Commentary : All ‘Elite’ Del Mar Wants Is Peace on the Beach

For the first time in recent years, an advertising agency unwittingly captured the true essence of beach life in Del Mar with the ad campaign announcing the 1988 horse racing season. It described Del Mar as a “sleepy little beach town cooled by soft ocean breezes most of the year . . . BUT . . . for seven weeks in the summer, it turns into a COMBAT ZONE.”

What followed was a clever little ditty about “hoof-to-hoof combat” at the race track. Still I can’t help wondering if the author spent a recent summer in our “sleepy little beach town” to come up with so apt a description.

The fact that the Sheriff’s Department regularly has to call for back-up units, California Highway Patrol assistance, police dogs and, occasionally, helicopters and the SWAT Team to quell the brawling drunks who come to riot, trash and vandalize this sleepy beach town (particularly at the beach called River Mouth), certainly qualifies Del Mar as a combat zone. And it lasts a lot longer than seven weeks.

Monday night, the Del Mar City Council, in an effort to regulate the rowdy vandalism that is turning this piece of America the Beautiful into the North Coast Dump, focused on eliminating the bonfires, which attract troops of trashers from as far away as Los Angeles and delayed a decision on whether to ban alcohol at the beach.

Unfortunately, most of the people living outside this city see any attempt by Del Mar to restore peace, eliminate environmental abuse and curb inebriated rowdiness as “elitist.”

Del Mar bashing has also been popular sport among certain media people, as was best demonstrated by Channel 10 reporter Adrienne Alpert following the Labor Day brawl at River Mouth Beach. After describing the problem Del Mar is having with underage drinkers, broken glass, nails in the sand, illegal bonfires, alcohol abuse and lack of law enforcement by the Sheriff’s Department, Alpert stated that, “The Del Mar City Council is considering taking out the fire rings and banning alcohol on the beach . . . a move that sounds like Del Mar is taking another elite step from the public.”

If concern for environmental abuse and the health, safety and welfare of beachgoers and the people who live near the beach is elitist, then Alpert, and those who share her opinion, are operating in the same vacuum of apathy and contempt as the insolent drunkards who trash that piece of sand every weekend and holiday. Perhaps they’re simply misinformed.

No one has any greater right to use public property than anyone else. The metal, glass, nails, smoldering coals, trash and other dangerous debris left behind by party trolls deprive others of the use of River Mouth Beach. It has gotten to the point that no one walks barefoot on that sand without shoes or excellent health insurance . . . as evidenced by the fact that every photograph taken of the party protesters in recent newspapers shows shoes to be de rigueur.

Del Mar has, by no means, cornered the market on inconsiderate party animals. The weekend papers are full of stories from other coastal towns whose parks and beaches experience the same kind of abuse. Yet I have never heard Encinitas being accused of elitism when they took action to clean up the same undesirable element downtown, or Oceanside for cracking down on the hooligans and drunks in Buddy Todd Park, or Carlsbad for their dissatisfaction over their own bonfire problems, or even Mexico for incarcerating drunken American youths and making them sweep the streets in retribution.

How is it then, that the media’s lens on life gets so twisted out of focus when they come looking for news in Del Mar? Why is environmental concern in Del Mar “another elite step from the public?”

It is illusionary and arrogant to call Del Mar elitist when we are finally moving in the direction taken by beach cities north and south of us.

These problems in the beach area are not new, and it’s surprising and irritating that little or nothing has been done to alleviate the nuisance problems and hard-core vandalism, which gets worse each year. Even the most mellow anti-control beach residents have been calling for bans on bonfires and alcohol on the beaches they no longer can enjoy. The predominant problem we now face is getting people to vocalize their discontent in public for fear of becoming targets of vandalism.

Attempts at problem-solving between beach residents and the party professionals have been met frequently with hostile confrontation or contemptuous indifference--and, in two cases this past summer, physical resistance.

Yet when these problems are aired to media people or people who don’t live in the beach war zone, beach residents are described as having “never been comfortable with sharing their beaches,” as Anthony Perry put it in a Times article.

No amount of denial or beseechment is going to change the minds of those who choose to believe that nonsense.

The young people (mostly non-residents) who spoke at Monday night’s council meeting in support of bonfires, acknowledged that underage drinking, broken glass, nails in the sand and rowdy behavior were significant problems, problems they do not condone. Yet their solutions were requests for more fire rings, bigger fire rings, more trash cans, more signs and more beach maintenance.How these solutions will curb the vandalism, noise and drunkenness, and keep the beach clean remains a mystery.

They also called for more law enforcement, which everyone heartily agrees on. But where the money for this big-buck expenditure will come from is also mysterious. (Contrary to popular belief, most of the money from the fairground and race track goes to the state, not Del Mar.)

In the end, the council decided to put a temporary moratorium on beach bonfires until May--a move criticized by many as a non-solution.

It doesn’t take a supercollider mind to figure out that Del Mar cannot continue to simply turn over the top 2 inches of sand on the bonfire beaches every day and pretend that the problems will evaporate with each new dawn. Nor can it blithely divorce itself from the lawsuits that are waiting after someone impales a foot.

Expecting what the media call the “filthiest beach in San Diego” to shed its Party Town legend in six months is Pollyanna thinking at best, and sounds like an attempt to neutralize the protests by prescribing two aspirins and a stiff drink. Call back in six months.

The predominant nighttime patrons on the River Mouth beach are not families with cherub-cheeked children toasting marshmallows, or Boy Scouts telling ghost stories around a cozy campfire.

The self-described party animals who trash the beach, build roaring bonfires (often using patio furniture and local street signs), vandalize property and vehicles, pickle themselves with alcohol or recombine their DNA with recreational drugs, and keep residents up till the predawn hours are the true “public” that Del Mar is “taking another elite step from.” And I see no merit in respecting people who refuse to be respectable.

Dyan Allen is on the board of the Del Mar Neighborhood Watch and is past chairwoman of the Del Mar Crime Committee.