Reno Real Estate Logic

Since we are facing such a radical market these days it’s good to see that there’s still money running downstream somewhere. Check out the story posted in the Mercury News about the millions being invested to protect our wild lands in the Sierra’s. It looks like someone is thinking ahead of the next buildilng boom.

TRUCKEE — In the 1860s, Congress created a huge checkerboard of land ownership across California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range when it granted every other square mile to railroad barons along the route of the transcontinental railroad.

Now, nearly 150 years later, one of Silicon Valley’s high-profile couples is working to buy back the squares for nature.

Jim and Becky Morgan of Los Altos Hills — he, the retired CEO of Applied Materials and she, a former Santa Clara County supervisor and Republican state senator — have launched an ambitious project to raise $100 million in the next five years to preserve land across the Sierra.

They are determined to protect up to 100,000 acres between south of Lake Tahoe and Lassen Volcanic National Park, all within a 125-mile swath of majestic forests and snow-capped peaks.

Unlike other donors who have spent millions to buy California’s pricey beach-front property for parks, or saved old-growth redwoods mired in political battles, the Morgans see the Northern Sierra as they would a heady startup venture. If you commit early, before all the hype, prices are still cheap.

“We’re trying to get ahead of the building wave,” said Becky Morgan, riding in a four-wheel drive truck recently along a bumpy dirt road north of Truckee.

The couple founded the nonprofit Northern Sierra Partnership in 2007, and committed $10 million from their family foundation. The David and Lucile

Packard Foundation followed with another $10 million donation. And various other donors have put in $10 million more.The idea is to work with willing land sellers and public funds, and buy about half of the 100,000 acres to transfer to the U.S. Forest Service, state parks and the California Department of Fish & Game. The rest would be kept in private ownership, but preserved through easements and other agreements, under which a timber company would continue some logging, for example, but give up development rights.