San Clemente Planners Put Off Decision on Nixon Library Plan

San Clemente officials acknowledged Tuesday that they probably will not meet a July 1 deadline imposed by supporters of former President Richard M. Nixon for approving a project that includes the Richard Nixon Presidential Archives.

Saying that he would not be pressured into decisions that could affect San Clemente for generations, Planning Commission Chairman Ed Kweskin said his commission, which had been expected to vote on the project Tuesday night, would probably defer a decision until June 30.

That would mean San Clemente’s City Council would probably not consider the project until its July 7 meeting.

Nixon library officials have repeatedly threatened to relocate the library, probably to Carlsbad, if San Clemente does not approve the 253-acre oceanfront project by July 1. Recently, however, some library officials said the deadline might be “flexible.”

But on Tuesday, Kweskin expressed skepticism that the library would move to another site: “Where else are they going to find a better site for a presidential library?

“We’re proceeding as fast as we can. But this is a project that everyone is going to live with forever. . . . Twenty-five years from now people will say, ‘Why were we in a hurry?’ ”

In addition to the 16.7-acre library site, the project by the Lusk Co. of Irvine would include three hotels, 1,290 homes and a commercial center, all to be built on a wide, windswept bluff that is considered one of the largest parcels of undeveloped oceanfront land remaining in Southern California.

At Tuesday night’s meeting, planning commissioners considered environmental and financial issues surrounding the project. About 100 San Clemente residents gathered in the City Council chambers to listen, maps of the project on their laps.

According to John Rau, a city consultant from the Placentia firm of Ultra Research, the project would cost the city $30 million but would bring in about $76 million in revenues from 1987 to 2006, largely from city sales taxes and bed taxes.

Rau called the project “a very major winner for the city.”