Relations Between Fair Board, Del Mar Sink to a New Low

On the surface, everything looks rosy here at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.

Workers are bustling about, slapping stages and exhibit booths together at a furious pace. Gus and Gertrude Goose have arrived with their goslings and the gaggle is gearing up for 18 days under the spotlight as 1986 Del Mar Fair mascots.

Fair officials even have a cheery, unabashedly upbeat motto for this season, which opens Thursday and marks the event’s 50th anniversary in town--”It’s a good feeling.”

But behind the sunny facade there lurks a disturbing truth: Relations between the fair’s sponsors and its host city, Del Mar, are at an abysmal--some say all-time--low. The feeling, both sides agree, isn’t good at all.

Directors of the 22nd District Agricultural Assn., as the fair board is formally known, charge that Del Mar city officials are bent on usurping their authority over the 330-acre facility. City officials have reaped significant financial benefits from the fairgrounds while selfishly seeking to control its use to suit their own parochial purposes, board members say.

Del Mar City Council members, meanwhile, complain that fairground officials have acted in an unneighborly way, permitting events that conflict with the seaside community’s ambiance. In particular, they say, the board’s recent approval of Grand Prix-style auto racing at the grounds shows a callous disrespect for local residents whose lives will be shattered by intolerable noise.

Each side has recently made moves which inflame the other.

The city has enacted a tough noise ordinance and filed a lawsuit against the fairgrounds, seeking to block the 10-day auto race in October.

Smarting from the legal challenge, the nine-member fair board responded last week by directing its counsel to explore options for the future--including the possibility of seceding from Del Mar. Losing the fairgrounds, which pumped $815,200 into city coffers in 1985, would cost tiny Del Mar dearly.

“It’s a sad state of affairs,” Del Mar Mayor Lew Hopkins said. “I’ve tried for 2 1/2 years to find some constructive, conciliatory route for dealing with the conflicting objectives of the city and the fairgrounds. Now I’ve got to say I’m at my wits end.”

Fair Board President Raymond Saatjian painted an equally bleak picture:

“It has become clear that we have hostile neighbors to the south,” Saatjian said. “It is apparent that the district doesn’t get the kind of consideration it deserves in view of the magnitude of revenue we generate for the city. I’m not at all certain we should continue to be aligned with Del Mar.”

To be sure, the marriage between fairground officials and the city fathers has had its share of peaks and valleys. In fact, some say the problems are as old as the city itself, dating to 1959, when Del Mar incorporated and engulfed the fairgrounds before the City of San Diego could gobble up the lucrative property.

That move set up what former Del Mar Mayor Tom Pearson labeled “a pecking order between the two agencies--one appointed by the governor, the other locally elected--and created a built-in conflict over who’s in charge.”

Byron Georgiou, a fair board member since 1983, believes it’s more a matter of the different constituencies each body serves--and consequently the different goals that each pursues.

“The members of the fair board are duty-bound to administer the fairgrounds in the interests of all the people in the County of San Diego,” Georgiou said. “It may be that some of the events we sponsor--like the auto racing--are not events which the citizens of Del Mar would choose to attend. But that doesn’t mean those events ought not occur.”

Over the years, several memorable spats have punctuated the normally cordial--if not warm--relationship.

Most vivid in Pearson’s mind is an episode in the late 1960s involving the city’s attempt to impose a business license fee on fair vendors. The idea was that if merchants in downtown Del Mar had to pay a charge to do business in the city, then vendors of trinkets, toys, food and other wares at the summer fair should too.

Fairground officials were steamed when they heard of the city’s plans, and they filed a lawsuit to block the action. They lost, but still refused to collect the fees on behalf of Del Mar. So, determined to get the money, the city manager sent in reserve sheriff’s deputies to collect from fair vendors.

“There they were, these pistol-packing guys trying to get money from Ferris wheel operators,” Pearson recalled. “Some paid and some told the deputies to go fly a kite. It’s a miracle we didn’t have a shoot-out.”

The city dropped the plan soon after, Pearson said, although it was resurrected about six years later when a new manager took over at the fairgrounds.

In the late 1970s, relations took another dive when the city proposed raising the admissions tax it collects on fairground activities. The increase angered board members, who asked then-state Senate President Pro Tem James R. Mills to sponsor legislation enabling the fairgrounds and race track to de-annex from Del Mar.

The bill would have permitted the 22nd Agricultural District to seek approval from the San Diego Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) to change Del Mar’s boundary, removing the fairgrounds and track.

Mills, who now lives in Del Mar, said he agreed in 1978 to carry the bill “because Del Mar has been greedy and grasping as far as the fairgrounds is concerned right from the start and I wanted to do something about that municipal selfishness.”

The senator later dropped the legislation after city officials and fair board members met privately to hammer out a compromise solution. Eventually, their negotiations led to a separate bill providing the city with a percentage of the annual parimutuel income from the race track. The legislation, which had a sunset clause, expires in 18 months, at which point the issue of the parimutuel earnings seems certain to be reopened.

Another topic that sparked fireworks between the two parties as the last decade waned was a multipurpose transit center proposed for the northwest tip of the fairgrounds.

Fair board officials viewed the $4.5-million center--which was to include a train station, bus depot and parking lots--as a boon to both their facility and the surrounding area. The Del Mar City Council, however, joined numerous civic groups and residents from Solana Beach in opposing the project based on traffic and environmental concerns. It eventually was killed.

More recently, the two camps have squabbled over an interchange Caltrans plans to build on Interstate 5 between Via de la Valle and Del Mar Heights Road. Fair officials say the freeway ramp, to be built on the south side of the San Dieguito River, will ease traffic problems by increasing access to fairground parking.

But Del Mar residents fear it will pave the way for construction of another highway--namely county Route 728--into their city.

Despite these various disagreements, however, the smoke has always cleared, the two sides have always kissed and made up.

Then came the Del Mar Grand Prix, an event that will feature two weekends of racing around a 1.6-mile course on the fairgrounds.

Fair board members approved a five-year lease with promoters of the event--who have sponsored a similar road race in Long Beach for the last 12 years--in an effort to raise revenue and increase utilization of the fairgrounds year-round. The event was approved by the California Coastal Commission last month.

“I’d say the auto race represents a major peak of irritations between the two agencies,” Mayor Hopkins said.

Board President Saatjian agreed: “The auto race issue really galvanized the differences between us and showed us that the City of Del Mar is our adversary.”

Disagreement over the high- speed auto extravaganza illustrates, perhaps better than any previous example, the often conflicting missions of the two bodies. Fair board members are appointed to represent the interests of the entire county, while council members are elected to protect and enhance life in Del Mar, a community of 5,200 residents.

“There are a substantial number of people in this county who want to see auto racing, and some of them live in Del Mar,” Saatjian said. “They have a right to expect that a state facility, which they own and which can easily accommodate such a race, will provide this sort of entertainment.”

Del Mar leaders say they understand that, and do not wish to meddle in district business. But Hopkins notes that as “a good neighbor, they ought to be respectful of the impositions their actions cause us, and this auto race is a major imposition.”

The dispute over the racing reached a boiling point at the fair board meeting last week, when Saatjian delivered a stinging attack on city officials, charging them with attempting to restrict use of the fairgrounds while enjoying fiscal bliss because of revenues provided by the district, the only self-supporting operation of its kind in the state.

Last year, the city collected $495,000 from the parimutuel race track tax and another $320,000 in fees for water, sewer and fire services provided to the fairgrounds by Del Mar. That amount included an admissions tax--recently raised from 7% to 10%--levied on all fairground activities except horse racing, including the Grand Prix.

The total income from the fairgrounds represents about 16% of the city’s budget, which is about $5 million this year.

“We give them all sorts of other benefits as well, like allowing them use of our facilities at no charge, nominal rent for their fire station, $1.7 million in improvements on Jimmy Durante Boulevard and so on,” Saatjian said. “We never get any thanks for those. All we hear is the strident voices criticizing us. Well, I say enough is enough.”

Hopkins, however, notes that fair board members fail to recognize the city’s contributions to the district.

“To give them sewer service, we’ve had to make the capital expenditures necessary to accommodate 75,000 people on peak days, which is the size of crowds they get during the fair,” Hopkins said.

The same, he said, is true for the water system. And the city aids the district in other ways by providing traffic control, parking and many other support services that benefit the fair indirectly.

“My point is, it’s not a one-way street here,” Hopkins said. “There’s give and take on both ends.”

Saatjian and his colleagues, however, believe there are sufficient grounds to merit an investigation into what other jurisdictional arrangements are available to the district. Deputy Atty. Gen. Norm Flette, the fair board’s counsel, will evaluate the options and report back at a meeting next month.

Flette declined to discuss his research. But Georgiou said the basic question is whether the fairgrounds “should govern themselves as an independent district, annex to another city--namely San Diego or Solana Beach--or remain under Del Mar.”

Michael Ott, a senior analyst with LAFCO, said existing state law would prevent the fairgrounds from seceding unless Del Mar agrees to give up the territory.

“All they have to do is protest, and the whole process would end right there,” Ott said. He added that special legislation could be sought to amend existing laws and permit the district to go forward regardless of Del Mar’s opposition.

“But I’d say it would be highly unlikely for the state Legislature to approve something like that because it would interfere with local control over boundaries and would mean a substantial, probably devastating loss in revenue for Del Mar,” Ott said.

Georgiou, however, argued that “whether we impact the city of Del Mar or not (by de-annexing) is not the question this ought to turn on. If Del Mar didn’t have the district, they would just have fewer resources to rely on.”

Georgiou noted that “we have numerous special districts operating independently in our society. Take the San Diego Port District, for example, which governs land-use decisions on some of the most critically important land in our area. This sort of thing is not unprecedented.”

Such talk makes Del Mar officials nervous. Mayor Hopkins admits he is “worried” about the fair board’s talk of secession because “even if they leave us, they’ll still be in the neighborhood and we’ll still feel the impacts of the fair and other activities.”

The only difference is that Del Mar would receive no revenue to ease the pain of those impacts.

Councilman Scott Barnett, who initially opposed the lawsuit against the district out of “the broader concern over our relationship with them,” is also uneasy about the consequences of this latest squabble.

“It would be fiscally devastating to Del Mar if we lost the fairgrounds,” Barnett said. “But almost as important, the fair and the races are what Del Mar is all about. I grew up here and those have always been an integral part of the community.

“We’ve got to work out our differences so the marriage can continue.”