The high Sierra Nevada's wild granite mountain slabs stretch for miles from the top of Castle Peak near Truckee. Pleasant, flat trails meander through Penn Valley's Western Gateway Park, winding past oaks dotting the area's comparatively tamer hills.

Vistas and open spaces like these have drawn residents to Nevada County for decades. But recent discussions raise the questions: What is the place of open space in a rural county, and who is responsible for creating and maintaining them?

County government doesn't do enough to set aside open spaces, some conservationists say. Private citizens need to form coalitions to buy and set aside space, or form parks districts and tax themselves to pay for the use and protection of the land, county officials counter.

Issues of public access to wide open space brush up against property rights.

Earlier this fall, Nevada County released its trails plan, which sparked controversy when a public easement for the historic Emigrant Trail, running through three south county subdivisions, was temporarily closed after residents in the subdivisions raised concerns about the damage that access could wreak on property values. Trail supporters said the county needs to assure the public will have access to the area.

As people continue to move into the region — drawn by its natural beauty — such competing concerns will continue.

Nevada County Land Trust officials are taking on the role of buying up and protecting some lands, but see it as government's role in the future.

Placer County recently allocated $5 million to buy about 1,700 acres south of the Bear River as an open space preserve, and Nevada County Land Trust Executive Director Marty Coleman sees moves of that magnitude as the future for Nevada County's open spaces, she said.

A fork in the trail: Which way to go with open space?

In September, the Nevada County Board of Supervisors declined to release more than $70,000 in funding to help Nevada City buy 30 acres on Sugarloaf Mountain north of downtown.

Chairman Nate Beason, who represents Nevada City on the Board of Supervisors, said Sugarloaf didn't offer enough “bang for the county's buck.”

“The marginal utility of acquiring more open space in an area that abounds in open space or other passive recreation opportunities, in reality, creates no practical, effective expansion of recreational opportunities that could justify the expenditure,” he wrote at the time.

Funding for Sugarloaf would have come out of the AB 1600 program, which uses developer fees to pay for open spaces and parks. With development declining, those fees are precious and must generate a larger benefit for county residents, Beason argued.

His explanation drew criticism from some quarters.

The county “needs to provide that service to the taxpayers,” said Virginia Moran, an environmental consultant and Alta Sierra resident, who supported the Sugarloaf deal and who has led hikes there. “People are crying out for more parks and open space, and since the county's not doing it, they are doing it themselves.”

She pointed to the county's parks districts such as Western Gateway, Bear River Recreation and Parks District, and most recently the Oak Tree Park District voters created November in North San Juan.

In those instances, county residents agreed to tax themselves and create boards to administer their parks — exactly how county officials would like to see open spaces maintained.

“Generally, the county supports the private recreation districts,” said Todd Herman, a longtime employee of the county's planning department.

Competing priorities, declining $$

Recreation districts alone aren't providing county residents enough space, open space advocates said.

Because of the county's growth over the last few decades, “it's time for Nevada County to really consider formalizing a parks and recreation district for western Nevada County,” said Linda Chaplin, an advocate for the Cross California Ecological Corridor and Trail.

The trail's backers want to string together a band of open space between the Northern California Coast and the Sierra Nevada, a trail that could include some parts of Nevada County, she said.

“Our present system of open space preservation in Nevada County is no longer adequate,” Chaplin said. “It does place an undue burden on private property owners.”

That estimation doesn't take into account the larger picture, Beason said.

“The taxpayers are going to pay whether the county has a parks and recreation department or not,” Beason said. “We'd have to find a way to support that with revenue from somewhere. It's not like, if the county takes it over, the cost will just go away.

“There's this idea that the county has some bag of money somewhere to pay for everything,” Beason added. “For every service we perform, there must be some source of revenue.”

Especially in a bad economy when property and sales taxes are shrinking, creating open space is not a priority, Beason said.

Many people live here because of the proximity to the 800,000-acre Tahoe National Forest, he said. About 83 percent of the forest is within one mile of a road even though the forest is checkerboarded with 400,000 acres of private property.

“That is one of the reasons there's never been a lot of pressure for parks,” Beason said. “We do have open space, and we do have greenbelts.”

By not creating its own parks, the county is placing a burden on the National Forest and state parks such as Empire Mine and the South Yuba River State Park, Moran said.

The county's general plan, adopted in 1995, requires private landowners in most of western Nevada County to maintain 15 percent of their property as open space if it is less than 1 acre, and 20 percent if the property is larger than an acre, said Planning Director Jory Stewart. It also requires developers of new subdivisions to cluster their housing, putting residences on smaller lots and leaving more of the property open.

Chaplin and Moran panned the county plan, saying the public has no access to that land.

Middle ground

One course of action both sides support is work by organizations such as the Nevada County Land Trust in western county and the Truckee Donner Land Trust in eastern county to buy and conserve land for open space.

The Nevada County Land Trust owns 200 acres outright and manages another 5,000 acres of private property, mainly estates in western Nevada County. Owners of the land it manages agree to let Land Trust officials build trails and manage the land in perpetuity.

Nevada County Land Trust staff are working on an agreement to purchase more than 650 acres along the northern end of the Bear River called the Garden Bar Preserve.

“It's real, quintessential, Nevada County pioneer ranch land,” the trust's Coleman said.

The property lies across the Bear River from the 1,700 acre Bruin Ranch; Placer County's Supervisors spent $5 million in county funds last week to set the area aside for conservation.

Combined with other Land Trust property in the area, they would create a zone of nearly 3,000 contiguous acres of open space on both sides of the river.

“At some point in the future, citizens will decide to tax themselves and have the county take over the part of building parks and trails,” Coleman said. “As rural counties become more urbanized, that's a function people look to their government to take on.”

Because there is no county effort to build trails, the Land Trust also takes on that role, building such byways as the popular Litton Trail near Sierra College in Grass Valley.

To contact Staff Writer Kyle Magin, e-mail kmagin@theunion.com or call (530) 477-4239.