In San Clemente, they're saying heck no, we won't grow
In the conservative Orange County town, where 'hippie' is a weight problem, homegrown activists are springing up to fight what they see as unchecked development.
When Richard Nixon made San Clemente his western White House, the late satirist Art Hoppe described the population as "15,000 conservative Republicans, 2,000 surfers, five poor people [and] roughly the same number of liberal Democrats."
That was in 1972; today the population is 65,000 or so and it's possible they've chased off the last of the poor people and the liberals.
As a matter of politics and philosophy, San Clemente has long been friendly to business, to growth, to builders. Property rights are cherished, and some prominent preservationists have a habit of pointing out -- when they have not been asked -- that they do not consider themselves environmentalists.
So, few in town gave it much thought when a group of activists last year vowed to overturn a City Council vote allowing a golf course to turn a third of its holes into a subdivision of more than 200 homes. To the outside world, it seemed like a parochial dispute. A sizable portion of the 8,423 signatures that were collected to force the issue onto last February's ballot were delivered to City Hall in a plastic laundry basket.
Then, to the surprise of even its most ardent supporters, the effort to block the development succeeded -- overwhelmingly. By a 2-to-1 margin, voters sent an unmistakable message that open space is not for sale to the highest bidder, that San Clemente -- nearing build out 80 years after its founding -- was about to become choosy about its future.
San Clemente's rabble-rousers are not exactly peasants with pitchforks. They're retirees, golfers with notable handicaps, investment advisors -- more like patricians with pitching wedges. But they are piecing together a citizen revolt of their own, in a place that has not been accustomed to that kind of thing in recent years.
The victory at the golf course seemed to open the floodgates, and today, affable little San Clemente is in the grips of a surge in community activism. Citizen groups seem to be forming at every turn -- to oppose big signs that would be strung alongside a proposed outlet mall, to monitor the proposed development of more than 300 seaside homes, to fight plans for fancy retail development atop one of the town's primary beach accesses.
"It was a historic change," said Al Cullen, 72, a retired commercial banker who has owned a home in San Clemente since 1988, and whose wife, Yvonne, began surfing the city's famed T Street break long before that. "No one had ever tried to beat a developer here -- and won."
