Campaign Begun for Recall of San Clemente City Council

A San Clemente resident is organizing a petition drive to recall all five City Council members, citing the city’s recent loss of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library as the most flagrant example of the council’s “inability to make decisions.”

“If you come home after work and one of the kids has just torn up the other kid, you don’t have a committee look into it for three months, you do something about it right then,” said Peter Shikli, a four-year San Clemente resident who is leading the recall effort.

‘Various Axes to Grind’

Shikli and Ray Campbell, a former councilman, placed an ad in the local newspaper on Wednesday asking residents to join their recall campaign. By Thursday, Shikli said he had received about 25 phone calls and was planning to have an organizational meeting within the next two weeks.

“I’m not pretending to know all the issues,” Shikli said Thursday. “But they (council members) have given us so many excuses and so few results I’m of the opinion that someone has to explain this to us.” Campbell was on vacation and unavailable for comment.

Councilman Brian Rice said Thursday that he does not fear the threat of a recall.

“They’re only doing this as a result of the library,” said Rice, referring to steps the Richard Nixon Presidential Archives Foundation is taking to complete a library agreement with the City of Yorba Linda.

But Shikli said San Clemente residents “have various axes to grind,” including the way the council has handled issues such as a no-confidence vote against the city’s police chief, the slow-growth measure the voters enacted last year, and relocating a Chevrolet dealership to make way for a hotel.

Still, the Nixon library issue was “the big straw on the camel’s back,” Shikli said.

Rice was quick to defend the council role in the proposed Nixon library development: “In the last year, the city has worked unbelievable hours to plan that design as quickly as it did, and I have no regrets. I think the people appreciate the fact that we didn’t bend to the developer’s whim.”

The council in 1984 approved plans for the $25-million library but fell on delays because the 16.7-acre library site was attached to a controversial 253-acre residential and commercial development known as the Marblehead Coastal Plan.

The developer, the Lusk Co. of Irvine, was waiting for the city’s approval of the entire project before it would donate the bluff-top library site, which provides a view of Nixon’s former Western White House.

San Clemente was scheduled to reach an agreement with Lusk by July, but late-night public hearings delayed the decision until Sept. 2, and the project still faced a six-month to one-year approval process with the California Coastal Commission.

In light of the delays, the archives foundation sought an alternate library site in Yorba Linda, next to the house where Nixon was born. The City of Yorba Linda and the foundation expect to complete the details of their agreement at any time.

When the San Clemente council first heard that the foundation was looking for other library sites, Mayor Holly A. Veale and Rice tried to arrange a meeting with Nixon in his New York office, but they were turned down.

Two weeks ago, San Clemente officials attempted to accelerate the process of filing with the Coastal Commission, but the foundation’s executive director, John C. Whitaker, told them that they would be wasting their time because Nixon was confident that the Yorba Linda agreement would go through.

Rice said City Council members were not to blame for the delay because Nixon never personally informed them of his displeasure over the delay.

‘Nixon Let Down the City’

“As things materialized, we thought the archives foundation was speaking personally for Nixon, but it wasn’t,” Rice said. “I think Nixon let down the city, the library, the archives group and Lusk.

“If Nixon was concerned about the time element, he should have contacted us,” Rice said.

The other council members could not be reached for comment.

According to the Orange County registrar of voters, San Clemente has 19,021 registered voters. Organizers would have to gather the signatures of 20% of the these, or more than 3,800, for each council member they wanted to recall, subject to verification by the city clerk or the registrar of voters.