Jean Watt Steps Down From the Bleachers

When Jean Watt took her seat on the Newport Beach City Council earlier this week, it was something of a watershed.

For more than a decade, she has operated from the spectator seats, pushing environmental issues as the head mover and shaker of an organization called SPON (Stop Polluting Our Newport). Now she’s on the podium, looking at these problems from a different perspective.

“We need to define the limits and conserve Newport Beach as a good place to live,” she says. “But it’s a major misinterpretation to call me a no-growth person. There is a lot of growth that can and will occur in Newport Beach that I’ve never opposed, growth that is incorporated in the present general plan. But I think our first order of business is to do what we can to work with neighboring cities to get the region in balance.

“It’s a big mistake to build more jobs than housing. I think SPON has been consistent in opposing commercial development but not housing.”

Watt is as uncertain as most others about the mixed message sent by the voters a few weeks ago. She was paired with two other council candidates strongly supported by environmental groups. Watt won, they lost. “I’m still puzzled about that,” she says. “I know the fact that I was the only one not running against an incumbent helped. But my opponent ran essentially against me and used a lot of scare words like obstructionist , extremist and radical . It seemed to me a kind of classic environmental race, and if the voters saw it that way, the result had to tell us something.

“Yet, if the growth issue led me to win, then why the opposite result with almost the same margin on the other side in the other races?”

Watt has less problem with the mixed fate of environmental initiatives throughout the county. “I don’t see any reversal of public sentiment on environmental issues taking place in Orange County,” she says. “In general, slow-growth initiatives that include traffic management sections are vulnerable because of their complexity. Initiatives that deal with a single issue are not subject to misinterpretation. Voters simply need something specific, and those environmental initiatives that were easy to understand, passed.”

As her two examples, she points to the environmentalists’ victory over the Newport Center expansion and loss in the countywide Measure A last May. “When we defeated the Newport Center amendment,” she says, “it showed the strength of slow growth. But with initiatives that include traffic management sections, it’s easy for the other side to portray them as saying the opposite of what they really say. So by the time you add lots of developer money thrown in against them and the possibility of misinterpretation, they’re difficult to pass.”

It would have been equally difficult for Jean Watt to imagine herself talking this way 15 years ago when she first got involved in politics. Until 1974, she had been immersed in raising a family in the less frenetic years of Newport Beach. As residents of Pasadena--where Jean was born--Watt’s parents began renting a summer place on Balboa Island in the early 1930s and bought a lot on the newly developed Harbor Island in 1937. (Watt remembers that the lots were $5,000 on one side of the island and $10,000 on the other, “but they could be had at half-price if the owner promised to build immediately.”) When Jean married obstetrician Jay Watt, the couple moved to Beacon Bay after he finished his residency in 1953. Hoag Hospital was new then, and Dr. Watt has been practicing there ever since.

The Watts raised four children in their Beacon Bay home, and later on Harbor Island, where they bought their present home in 1961. Their oldest daughter, Tammy, is now director of advertising of Centinela Hospital in Los Angeles; Terry works as an urban planner for a San Francisco law firm that has been deeply involved in Orange County environmental issues; Lorna is a cardiac care registered nurse in Orange County; and son Mike--who has given the Watts their only grandchildren to date, Claire, 3, and Tommy, 9 months--is a resident in orthopedic surgery at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto.

Jean Watt got her feet wet in local politics when she signed on to manage the campaign of a Newport Beach City Council candidate in 1974. She had been involved for some years in “managing things”--as a Girl Scout leader and contributor to various civic groups, but this was her first experience in politics. “We lost,” she recalls, “but I got hooked. It was a consciousness-raising experience.”

She came away from that first campaign “thinking that there needed to be some kind of citizen’s group that was consistent, would function all the time and not just in election years.” That’s when she and a group of friends with similar feelings started SPON.

“We weren’t primarily an environmental group,” she says, “but most of the problems we were facing were environmental. We had seen citizen groups disband after an immediate goal was achieved, and we had also seen developers picture one organization as radical that had been fighting for a simple height ordinance. I didn’t like the idea that a group with legitimate objectives could be put down that way and then divided and conquered. I thought we should be able to rise above that.”

SPON had an immediate and potent impact. The candidates it supported won consistently for 6 years--until the environmentalists had a majority on the Newport City Council in 1978. “Then when we won again in 1980,” says Watt, “the other side started a 2-year campaign of discrediting us by saying a minority of voters was running the Council. They also started an effort to move the local election to general election years that was finally passed by the initiative. This hurt us badly because candidates are then able to identify themselves with state or national slates that have no connection with the local election.”

Environmental candidates lost control of the Newport Council in 1982 and have been unable to regain it since. Watt blames this partly on a lawsuit charging council members who voted against a hotel development in 1980 with conspiracy. The suit was dropped after the 1982 election but, says Watt, “a lot of our people bailed out of SPON because they were afraid they might be involved in expensive litigation.”

As part of its effort to regain its political muscle and attract new followers, SPON started a newsletter now distributed to all local residents (“by volunteers,” says Watt, “because we don’t have enough money to mail it”) and also formed a political action committee so it could financially support political candidates. That organization--called Newport 2000--attracted some heat in the recent election by distributing a flyer headlined “Feces on the Bay; Newport Politics--It Stinks.” Watt separated herself from it in a press release.

“But,” she says, “I still think that flyer was basically benign except for the use of a word people found offensive. It was a bad choice in the sense of taste, and I was offended because my name was on it. But the significance of the message was something quite different, and I don’t think it was nearly as bad as some of the character assassination practiced by the other side.”

Today, Jean and Jay Watt find themselves at opposite ends of the work spectrum. Jay, who recently retired, has, says his wife, always been supportive of her activities but has never gotten involved directly, a circumstance that isn’t likely to change. Jean, meanwhile, is launching a political career as she nears retirement age--with no indication that she intends to slack off soon.

“Growth is beneficial,” she says, “as long as it allows an area to function at its highest and best use. In Newport Beach, I think that is more an enjoyment of the natural marine environment than as a financial Mecca. Ten years ago, slow growth was a bad term and so--to a lesser degree--was environmentalist. Now, practically everybody is an environmentalist and slow growth is seen as OK. I think that’s progress.”