburbs move out into rural areas.

242
RC: Yeah. I could talk about the politics and the people, but I guess your focus here is on, I guess, more the physical changes that have occurred.
MW: You can feel free to comment on the politics and the people. That's part of the history there. Traditionally, in California history – this is kind of my niche for history – is that since the Second World War this has been an ongoing struggle in terms of developing areas. Historians have written about – Adam Rome
Bulldozer in the Countryside and Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier – the idea of developing the suburbs. It's really a change in American history in terms of the way in which we live. More people live out in suburbs than in cities today.
RC: That's right.
MW: And I don't see it being something that is going to stop. It seems like people will continue to move out into areas. So if you have any comments about the politics of it –
RC: Well, I guess about the sociology of it. I think where it's heading is now in terms of the interface with the natural environment, and also the problems of urban sprawl. They tend to build these things as purely residential areas, so then all the people have to get in cars, and there's no decent transit system here to speak of, so everybody's driving all over the place. You get the traffic congestion and the air pollution and water pollution and all the problems that could come from having it done that way.
The issue with Riverside and the tunnel through the Santa Ana Mountains,
I think, is the extreme form of that. They haven't bothered to plan employment in
Riverside County, so they just put up these residential subdivisions, and then the

243 people all drive to Irvine and clog up the roads and use up the oil and the gas. So all the things that go with that.
If you listen to Tony Moiso, and I've tangled with him over the years on these other projects, but he presents himself as a benefactor of humanity, building these places for people to live. But I do think that they could have done a better job thinking about all of the issues. Where are people going to work? They could have left a buffer with O'Neill Park, instead of just jamming the houses right up to the borderline. For years they didn't even have a post office up here, so they were all coming down to our post office in Trabuco Canyon.
Then the natural environment, he presented the rest of the rancho as being open space at the time when he sought approval of this, and then he sought approval of Las Flores and then Ladera. It was always not to worry because you've got another forty thousand acres here that's going to be open space, so the impacts are really not that important.
But now, this kind of extrapolation is continuing. We're just going to move down and build another residential subdivision. Maybe there'll be commercial development, but there's nothing in terms of employment, so again you're looking at what are we going to do with the roads, and how are people going to get to the employment centers? It's making a hell of an impact on everybody else and traffic and air pollution.
Of course, the school district situation has been – if you look at the schools, they're pretty much temporary trailers, because the developers, including
Moiso and his bunch, have fought at the state level to limit the fees that they have

244 to pay. So the fees that they pay are not enough to fund the proper permanent school buildings. They're limited by – they've put a law through that it's a certain amount per square foot of commercial and a certain amount per residential unit, and that's the maximum. If that's not enough to put up the school, the school district really has no other recourse. So that's why we've got all these trailer schools.
Of course, they can try to get bonds passed, but they're not really paying their way, these suburban developments. They're not paying their way. That's a matter of statistic as far as the required infrastructure. They're costing more in what they require in municipal services. The cities, of course, favor the retail developments because there they can get a sales tax increment, they can compensate for the roads, the flood control, the policing, fire, and all that that residential development requires.
MW: I think that that's interesting, and it does touch a lot of the project. I can't think of anything else. Is there anything –
RC: No.
MW: It's your oral history. I want you to feel like you have ownership in it. Is there anything else you'd like to add in it?
RC: No. I think that's it.
MW: Okay. Well, thank you very much. I'm going to turn this off here.
END OF INTERVIEW

245

246
Gilbert Aguirre, Vice President of Cattle Operations for Rancho Mission Viejo
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, FULLERTON
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
Rancho Santa Margarita Project
INTERVIEWEE: GILBERT AGUIRRE
INTERVIEWER: Michael Woods
DATE: April 13, 2001
MW: This is Michael Woods and Melissa Potter with the Rancho Santa Margarita
Project with the Oral History Program at California State University Fullerton. It is the 13th of April 2001 at 9:05 a.m. We're at the Rancho Mission Viejo headquarters speaking to Mr. Gilbert Aguirre. Mr. Aguirre, I want to thank you very much for meeting with us today.
GA: My pleasure.
MW: Last December I met with Mr. Moiso, and at that time we were studying the incorporation of the cities and the development and that side of the business that
Rancho Mission Viejo's involved with. He mentioned that it was more than just the Tony Moiso story, this was the story of the ranch and the people who make up the ranch. In speaking to him and thinking about it, we really find it to be an example of a California history, the people who live and work in California and

247 the development that's occurred here in the last few years. He strongly suggested that I meet with you and conduct this oral history in that you've had thirty years in the ranching aspect of the business. Could you explain to me what you do here at the ranch and what your capacity is and what you oversee?
GA: I came to the ranch in March of 1967, and at the time, the entire property was
52,000 acres. They used to run approximately 1,500 mother cows and about
4,000 stocker steers. It has evolved from that point to today in the twenty-first century, 2001, the city of Mission Viejo, which was 10,000 acres, the city of
Rancho Santa Margarita, which was 5,000 acres, Los Flores, which was 1,000 acres, the Telega Project, which is in San Clemente, was another 3,600 acres, I believe it was, Ladera Ranch, which is 4,000 acres. As you can see, our world has gotten quite a bit smaller from the 52,000 acres. Consequently, our numbers have come down drastically from being a very large cattle ranch in the sixties and even seventies that now in the twenty-first century, we're a very modest ranch, even though we're the largest ranch in Orange County as far as an operating ranch goes. When you look at those numbers, our numbers today pale because we've only got about 600 head, and that's just because a function of acreages that have gone for development. That is the impact of the ranching business.
What do I do? That's how we got started in 1967. In 1970 we purchased a ranch in Elko, Nevada, which is northeastern –
MW: On Highway 50 there.
GA: Highway 51 it used to be. It's Highway 25(?) today. But it's Highway 80 that goes through Elko, and it goes to Salt Lake, and et cetera. We purchased a ranch

248 over there that was 44,800 acres and approximately 250,000 acres of federal grazing permits. We used to run 10,000 steers and 3,500 cows. Just recently we finally sold it, actually, this year. We closed escrow January 3rd.
We spent thirty years in Elko, Nevada, which is completely the opposite of
California ranching. The biggest problem over there, of course, is the weather.
You have to feed the cattle from Thanksgiving to the 15th of March because you've got a foot of snow on the ground, so you have to feed them hay. It's an extremely short season. I think we've got less than a hundred days that are frostfree at that elevation, which was 6,400 feet to 10,000. It was quite an interesting experience, and it was a very fruitful experience for all of us. It was probably something that doesn't happen every day. It's amazing that thirty years went by and we were in and out. Fortunately, we had to sell the ranch because there's nobody has any interest in ranching anymore as far as this family goes. They're interested in development, and that ranch will be a ranch forever. You won't have any development in northeastern Nevada for a couple of centuries yet.
So, there was nobody had any interest in it, and the partners that were in that ranch were Mr. O'Neill and Tony and myself. Well, Mr. O'Neill is seventyeight years old, Tony is sixty-two, and I'm sixty-five. There weren't very many young people coming up pounding our door wanting to get into the ranching business.
That took a big part of my time, but it was at the right time because the operations here in California, as you're aware of, are in the wintertime when the

249 green grass comes. Come May, we sell everything off. Come May and June,
Nevada blossoms.
MW: So they kind of complement each other.
GA: They did. They complemented each other in the seasons, and they complemented each other in that we could move cattle back and forth and have green grass.
They complemented the whole operation pretty good.
MW: How do you move cattle from –
GA: Well, on trucks. You move them through trucks. In those days, unlike today, it was relatively cheap. As you're aware, with the fuel cost, energy cost, et cetera, it used to cost us about $20 a cow to move her back and forth; today it's going to cost you $60.
MW: How many head of cattle are we moving?
GA: Thousands. A truck can hold 50,000 pounds legally. They can haul 50,000 pounds, so if you've got 50 cows that weigh 1,000 pounds, you'd haul 50 cows.
Basically, that's what you can haul. But like I say, it complemented the operation.
My time was taken in the wintertime in California and the summertime in
Nevada.
During the early seventies, we had other ranches. We had ten or twelve ranches leased in northern California, central California, where we used to run stocker cattle. At one time we ran as many as 30,000 cattle, stocker cattle. We also had a ranch in the seventies in Mexico, in northern Mexico. We had a ranch leased over there. We used to buy Mexican cattle, keep them on that property,

250 cross them into the United States, and then put them on these ranches, not only here but on other ranches. Again it was quite an experience.
To put it in perspective, when I say 30,000 cattle or 5,000 cows, the average cowherd today in the United States, the average cowherd is 36 head in the
United States. The top 2 percent of the cattle operations run over 90 percent of the cattle. So as you can see, in the southeast, in places like Missouri, Arkansas,
Georgia, Mississippi, et cetera, everybody's got a piece of ground, everybody's got two or three cattle or ten or fifteen, and they can get in and out of the cattle business on any given day. When you have these many cattle, obviously, it's a little difficult to get in. You're kind of locked in. So to put it into perspective, that's how it is. The average cowherd in the United States is 36 head, and our average cowherd was 5,000 cows, let alone the stockers. That just shows you how big our operation is.
In the cattle business, the operation is so land intensive. It's so capital intensive. Quite honestly, it's a wonderful way of life. It's unparalleled for raising a family or growing up in or being in. It's just a wonderful way of life. It's not a very good way to make money. It's not very profitable to make money because your constrictions are the elements, of which you have no control whether it's going to rain or it's going to be too cold or too dry, et cetera. And the market. You have no control over the market. There isn't a Blue Book that says this cow's worth $7,000 because it's got four legs and it's got a nice brown hide on it and it's got horns. There's no such thing. It's only worth what somebody's

251 going to give you for it. That's what it's worth. Consequently, it's a very volatile business as far as making any money.
Where you make money is on the land. You own the land, and, obviously, it comes around to what you're talking about is development. You own the land, and eventually you're going to make some money. And what do you do with the land until it can be developed? A classic example of this is this ranch, Rancho
Mission Viejo. In the fifties there was no development, so they had a ranching operation. In the sixties it started to develop, but you still don't develop all your land at one time, so you put it to its best use and it's best use is cattle grazing.
The best part about it is this area here, southern California, is probably the best grazing area in the entire world. The feed that is grown here when it rains, the clover and your wild oats nutritionally is the best feed in the entire world. The cattle just do phenomenal. When you go up and down, especially when you leave the Los Angeles area and you go through Thousand Oaks, and you go through
Oxnard and to Ventura and Santa Barbara and Santa Ynez, all the way into San
Luis Obispo, the central coast is just unbelievable country for grazing cattle.
Unfortunately, you drive through there today and you don't see much cattle. A lot of golf courses and a lot of cars, lots of people. But that's progress.
A lot of people gave me a lot of static when we started Mission Viejo
Company in 1964. That afforded us the luxury of being in the cattle business, being able to have a source of income that allowed us to be in the cattle business, because there were some pretty tough years in the sixties and seventies as far as the cattle business went. So, basically, that's pretty much it.

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Getting back as to what I do at the ranch, the ranch is not only a cattle ranch. It's very unique in that there's a number of leases that we have, and the leases that we have here in San Juan Capistrano, Rancho Mission Viejo vary anywhere from a TRW where they're testing rockets to go to the moon to agricultural leases where we have people picking oranges and lemons. So, on any given day on this ranch, even today, there could be as many as four to five hundred people that are working here at different levels. I mean, there could be a rocket scientist or somebody picking lemons. It's just that diverse.
MW: It's diverse in that it represents California and the state where we are right now.
GA: We have some sand and gravel leases, some cement plants. We're the garbage capital of the world because it is home to a company that collects the garbage, I mean that has the trucks.
MW: Is that the Western Waste Management?
GA: Well, it's Solite. They have the contracts for the Mission Viejo, El Toro, San
Clemente, who knows what they've got. But they've got a hundred garbage trucks. They built a site here on the ranch that they lease from us where those trucks come in every night. They have to be steam cleaned, they have to be sanitized, so to speak. It doesn't smell very good over there, but they have to be someplace. We go the gamut from a rocket scientist to garbage trucks to lemon pickers to a cattle ranch. It's very diverse.
It's been very interesting in dealing with that many people . If we were a ranch in Nevada, you never see anybody. You're a ranch and you welcome somebody to come to the door, somebody to talk to. Over here, you need a

253 number on their back and a program to keep tabs on everybody that's around here.
I like to tell people that I live on a ranch that the newspaper's delivered to your door. It's very unique in that manner. Yet, if I want to, I can get out, even today, you can go drive around for three or four hours, and you can put a hundred miles on your vehicle and not see anybody, when you're out in the back country. So it's pretty interesting. It's pretty interesting.
We've seen the gamut from the little strawberry farmers, the little Japanese farmers that we used to have that would come and farm right across the way here.
There's a guy there that farmed twenty acres of strawberries. He made a living.
He and his whole family made a living doing twenty acres of strawberries. And we've seen that transform.
We've had the luxury of being able to observe some of these Mexican families that came here with us thirty years ago, came from Mexico, did not know the language, and have seen their children that were born here go through the whole school, high school, college. They're now teachers and lawyers, and they came from very meager means, from Mexico, and came to work on this ranch.
Their parents are still working here, and yet their offspring have been able to –
MW: That must be rewarding to you.
GA: Well, it is. I can remember some of these kids, along with my kids, that would be standing on the Ortega Highway waiting for the school bus to come, and they wouldn't even speak English. But yet they made them go to school, and they went to school and got an education and furthered their education and went on to college. It's just unbelievable that you could do that.

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MW: Great opportunity.
GA: Wonderful opportunity. Especially when I know where these people came from because I have physically been in their home states. People that have a very, very meager subsistence. Now these kids, their generation have progressed and gotten an education and done very well. Very interesting that way.
We've been very blessed in what we've done here, I think, that the whole family, especially the O'Neill family and the Moiso family have done a wonderful job of looking after their employees. The average tenure of our ranch employee is twenty-six, twenty-seven years. There's very little turnover. The only turnover we have is people that retire, and we don't replace them because, obviously, our world's getting so much smaller.
MW: A change in the operation.
GA: The family has made a commitment to them, and basically, we don't need these people, but we're not going to let them go. What are they going to do at sixtythree years old? So the family has made a commitment. You've got a job here, you work for us, and we've committed to you. You've got a job here until you retire.
MW: I've read Jerome Baumgardner's book of his father's reflections. I don't know if you have.
GA: Oh, yeah.
MW: When you say that, a number of things come up in his oral history book. Steve
Peters, the ranch hand, was one. But the idea he mentions that you never think of firing Steve Peters because that's like burning down the ranch house.

255
GA: It's family.
MW: It's part of what goes on there.
GA: The ranching business is very unique. Even today, in the twenty-first century, we buy and sell a lot of cattle, and it's still on a handshake. I come to you as a rancher, and I say, "Do you agree to sell me your cattle?" and its hundreds of thousands or a million dollars worth of cattle. I look you in the eye, we agree on a price, we agree on a delivery date, and we agree on everything, and I shake your hand. This is in October, and on May 20th I show up at your door and you have the cattle ready. You said what you were going to do, and I receive them, and I pay you what I said I was going to do. And it's just on a handshake. There's not a lawyer, there's not a piece of paper, there's nothing. That's what's so unique about this business.
MW: It is. And it's been involved in the family. When I hear about the Floods and the
O'Neills and the agreement in the twentieth century. You purchased all this land, and here's this millionaire, the Floods, the silver tycoon, says, "Okay, you go down and work it and I'll put up the cash, and we'll split it, and we'll be even."
GA: Nothing on paper. Twenty years later, you're sitting here and you've got a onehalf undivided interest. We can turn the clock forward because when we bought the ranch in Nevada, there was somewhat of a similar deal given to me. He says,
"I'll give you this. You've got a percentage of ownership. You can just run it, and whenever we sell it, you'll get your share." That happened to me, so I can relate to what happened to Jerome O'Neill and the Floods, because this is the deal that
Tony Moiso gave me. "Yeah, sure, let's go buy this ranch. I'll buy it, I'll put up

256 the money. We'll run it, and if we sell it next year, we sell it twenty years from now or thirty – we never thought of selling it at that time – you own this much of the ranch." That happened. There was no documentation to speak of.
MW: It's so unique today.
GA: If he would have died in between, I'd have had a pretty tough time telling somebody, "Hey, I've got –"
MW: I need some lawyers. We've got this handshake deal where we looked each other in the eye.
GA: Yeah. "Tony told me." "Oh, yeah, where's the papers?" "Well, I don't have any."
"Well, tough." But that's the cattle business, and it's very unique in that way, when you live in that so-called society that your word is your bond and you're going to do what you say you're going to do. You read in the newspapers today that somebody gets paid millions of dollars, wants to renegotiate the contract.
MW: Baseball players.
GA: It's just hard to fathom. When you tell somebody you're going to be there, you know, "I'm going to be there New Year's Eve on 2025," you can bet your boots he's going to be there, unless he's dead. That's the kind of relationships that you have. Not that there's not some bad people. There's some people that don't do those things. But as a majority, the people, the old people that are in the cattle business, the so-called people that own these ranches that made the West, so to speak, as we know it today, they're just wonderful, wonderful people.
I've seen many occasions where somebody got hurt or fell upon hard times, or whatever, and there's nothing for somebody that you know that's not

257 even next door. Here's a guy that had a drought, or whatever, I'll send you twenty head of cows to get started, just give them to you. I guess you can relate it to if you had a fire in your home and your neighbors took up a collection and bought you a sofa, but this is an individual that gives – here's twenty cows, and somebody else might give him twenty, and all of a sudden he's got a hundred. He's got a start. That's the kind of mentality that you grow up in, you live in.
MW: That's refreshing to see this late in the twentieth century that you still speak of that. I teach history to high school students, and we teach about the settling of the frontier and the challenges that they had in terms of digging a well. They got everybody together in the community, the other farms, the other ranches, and they help do this. Then when it was time to build the barn at someone else's, you went and assisted them in that. That's history. They're like, "I can't fathom that."
GA: It's even today, as insignificant as it sounds, that here we are in Orange County, and we have friends in San Luis Obispo, Visalia, Paso Robles, Santa Ynez, and the custom of helping each other. When they brand their calves, they will call and invite us to go help them brand. I mean, it's not like you're going next door. It's four or five hours away. And vice versa. We invite them and they come and help us, and it's just a tradition. It's a real good tradition. Just keeping the West alive, so to speak, is what I call it. You get to go – not that they need your help, but it's just a tradition that they did need your help in the old days.
MW: Would you feel slighted if they didn't invite you?
GA: Oh, sure. Sure you would. It's like you're out of favor. But the fact that it's tradition. It's tradition. There's not very much tradition left, really, when you stop

258 to think about it. People talk about a lot of tradition, but – the western way of life has lots of tradition. When you stop to think that there are still people who wear cowboy hats and still wear boots but wear them for a reason, because you wear them with pride. It's just like pride of ownership. That's what it is.
MW: I have a quick question. In your capacity here, are you the evolution or descendent of Steve Peters in the book Rancho Santa Margarita Remembers in terms of your capacity here at the ranch?
GA: Well, I can't speak for Steve Peters, but I'm in charge of all the cattle operations and agricultural operations, whether it's these trees out here or whether it's the leases on the ranch or buying or selling the cattle. There's nobody else. I've had a pretty free rein ever since I've been here, and I've been here since 1967. Tony's a wonderful person, and obviously, I keep him informed. Unlike little bits of papers on your dashboard, we do have an accounting system and checks and balances. I make all the decisions, and never once have I been told that it's the right decision or it's the wrong decision. You do whatever you think is best.
There's a saying in the cowboy world that when somebody loans you a horse, you ride it like it's yours, like you own it. Even though I'm loaning it to you, you ride it like it's yours, which means you've got full rein.
MW: You mentioned about tradition. Sitting here and the evolution of the ranch into the development community, do you see any ways in which the company today tries to carry on that or carry it toward something like the development of communities where there typically isn't any tradition? It's a brand new entity in itself.

259
GA: I think that the family has tried to carry on the tradition in their development, not so much in Mission Viejo because Mission Viejo was a different ballgame.
Mission Viejo, you had 10,000 acres and you built 10,000 acres. Santa Margarita, there's 5,000 acres, you had 2,500 acres of open space. The family has given away, literally, almost 10 to 12,000 thousand acres for open space, perpetual open space. Forever. It'll always be open. In the years gone by, they could have probably built on it, they could have kept it, but they've given it to the public, given it to the county for public use. That's their way of making the open space and the way of ranching as a tradition.
The other thing that they have is that they have all this land, and everything south of the Ortega Highway will probably always be open space, will probably always be ranching just because of their heritage. You say always or you say never, that's a long time, but for the time being, they have no plans to do that. It will just be ranching and open space. When you consider that you've got
Caspers Park that's approximately 5, 6, 7,000 acres, you've got the Cleveland
National Forest, which is millions of acres, so 10,000 acres doesn't seem like very much. But for somebody to give up 10,000 acres for open space, you do the math.
MW: That's a lot of homes or development –
GA: You do the math. It's hundreds of millions of dollars that could be in somebody's pocket. You say, "Well, that's pretty generous of them." Well, sure, they don't need the money now. Well, that's true. They may not need the money this generation or the next generation, but what about future generations? Are you

260 going to deprive them two or three generations down the road? As you know, money doesn't last forever. When you hold land, it's inventory. You have to sell land. That's your wealth. You don't make it off the cattle business, you don't make it off the trees. It's just a way to hold this land ‘til you can do something better with it, so you just keep chipping away at it. There's a saying that every time you sell a piece of ground, you get poor. You get the money, you get ecstatic, and then two weeks, two years, twenty years later you're out of money.
Spent. No more land. It's pretty interesting.
MW: Before you started in the 1960s, what was your capacity? What did you do?
How did you come into Rancho Mission Viejo?
GA: I was born and raised in Tucson, Arizona. I graduated from the University of
Arizona in 1957 with a degree in animal science. My family in Tucson, southern
Arizona, was a ranching family. They owned a lot of land and a lot of cattle in the teens, '15, '16, into the twenties. Then, of course, the Depression came and a lot of people lost a lot of things. So I'd always been in the ranching business. I grew up with a ranching legacy, so to speak.
When I graduated from college, I went to work in a feedlot in the Phoenix area. Then I met the O'Neills in 1967, and they asked me if I would be interested in coming to California. Never having been to California, my first reaction was no. Why would you want to go to California in the sixties? You know, a bunch of hippies. (chuckles) I didn't want to go to California. They talked me into coming as a consultant. I'd never heard of the word consultant, but they needed some help, so I came and looked at the place. They were between managers,

261 obviously. Then I came back again in the following February, and I came back in
March. I said, "This is a diamond in the rough. This isn't bad." So I made the right decision. The family has been awful good to me. Awful good.
MW: Can you describe the areas on the ranch prior to the communities being built?
You mentioned Mission Viejo or Santa Margarita. What was the land like? What did the company use the land for, in terms of whether it was agriculture or ranching? And how has that changed? Those pictures, the images, the reflections have been lost now to the building and construction of these cities and communities.
South section of the Plano Trabuco home to agriculture before development 63
63 County of Orange, CA. “Environmental Impact Report #320 General Plan Amendment 82-2: Plano
Trabuco Planned Community.” April 1982. Exhibit 5, 19.

262
GA: It's ironic that the environmentalists today seem to think that we haven't done a very good job with this land, in their eyes. Yet, if you don't take care of the land, it doesn't take care of you. Consequently, we've had this land since 1882, and it's as good a ranching land as there is, so we've taken very good care of it.
To get back to your answer how this thing has changed, I don't know if you're familiar where the Cow Camp area is, but it's about two miles up the
Ortega Highway. That's the center of the operation.
MW: That's the area where I see the signs as I go up. It says residents –
GA: Residents, Cow Camp, maintenance shop, et cetera. Anyway, in the old days, before the advent of the use of trucks and trailers as much as we use them today –
I don't know if you're familiar where Cook's Corner is.
MW: Yeah.
GA: We used to get on our horses in three-thirty, four o'clock in the morning and go on our horses on a long trot all the way to Cook's Corner. It'd take you an hour and a half, two hours just to get there, because that was the northern end of the ranch,
Rancho Santa Margarita, to do the cattle work. Then you'd come back at six o'clock at night. You'd end up here at dark, but you'd come at a long trot and somewhat of a gallop. That's the span of what you used to have to do before the advent of the gooseneck trailers, what I call the gooseneck society today.
What happened? Okay. Mission Viejo came in and the development started. Unlike – I don't know if it's unlike, but in California especially, where do they develop the best land? It's always the best land that goes first because the best land was by the freeway and by where the utilities were. So Mission Viejo

263 came in. Every day we'd ride out that way, and every day you could see these houses get closer and closer and closer and closer. We'd say okay, that's progress.
Now we go to Rancho Santa Margarita, and now the houses are closer and closer.
That was '64, this was '84. Now this is 2000, and if you just look over the hill right here, you'd see Ladera. You'd see houses right there. So progress has overtaken us.
Progress isn't so bad in the fact that it brings people. Progress is good, but it brings people. The fact is that now, all of a sudden – that we've created ourselves, now, mind you. We're aware of this. We've created it. Now we've created all these people that have a lot of time on their hands, so what do they do on Saturday and Sunday or when it doesn't get dark until nine o'clock at night?
They look across the road and see all this open space, hmm, must be ours so let's go. The fact that there's a sign on the fence says "no trespassing, private property" has nothing to do with the American public. It's mine so let's go. We're not doing anything. You stop the people, "We're not hurting anything. All we're doing is walking," or, "All we're doing is jogging," or, "All we're doing is walking our dog, and, "We're not hurting anything." The fact that your windmills are all shot up, the fact that your water troughs are full of rocks because the kids throw rocks in them – "We're not hurting anything." It happens, I guess. It's the immaculate conception, somebody's doing it. Those are the types of problems that we have.
What people don't realize is that when you jump this fence that says "no trespassing," there's probably cattle in there. Cattle can smell you quarter of a

264 mile, half a mile away. They're not used to people afoot, so what do they do?
Their nature is to move on, and sometimes they'll run to the back of the fence to run away from somebody that's coming in. They're running beef off, and they're getting wild, or they'll get scared and they'll get to the other fence and go through it and break it. They're not used to people afoot. But nobody's hurting anything.
It's very hard to describe that to somebody.
MW: There must be a tremendous liability. They saw a sign, but they don't pay attention to it.
GA: We've had the problem where a trespasser has gone over the fence and has fell and broke their leg, and they sued us. It's our fault. It's a bizarre society we live in. There's a guy that jumps the fence, he's trespassing, he broke his leg, and he sues us. It's our fault.
MW: Could they ever be attacked by a bull or something like that?
GA: Not really. The only way a bull would attack them is if they were cornered, if a bull was in an area where he couldn't get out. Of course, a bull can get out anyplace he wants to.
MW: If he puts his mind to it.
GA: So he's not going to – chances are very remote. There's a better chance of getting eaten by a mountain lion – let's put it that way – than being hurt by the cattle, because they're going to run away. But the point is, that's the biggest problem.
Everyone asks me what's the biggest problem. The biggest problem is people, is the people problem that we have created. We've created it and we've got to live with them. It's not going to get any better, it's going to get worse. We have full-

265 time security on the ranch just to keep people out, and it's a full-time job.
Nobody's hurting anything. Well, sure.
MW: There's always the potential that there could be. They could get hurt themselves.
GA: Oh, yeah. Just the liability alone. It's pretty interesting. And it's sad. From my perspective of being sixty-five years old, you get to the point where you kind of reminisce a little bit, of what a great ranching tradition this was, one of the great ranchos of California. When you stop to think of 235,000 acres, from Oceanside to El Toro. The tradition. You walk up and down the halls – I'm sure that Tony showed you some of those pictures of the old cowboys and what they used to do and the thousands of head of cattle that they had. It's sad. It's gone. It's not here.
It's not here anymore. And there's very, very few places – there's a book out called The California Cowboy , and it's just a book of photographs that was taken from southern California all the way to northern California depicting the different ranches that are left. We have a copy over there someplace. I'll get you one.
MW: I thought there was one on the coffee table.
GA: I'm sure there is.
MW: I haven't seen that. It would be interesting to look at.
GA: It's just photographs starting here on this ranch, and they went all the way north.
We're fortunate to be in it. There's still some real pretty country left, and there's still some pretty good sized ranches left in California. It's hard to believe, but there's some – especially in northern California. So the tradition is still here. It's still a viable – people have to eat, and consequently, over the last two years, the beef consumption has begun to come up. It used to be going down. For a while it

266 was level. Now there's a little rise to it. All of a sudden, meat's not that bad.
You're not going to die of a heart attack if you have a steak. There's more and more steak houses being built.
MW: I had another question that came up when you mentioned that. When I read some of these books and some of these accounts and challenges that they had a long time ago, one of them being to have to fence this colossal property in, and another one being problems with disease and such. What precautions do you have to take
– considering things that we hear about in the news in Europe with regard to different diseases?
GA: We're pretty liable. The foot-and-mouth disease is pretty serious. It's a pretty serious disease. It can be transmitted by humans, it can be transmitted just by your clothing. It's something that could happen here pretty readily, especially with the mode of transportation that we have today.
MW: And they've had outbreaks of it before in California, haven't they?
GA: The last real outbreak they had was 1929.
MW: Oh, okay.
GA: But as far as diseases go that are so-called native born, everybody vaccinates for these diseases now, even anthrax. Anthrax used to be a big problem. It's still a problem in some sections of the country, but they have vaccines for it. We vaccinate all the time.
MW: That I only hear about in the context of weapons anthrax. What is that in terms of
–

267
GA: It's a cattle disease. You read years ago in the early 1900s where it would just come out and just wipe out entire herds. But there's vaccines for it. There's vaccines for hoof-and-mouth disease. Health is a real important problem today because you're dealing with an animal that you're raising and you want to give it – what do you have to sell as a rancher? All you have to sell as a rancher is your grass, and you need an animal that's going to convert that grass into pounds of meat that you're going to sell. That's your goal. So you want as healthy an animal you can have that can convert that grass.
It even goes further back into genetics in that you want the right animal that can convert the right grass. If you're in southeast Texas where it's very sparse, there's a different kind of an animal. It's called a Brahma. It can survive under severe heat conditions and ticks and et cetera. And it produces a quality of meat that – there's nothing wrong with the quality of meat, but that animal can survive. You would take a nice Angus or Hereford, English type, they couldn't survive the elements over there, the heat and the sparse feed. So there's different animals to fit different areas. We're pretty fortunate. This area right here could take care of anything. Especially better quality ones.
[end side A; begin side B]
MW: I don't want to take anymore of your time, but is there anything else – I don't mean to wrap it up on the other hand, too. I'm really intrigued listening to you and the reflections you have and the comments on the changes and the two different worlds that we live in. Are there other things that you could share about the use of land and the changes in the use of the land, whether it's growing citrus,

268 whether it's the gravel business that I've seen mentioned in an interview by a man by the name of Warren Wilson that was with the ranch.
GA: Remember now, when the O'Neills took possession after 1941 or '42, when they were given what is now Rancho Mission Viejo, you take that part and, tongue in cheek, we'll take the money and leave. (chuckles) And we'll leave you with the land. Well, guess who got the last laugh fifty years later. There was an area there that you had to make this ranch produce, and you had to live off the ranch. What could you do? Well, you had some sand and gravel deposits, so they were – they put money in the till. Why did we lease land out to TRW? Because they needed some land to do their testing, and it created income. So all these leases were out of necessity, really. You had all this land, and the cattle business is okay, but it doesn't make that much money so let's enhance our income by leasing these properties out, whether it was sand and gravel or just a flat out lease for somebody to put some container nurseries. You were optimizing the land is what you were doing.
They all talk about the O'Neill family having lots of money. Well, they had lots of land but very little money, as everybody did in that time. But then all of a sudden you get lucky because here comes a freeway down. Here comes the freeway down, and you've got some land alongside the freeway, bingo! They were pretty smart. Then you have to take that and make it what it is.
MW: Mr. Moiso always emphasizes, "We're very fortunate."
GA: We are. We're all very fortunate. Obviously, he's more fortunate than I am, but we're all very fortunate in that we landed at an era where this thing has just

269 blossomed. Yet we had the tradition of the legacy of the ranching heritage that was here, the stewards of the land. When I came there were some cowboys here that were here from the old Santa Margarita days, people that were born in San
Juan Capistrano and had worked their entire adult life for the O'Neill family, whether it was Rancho Santa Margarita at Oceanside or Rancho Mission Viejo at
San Juan Capistrano.
To listen to their stories of the many thousands of head of cattle that they used to have to move, the way they handled them, the old vaquero tradition of the rawhide ropes and the rawhide reins and the hundreds of head of horses that they had to till the ground, because there weren't very many tractors in the thirties.
And they used to have horses to pull the plows. Just a wonderful, wonderful way of life. I mean, it's a wonderful way of life that's very hard. It was very hard as we look back on it today. But it was such a tradition, such a wonderful heritage.
To be a part of it is – I feel very fortunate that I've been a part of it and to learn from those people how to ride and how to rope. It sounds kind of corny, but it's truth. It's the truth. It was a privilege to be able to learn how to ride and how to rope from those people, because even today you go someplace and people say,
"Oh, he's a pretty good hand. Where did you learn this?" "Well, I grew up in it. I grew up in it with people that taught me, that had that background."
MW: That's interesting because it's kind of a maintenance of their tradition. How much has the ranching industry today evolved from 1882 or from – I realize with automobiles and engines and such, but –

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GA: I guess you could put it into perspective that even today you still have to get up in the morning at four o'clock, go saddle your horse, and go gather the cattle. You can't push the button and they all show up. Oh, here's number fifty-seven.
They're pretty good calves. Where is she? Well, she'll be here. You still got to get on your horse, go gather the cattle, bring them into the corral, sort them, brand them, and send them on their way. That hasn't changed. It's a lot easier. Rather than going from here to Cook's Corner on a full trot for two hours, you load your horses on a trailer, and you're there in thirty minutes and you're back. Or in some places where it's very, very remote, they do use some helicopters, and that helps a lot, too.
But, basically, it's still the same. You still got to go get your horse, you gotta put a halter on him, you gotta brush him, you gotta saddle him, and you gotta get on him and go do the work. That's never going to change. I don't care if you got 10,000 head or 10 cows. It's still the same. There's trailers, there's trucks, there's four-wheelers, there's helicopters, there's a lot of amenities that make life a lot easier, and they're all good tools. But you still gotta go get your boots soiled.
You gotta get a little manure on your boots to finish the job.
MW: It's great to hear that the family is still interested in maintaining that tradition.
GA: They're going to maintain that tradition because there's where they came from.
Whence where they came. It's a wonderful story. I know that you've heard it.
Here comes this Irishman in 1882. Jim, you oughta buy it. Nice ranch. He's just a butcher. But it turned out pretty good. It's a wonderful story.

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MW: It ties in so much with what we do, the mineral aspects, the Comstock load, the money that's created from that.
GA: But it's land. Where did this country come from that's not from the men from the land?
MW: And wanting to own the land and work the land.
GA: When you look back in California history, especially southern California history, and the land was owned by a handful of people, and you wonder where the land went. When you hear some of these families like the Yorbas that had land grants of hundreds of thousands of acres, it's all gone.
MW: Or you wonder where the money that came from, say, the Comstock lode, I kind of see it as a transfer of wealth, which I'm the beneficiary of that, in that the money's taken out of the earth in terms of silver, it's transferred to this ranch in terms of the purchase here, it's maintained for years until there's a time at which it developed into homes, and I can purchase my first home in Santa Margarita and have that little area of the land.
GA: That's precisely the point. I was just going to say, I'm involved in development somewhat, and it's amazing when you go to these grand openings, not so much now, but at Rancho Santa Margarita where people would come up and thank you.
I mean, "Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be able to buy my first home."
MW: That's the way I feel.
GA: When you say the transfer of wealth, that you can trace it all the way to the
Comstock lode and came, like you say, to buy the ranch, to hold the ranch, to

272 develop it, to go through the whole war years, to come into the sixties and seventies, eighties, and people are benefiting from that. You talk about a transfer of wealth. Just think about that awhile. Start putting arrows to that little circle, how it comes back.
But that's what it's all about. And I'm not bad-mouthing these other people, but some of the neighbors up the road in the sixties and seventies that had ranches, they just sold them. The Moultons is a classic example. In 1970, or whatever it was, they got $30 million for all that El Toro area where the El Toro is, especially on that side of the freeway, Aliso Viejo and all through that. They got $30 million. They got their check, they got their money, and they moved on.
They went up to the Merced country, they went up to the Pacheco Pass, they went up to the Klamath country, and they bought ranches. And they forgot about the heritage, unlike the O'Neill family that said, "Hey, we got this land, we're going to have control, we're going to build Mission Viejo the way we think it should be built. We're going to build Santa Margarita the way –"
MW: That's the story is that they –
GA: And they kept their hand in it rather than just to give it to some builder and say,
"Here, I'm going to sell you 1,000 acres, you build whatever you want to." You can still see the flag in Mission Viejo that has the brand on it. There's some heritage. You've done something. They had enough interest and desire to make this land – to take it all the way, I guess.
MW: That's unique about the family, I think. I spoke to Mr. Schrank last week about development, and that's something that I find unique. They aren't going to sell it

273 and move on. I believe that even Rancho Mission Viejo purchased some of the
Moulton ranch. Weren't they involved in the development of Aliso Viejo?
GA: Well, when Philip Morris bought Mission Viejo, they bought some of that.
MW: Oh, okay.
GA: But it's the fact that they care, all the way to the extent today that – I sit in some meetings, they're so concerned about how big is this trail going to be around
Ladera? And where is it going to go? And who's going to use it? Okay. Then they better have some open space over here, so let's give them some more land so they can have some open space.
MW: Do you find that's unique with the family?
GA: Oh, very much so. It's very much so. Sure, tongue in cheek, it sells homes.
There's no question about it. But you have to have the economic value. But the fact that if you were to sell it to Joe Blow, he might not be that free with that land and say, "Hey, wait a minute. We could put some houses over here. We could cut this trail in half." And blah, blah, blah, and change this whole thing because it's going to line somebody's pockets. These people are looking at the whole picture. It's going to be a community. It's going to be there for a long time, and we've got to be proud of it, because it's part of the heritage. We're still here.
We're watching it every day. We're still going to be here, whether it's us or the next generation that's here.
MW: You're picking your neighbors.
GA: Exactly.

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MW: I remember in December we had an opportunity to look at a map, and it showed some of the development. I remember Mr. Moiso looking at Mission Viejo and how the houses – and there isn't a lot of open space in that development. He said that's never going to happen again. There's going to be the open area like in Santa
Margarita.
GA: We didn't know any better. Obviously, things change. We didn't know any better, and quite honestly, we didn't have the laws that we have. And if we wanted to, you couldn't, but that doesn't mean that we won't give open space.
Their biggest desire is to make this something that we're all going to be proud of.
It's not only those of us that are here today, but it's the next generation coming up because there's enough land here to go on for two more generations to finish building. So we're just hopefully setting the right platform so they do the right thing.
MW: I don't want to take anymore of your time, but I really enjoy this.
GA: I hope that it helps some.
MW: I hope you enjoy sharing this – it's a unique opportunity for us.
GA: Very honestly, you don't get a chance to – around here, this day and age, everybody's at such a fast pace. Everybody just kind of takes it for granted. I mean, we all take it for granted just because we're here. But yes. It's very enjoyable to be able to share this with somebody who cares, and thank you people for doing this. Hopefully, somebody's going to benefit from this down the road.
MW: We're benefiting from it right now.

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GA: When it's all gone, they're going to say, "Wait a minute. What are those old guys talking about a ranch? There's never been a ranch here." All we got is O'Neill
Park and we got Antonio Parkway, a bunch of old guys that happen to have their name on the roads.
MW: The more I research this, not just the O'Neill portion but even before that, I come across so many little aspects of the use of the land. One of them was an artist by the name of James Walters, who painted pictures back in the 1820s of cattle, and they've become pretty significant in terms of California history. I'm looking at one in a history book, and I know he was on the Rancho Santa Margarita y Las
Flores, but you look, there's Saddleback Mountain and the cattle. It's in the setting, but I recognize it because I look down the street every day on my way to work, and I see the mountains.
GA: When I drive around and I'm driving down Olympiad in Mission Viejo and I see those power lines, when you get to Olympiad and Alicia. I don't know if you're familiar with that.
MW: Yes.
GA: Olympiad and Alicia. If you're going north on Olympiad and Alicia's going to
Santa Margarita, if you look to the right, there's power lines that come up there, but there's a big green area. There was a big spring there. And then right there where – there's a Mobil station, if I remember correctly. There used to be a big barn there, a big barn, and we used to call that the Chengala(?) lease because there's five brothers by the name of Chengala used to farm all that country dry land farm, all the way to El Toro. Every time I go by there – in fact, in the old

276 days, when there was nothing there, you used to come upon this beautiful – it was a rundown old barn, but it was one of the gigantic barns that they used to build in those days and all kinds of equipment around it and an old house, but they had this spring, and this spring was – there was a two-inch pipe of water used to come out of there. It was unbelievable. Used to be called the Kingly Spring.
You drive around and you see those places, and then you drive in other places and I have to look around, I don't know where I'm at because the topography has changed so much that I don't know where I'm at in those places.
But it was beautiful. You feel very fortunate to have been a part of it and seen it and seen it develop, and develop very well. Naturally, it would have been a lot better if it had never been developed, but unfortunately – I think Tony's got a great line, that when you have to go pay your bill at I. Magnin's, you can't put a little bit of dirt in an envelope and send it. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. So you have to develop that land to its highest return. And we're all very fortunate to have been a part of it.
MW: Is there anything else that you can think of that might add to our study, or comments that you want to make?
GA: The only thing I can add that I'm really grateful that there's people like you that have taken the time to put this in tape and in film for somebody's benefit from it down the road.
MW: I'd love to come back and talk to you again sometime in the future.
GA: Oh, any time.

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MW: Or give you a call. I know what typically happens with this is, I go back and I make an index, almost like a table of contents on the tape with a counter. Then when time permits, or if time permits, some of the tapes, if we're working on one project, they'll transcribe them and put them in text form. Sometimes they're even put into a book. I'm working on my thesis in terms of related issues, so I'm collecting all this information to put into something.
GA: You put that all together, and if there's some blank places come back and we'll fill them.
MW: I really appreciate that. This is a real interesting interview that people are going to enjoy listening to, because it's unique. We don't see this. We grow up in an area that's paved over with asphalt and cement, and we look at picturesque lakes and mountains.
GA: It's amazing. You can look around at these pictures here, modestly, of ourselves that we put up, but it's a way of life. It's amazing. You go around today, and one of the great lines I like to tell is, people come up to me and say, "Are you a real cowboy?" I say, "Well, I'll do ‘til one comes along."
MW: Thank you very much. We really appreciate it.
GA: You're welcome.
MW: I'm going to stop the tape now.
END OF INTERVIEW

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The Rancho Santa Margarita Community in June 1993 courtesy of Arial Eye, Inc.