Alarm bells turned to celebratory chiming Wednesday as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger presented a state budget plan that would keep La Purisima Mission State Historic Park open.

“We're ecstatic right now with Schwarzenegger taking us off the table,” said Jack Forrest, a spokesman for the mission's docent volunteers.

In January, the governor's first budget proposal called for the closure of 48 state parks, including La Purisima and Montana de Oro, an 8,000-acre beach park south of Morro Bay State Park. The closures were part of a general budget cut to all state departments to help fill a $15.2 billion deficit in next year's budget.

Schwarzenegger's budget proposal Wednesday keeps all the park facilities open, instead borrowing $15 billion in future lottery revenue to fill most of the gap.

“This budget is a giant leap forward from the January budget proposal and a step in the right direction,” said State Sen. Abel Maldonado of Santa Maria, whose district includes 10 of the parks considered for closure. Montana de Oro is inside his district, but La Purisima is outside.

“The credit should go to the people of my district who wrote me and called me and kept the issue alive,” Maldonado said in a phone interview Wednesday, calling the level of public support for keeping the parks open extraordinary.

Organized community support for the mission, led by the docent group Prelado De Los Tesoros De Purisima, had been active in the last four months, with a letter writing campaign, a trip to Sacramento to speak with legislators in support of all 48 park sites, and a community march that drew more than 300 people to the mission grounds.

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“What we did definitely provided a visual and a visible awareness of the community support for the mission,” said Scott Coe, vice president of marketing for CoastHills Federal Credit Union, which helped sponsor the march.

“It brings all kinds of people to the Lompoc Valley; you put the mission, the murals and the flowers together and you have the backbone pieces of our community,” said Lompoc Valley Chamber of Commerce President Denny Anderson.

State Parks spokesman Wes Chapin said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the news.

“Obviously, if that holds up and turns out to be true, we're very happy about that,” said Chapin, adding that final budget approval will not come until July 1 at the earliest. He suggested that citizens follow the budget debate closely, and continued to let their government representatives know how they feel.

“Now comes the hard part,” Maldonado said when asked about the upcoming budget negotiations.

The senator said that while the governor's “snapshot” version of the budget looked promising, he did not like the possibility of a 1 percent sales tax increase that was also mentioned, and called the lottery borrowing plan a “Band-Aid” for the state's repetitive budget woes.

For now at least, the docents shared a sense of relief Wednesday, gathering on the mission grounds with signs used in the community rally back in March- with “D's” now added to signs that read “Saved our La Purisima Mission,” and “Saved California History.”

“We'll never really know how much influence we had, but you can say that if not for all of us, it might not turn out the way it did,” Forrest said, speaking about the entire community effort.

Glenn Wallace can be reached at 737-1059 or gwallace@lompocrecord.com.

May 15, 2008