A pathologist at an Anaheim hospital by day, he also heads up the Banning Ranch Conservancy, a nonprofit that hopes to shore up the millions it would take to buy the land and preserve it as parks and open space.
Welsh has spent the last 10 years lobbying to preserve the ranch, roughly 400 acres dotted with oil wells between Costa Mesa, Newport Beach and the Santa Ana River.
Newport Banning Ranch LLC, a consortium of three land owners, wants to build 1,375 homes, shops and a hotel on Banning Ranch. The developer has estimated it would cost between $30 million and $60 million to clean up the land after years of oil production. Under the development plan, about 70% of the land would be preserved as open space.
“We have an uphill battle ahead of us and we really need more people to help us,” Welsh said.
The conservancy hopes some of the money might come from county Measure M dollars. Orange County voters approved the measure in 1990 to allocate sales tax money to transportation projects. Some Measure M money goes to fund buying chunks of land for preservation in the county.
The conservancy has applied to the Orange County Transportation Authority to get a chunk of the more than $200 million Measure M dollars that are up for grabs and expects to hear back “in months rather than years,” whether or not the project makes the cut, Welsh said.
Even if the Banning Ranch Conservancy gets a cut of Measure M money, it won’t pay for all of Banning Ranch.
“We don’t expect this to pay for the whole of Banning Ranch, but it could be seed money,” Welsh said.
A pricing study commission by Newport Beach found the land could cost anywhere from $184 million to $211 million.
The city could get a discount of 25% for buying the land all at once, reducing the price to anywhere from $138 million to $158 million, the study found.
Newport Banning Ranch prices the land even higher than that.
