Seal Beach Traffic Initiative Losing by--Yes, a Single Vote

San Clemente voters handily passed their second slow-growth measure since 1986, but at the other end of the county, Seal Beach’s so-called traffic initiative was trailing by a cliffhanging single vote Wednesday.

However, Orange County Registrar Donald F. Tanney said the Seal Beach race remains a question mark because about 6,800 ballots countywide remain uncounted, and a small portion of those may be from Seal Beach.

Those ballots--6,000 of which are from absentee votes that arrived by mail just hours before election polls closed Tuesday night--won’t be counted until late today or early Friday, Tanney said.

His staff spent most of Wednesday verifying signatures on the late-arriving absentee ballots, as well as verifying registration on another 800 ballots that were cast at various polling places.

Those final ballots were not expected to change the outcome of San Clemente’s Measure E, a slow-growth initiative that passed Tuesday by a two-thirds margin. Measure E is virtually identical to the countywide traffic initiative, which was defeated.

56% Turnout in Seal Beach

In Seal Beach, however, the final vote count was nearly a draw: 5,003 in favor of slow-growth measure F, to 5,004 votes opposed. Hour by hour, Tanney said, results waffled narrowly back and forth on the initiative, for which 56% of Seal Beach’s 18,000 registered voters cast ballots.

“I’m sure that number will change once we run the latest absentees, and I and my staff are certainly reviewing the recount laws,” Tanney said.

Indeed, both proponents and detractors said they would seek a recount if Tanney’s tallies show them losing on the Seal Beach measure--which would tie growth to the ability of developers to meet strict traffic, flood-control, parks and public safety standards.

“We’re now looking around, trying to find ways to raise funds for the recount, which costs $250 a day,” said Seal Beach resident Barbara Rountree, leader of the slow-growth measure.

“We only raised $350 for the whole campaign. Well, we did raise about $60 more when we were out collecting signatures. You must remember, we thought we had no real opposition. There had been no organization out campaigning against us.”

Seal Beach City Manager Robert Nelson, who had joined the City Council in opposing the municipal slow-growth initiative, said there is not much else anyone can do but wait for the final count.

One of the principal arguments against the measure, Nelson said, has been the unanswered question of how much it will cost the city to comply with the demands of the measure. Of Seal Beach’s current budget of $13.9 million, $400,000 is earmarked for capital projects.

A more sweeping initiative backed by the Seal Beach Preservation Initiative Group was defeated at the polls in March, with the loss attributed to the measure’s laundry list of reforms, ranging from protecting “urban forests” to establishing that no hard liquor would be sold at the pier’s restaurant.

An interesting dichotomy emerged Wednesday as final vote tallies were released. Measure A, the countywide slow-growth initiative, which was expected to receive strong support in the south county, did not. Yet San Clemente, the county’s southernmost city, passed a carbon-copy measure, 63.5% to 36.5%.

C.L. Snider, 53, a packaging broker and co-chairman of the campaign for Measure E, said he was not surprised by the traffic measure’s victory in San Clemente.

“It’s not a matter of stopping the growth, it’s a matter of planning for it,” Snider said. “Parking is at premium, and . . . we don’t want to be trapped in our own community, for example, like parts of Mission Viejo and El Toro.”

Snider added that he didn’t fret much over the election’s outcome Tuesday night: “I didn’t see anything about San Clemente on TV, so I went to bed. I figured this morning, one of the newspapers would be calling me, and I just asked them what the results were.”

In February, 1986, a slow-growth initiative was approved handily in San Clemente and set a yearly building limit of 500 units.

For that reason, Thomas J. Davis, president of the San Clemente Chamber of Commerce, which was the only organized opposition to Measure B, said he wasn’t surprised that the latest measure was approved by voters.

“I have lived here 11 years straight,” Davis said, “and San Clemente has always been a hotbed, a reactionary kind of town.”