The city of Santa Clarita continues the work to completely encircle the city with a green belt of open space. At present, more than 13,000 acres of open space and trails exist for public use. Land continues to be purchased thanks to funds provided by the City of Santa Clarita Open Space Preservation District approved by voters in 2007.
After a similar effort to fund an open space district failed in 2006 City Councilwoman Laurene Weste, a longtime advocate of open space, chaired a new effort to get the initiative passed. “As far as I know this has never been done before in the United States,” said Weste. “I created this Open Space District so we could buy all this land legally.
I am very proud of our community, they stepped up to the plate.” With funds in hand from Open Space District, Weste described the process of obtaining additional land for open space as “quilting.” “It’s like a giant quilt,” she said.
“We keep filling in pieces. We have a lot of land in open space, but we will always be adding more.” A Tale of Two Dumps Public perception is that the fight to keep dumps out of Elsmere and Towsley Canyons in the 1980s and ‘90s resulted in the Open Space movement in the Santa Clarita Valley, however Weste said the two aren’t connected.
“The result of defeating the dumps is open space, but even if the dumps had been built open space land would still have been acquired,” she said. Efforts to make Towsley Canyon a dump date back to 1983. Managed b.
