Imperial Beach Has Long Held Crown Among Hapless Cities

Despite its regal name, Imperial Beach has known more than its share of unceremonious moments. For much of the past decade, Imperial Beach has stood by helplessly, watching its incorporated throne dissolve.

Beginning with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978, the seaside city that bills itself at the Most Southwesterly City in the Continental U. S. has survived most emergencies, from occasional spills of raw Tijuana sewage that literally piles up on its doorstep to the dissolution of its police force and the indictment of its city treasurer for stealing from its coffers.

But earlier this year, the City Council was confronted with a realization that shocked even most citizens who thought they had seen and confronted everything that could ever afflict Imperial Beach. City Manager Ron Jack informed the council that the city was flat broke and needed to come up with almost $800,000 in revenues by the start of the new fiscal year July 1. That, or the city might be forced to disincorporate.

Suddenly, Imperial Beach became Imperiled Beach.

At a noisy town hall meeting last week attended by about 300 people, city leaders attempted to explain the seriousness of the situation. Some of the options discussed included annexations by the county and San Diego, but they curried little favor with the audience, which demanded to know how the city’s financial situation had gotten so bad.

One speaker, noting that Imperial Beach seems to always be indebted to someone, compared the tiny beachfront community to a Third World country. Indeed, since its incorporation in 1956, Imperial Beach, with a population of about 24,000, seems to have spent much of its cityhood teetering on the precipice.

With virtually no industry, the city is almost wholly a residential community that must rely on property taxes for most of its revenue. Property tax rates for Imperial Beach are already among the highest in the county. But even if the city could attract industry, Mayor Henry Smith noted in a recent interview that “we don’t have any place to put it.”

The truth is that there is very little space left on which to build in Imperial Beach. According to Smith, half the city’s 4.4 square miles is made up of greenbelts and a wildlife estuary. Smith, a plain-speaking, self-proclaimed “cracker,” finds himself in the unenviable position of possibly having to preside over the dissolution of the city.

Imperial Beach, it seems, has always been plagued by a heavy dose of bad karma. The city’s beginnings were tenuous at best, but not without humor. Perhaps as testament to its modest surroundings of homes and people, Imperial Beach was founded for a simple purpose.

“We were initially founded to accommodate tourists from the Imperial Valley, who came to the beach to escape the summer heat. . . . They would pitch tents on the beach during the summer. At the beginning, the only people who came to Imperial Beach were farmers from the Imperial Valley,” Smith chuckled.

Today, he said, unless you live in Imperial Beach, there isn’t much reason to come here.

Grinning and Gritting

Throughout the years, Imperialists have learned to grin and bear it. And, because of the city’s proximity to the Mexican border--just 5 miles south--local residents have also learned to grit their teeth. Until recently, sewage spills were as common in Tijuana as the pounding of the ocean on Imperial Beach’s pier, the town’s only landmark.

When the spills occurred, millions of gallons of raw sewage would flow down the fetid Tijuana River to the Pacific Ocean, where it would wind up on Imperial Beach’s 19,000 feet of beach.

“The sewage always stopped at our city limits,” Smith said. “The other side of the city limits, to the north, it was clean. Coronado was always clean . . . . It was the damnedest thing.”

The spills made Imperial Beach the butt of numerous jokes, and some people suggested that the city’s motto should be changed to “Where the sewage meets the surf.”

However, the city’s financial problems have never been a laughing matter. When Proposition 13 was passed by state voters in June, 1978, Imperial Beach was the envy of most San Diego County cities. While they were laying off employees to comply with the newly mandated tax cuts, Imperial Beach--with its high property tax base and small public work force--was able to give its employees raises of between 5.5% and 6.5%, and proudly announced that it had more than $500,000 in reserves.

But beginning in 1981, the half a million dollars in surplus was persistently whittled away until it disappeared four years later. By City Manager Jack’s own admission, Imperial Beach today can’t even afford to fill a pothole.

Pilfering From Parking Meters

But back in 1978, City Treasurer George Ramos liked to show reporters his $8 desk and boasted that he ran Imperial Beach “like a cheap household.” Five years later, when the city began showing signs of financial instability, Ramos was convicted of taking $2,000 in meter money and padding his sick-leave compensation by $1,200. He was forced to resign.

While Ramos was pilfering from the parking meters, the City Council was voting to dismantle the 14-member Police Department as a cost-saving measure, and voting to instead contract with the county Sheriff’s Department for police services.

Five years after the entire department was fired, Imperial Beach was still paying thousands of dollars in damages to people arrested by Imperial Beach cops.

“We had about 40% bad arrests,” Smith said. “That’s tremendously high.”

The city’s Fire Department was trimmed to nine firefighters, working three shifts of three people each. As a cost-saving measure, Jack recently looked into the possibility of reducing each shift to two firefighters, until he was told it would take at least three people to battle a fire.

In 1986 and ‘87, city administrators attempted to right their listing ship through the stock market. But, like most of Imperial Beach’s dreams, that quickly turned into a nightmare that promises to worsen before it gets better. Hoping to make a quick killing and fatten the city’s coffers, the previous city manager, city attorney and planner invested about $300,000 of the city’s money in stocks. The move quickly went sour.

Hefty Legal Fees

The three officials were subsequently fired and sued by the city, which also filed a $2.5-million suit against the E. F. Hutton firm, the successor to Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc., which handled Imperial Beach’s investment. Attorneys representing the city in the matter presented the council with a legal bill of about $200,000 last year, Smith said. And considering the slow and tortuous path that civil suits take in Superior Court, the city’s legal fees are certain to mount.

At last week’s town hall meeting, Jack told the audience that the attorneys have predicted they will be able to recover a sizable amount of the lost investment.

Jack’s comment raised the ire of one resident who shouted that “Imperial Beach is always willing to listen to the first used-car salesman who comes to Imperial Beach!”

A few years ago, “experts” convinced the City Council to build a $3-million pier to replace the one destroyed by a winter storm. The city, whose annual budget amounted to about $4 million, took on the added expenditure, Smith said, because the pier was seen as Imperial Beach’s economic salvation.

“You ask, ‘Why would anybody want to come to Imperial Beach?’ Without the pier, there was no reason to come to Imperial Beach . . . . The pier was important to us because we hoped it would attract other commercial businesses and provide new revenue for us,” he said.

The economic boon promised by the pier never materialized. Smith claimed that several developers have expressed an interest in building beachfront hotels in Imperial Beach, but the beach remains undeveloped.

Environmentalists Blamed

The mayor blames much of Imperial Beach’s economic problems on environmentalists who have successfully opposed a redevelopment agency for the city and plans to promote commercial building in the city.

“We have a lot of environmentalists in this town, and they’ve been very successful . . . . They’ve voted down a redevelopment agency three times and succeeded in recalling one mayor who supported redevelopment . . . . You can be very popular if you say you’re not going to promote any building in this town and let the beach remain as it is,” Smith said.

Smith predicted that Imperial Beach might be able “to hang in for one more year” before it will be forced to disincorporate.

Meanwhile, the council is hoping that the San Diego Unified Port District will come to Imperial Beach’s aid. The city has proposed leasing its entire beachfront to the district, with the idea that the it will develop the area and provide a new source of revenue for the city.

Smith envisions the Port District putting in a new marina, tourist attractions, hotels and restaurants around the pier. However, the city is still negotiating the idea with port commissioners.

Although the city is a charter member of the Port District, it is the only one that has not profited from the association.

“Our best bet for survival as a city is the Port District,” Smith said. “The citizens won’t stand for us raising property taxes or creating new assessment districts . . . . But we’ve never derived a penny from the port. We have some chits to cash in, and now is the time to do it.”

Despite his own poor health and the prospect of having to resuscitate a city that is already gasping for breath, Smith remains upbeat about Imperial Beach’s future.

“It’s been a tough year. Being mayor of this small town has turned out to be a tough job,” he said. “But I’m a tough old bastard. Neither the city nor I will go without a fight.”