Coastal Battleground : Political Winds Buffet Imperial Beach Plans

There’s a big event coming up in Imperial Beach that will focus the klieg lights of the world on this southwesternmost corner of the mainland United States.

Professionals from Australia to Sweden have honed their skills for the coming contest on their local turf and at competitions around the globe in anticipation of the big one, the final test, the mini-Olympics.

No, it’s not another hype for America’s Cup racing; it’s the buildup for the only thing that all of Imperial Beach (or, at least, a very healthy majority) agrees about--the annual U.S. Open Sandcastle Competition, which brought about 135,000 visitors to the usually uncrowded Imperial Beach strand one weekend last July.

What those visitors see is one of the widest, cleanest beaches in the state--bordered by a ‘50s-era commercial strip that has seen little improvement in the past 20 years.

Imperial Beach is a 13-blocks-square cluster of small homes, small businesses and newer apartment blocks that is hemmed in by Mexico, San Diego and Coronado with no place to grow. The city ranks at the bottom of the list of San Diego County cities in tax revenues, the lack of which forced the community of 23,500 to give up its police force in 1983 in favor of contracting with the county for less costly Sheriff’s Department protection.

Despite a severely storm-damaged city pier and sewage pollution from Tijuana that periodically invades Imperial Beach waters and forces the city to close beaches, citizen groups have persisted in creating a tourist-oriented beach area plan. In 1984, they gained nearly $2 million in state grants to improve the beachfront.

Jim Sandoval, the city’s planning director, said the improvement plan was compiled over the past four years with the aid of million-dollar computers of national consultants, 29 cents’ worth of planning department glue, and the imaginations of hundreds of Imperial Beach residents who drew pictures of their ideas on butcher paper and met for hours in the austere setting of the fire station--the only hall in town big enough to hold the 300 or so who turned out for dozens of planning sessions.

Now, however, the beachfront plan designed to spruce up the area for the annual summer tourist crowd has been put on hold. Currently, the proposed site of this year’s sand-castling event is a barren, fenced vacant lot at the foot of the city pier--the victim of the latest shift in Imperial Beach’s volcanic political fortunes.

In November’s city elections, Imperial Beach voters threw out the junta backing the beachfront restoration project that would have turned the rundown area into a neat but not gaudy mix of beachfront homes, shops, hotels, parks and plazas flanked by the off-street parking missing in every other beach community along the California coast.

Now, the three new City Council members swept in by healthy voter majorities appear to be systematically dismantling the multimillion dollar plan just as it was scheduled to get under way.

The new mayor, Henry B. Smith, campaigned on the sanctity of private-property rights and the injustices that the use of condemnation of property can wreak. New Councilman John Mahoney seconded Smith’s opinions, and Tommie Schuette, the third council newcomer, agreed.

Smith, Mahoney--publisher of a monthly newspaper, Imperial Beach Times--and Schuette won the voters over with their opposition to the use of eminent domain, condemnation of private property, in this case in the beach area to turn the oceanfront into a mecca for tourists.

Are we going to change our beachfront for the benefit of the people who live here, or for the people we wish to attract here? Mahoney asked the voters. Do you really want to change your hometown? Is there anywhere else where the sun sets better than it does in Imperial Beach? If they take private property in the beach area, couldn’t your neighborhood, your home, be next on the list?

Mahoney is certain that Imperial Beach can develop its beachfront without “the Trojan horse” of a redevelopment agency. A tourist hotel “definitely” will be built, but probably north of the city pier, not to the south; a park, a commercial complex, a rejuvenation of the pier are all in the near future, he said, but stressed that the initiative will come from private property owners, not a public agency with power to condemn private property.

The new council majority took office early in December, setting to work briskly unraveling the machinery that the earlier majority had put in place:

- A redevelopment agency--twice voted down by Imperial Beach voters but resurrected by the earlier council majority--was permanently consigned to the trash.

- A parking authority created by the deposed city leaders was scratched--scotching plans to assemble a beach site for a 200-room hotel.

- A beachfront task force promoting the beach improvement plan was discharged and replaced.

- A planned open-space park on the oceanfront, for which $1.1 million in state Coastal Conservancy funds has been pledged, was put on hold.

The plan that had taken years to assemble fell victim to its opponents almost as quickly as sand castles dissolve in the tide.

A long-delayed repair project for the pier, to extend it and raise it above the killer waves that splintered it during the winter storms of 1980, remains on the books. But some city officials are concerned that funding agencies who advanced money for the now-stalled beachfront projects won’t be willing to grant $2 million more for the pier.

Mike Overcast, manager of the Imperial Beach Chamber of Commerce, views the wreckage of what had promised to be an enormous upturn in the city’s economic fortunes with dismay.

He admits concern over the abrupt turn of political events and the unofficial demise of the plan.

“If it doesn’t happen now, in this economic climate and with present low interest rates, I doubt if it will ever happen,” he said.

Planning Director Sandoval is less pessimistic. A pier plaza project, designed as the centerpiece for the 10-block-long beachfront improvement plan, is up for state Coastal Commission approval soon and should be ready for a construction start this month or early next. With luck, the barren lot will be transformed into a proper plaza, complete with seawall seating and a sand stage for the sand-castling event next summer.

The new council members have not killed the beach-improvement project, Sandoval stressed. Even with its wounds, it is still alive and growing, he contended. One private development--a commercial/residential complex--is complete; another is under way, and three will start soon, he said.

“That’s progress,” Sandoval stressed. “Especially when you compare it with the past 20 years when the only new building along the beach was a 7-Eleven.”

Councilman Bud Harbin, the only holdover on the Imperial Beach City Council and a vocal supporter of the beachfront plan, hasn’t surrendered, even though he is outvoted.

“They are systematically tearing this thing apart,” Harbin said, fuming. “They are tearing the city apart. We can’t survive without the help of outside agencies like the county, the Coastal Commission, Coastal Conservancy, Corps of Engineers, (state) Fish and Game. We haven’t got the funds to put a beachfront plan together, and now they are systematically turning all the government agencies against us.”

“The sad thing is that this thing, the beachfront plan, almost got off the ground. We, the City Council, were supposed to sign the agreement for the hotel land in December. Then, they came in and scrapped the whole deal.”

Eminent domain, the bogyman that the three new council members campaigned against, was not an essential part of the plan, Harbin said. Property owners had agreed to lease or sell the hotel site property to the city through a parking authority in the same way that the Plaza Bonita Shopping Center land was assembled by the city of National City.

“We could be turning dirt now (on a new hotel), but the new council refused to sign,” Harbin said.”

The hotel, he said, is essential to the plan because without a place for visitors to stay, commercial development will not occur “because there would be no customers.” (Currently, the town’s largest tourist accommodation is a 36-room beachfront motel.)

“I’ve said it a dozen times and I mean it. They don’t want the plan to go ahead because they have a hidden agenda, plans of their own, time-share condos.

“I say, if they don’t like the plan, truly the people’s plan, then let’s change it, not scrap it. And I’m going to stick in here until things change and we go ahead.”

Harbin admits that “things change” quite often in Imperial Beach’s shifting political winds. On March 3, voters will pick a new councilman from two candidates--former Mayor Bill Russell and John Clingan--who are both considered beach development supporters.

Also, the San Diego Unified Port District is studying a proposal by member Mel Portwood, who represents Imperial Beach, to turn over the city-owned oceanfront tidelands to the district in return for beach improvements that the impoverished city cannot afford but the rich port district can.

“But how much damage are they (the present City Council majority) going to do before they are voted out? They have set us back maybe three years in the last three months,” Harbin said, “And at this rate, it could be seven or eight years before we get back on the track.”