SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Backers Get Behind ‘Central Park’ Move

Supporters are already joining a campaign launched this week by city officials to promote a proposed bond issue that would raise $20 million to buy 120 acres of farmland and convert it into a “Central Park.”

At a Wednesday private dinner hosted by city officials and attended by 110 guests, San Juan Citizens for Open Space was begun under chairperson Marlene Draper, a 12-year city resident and a member of the Capistrano Unified School District Board of Trustees. She is joined by two city planning commissioners, Gil Jones and Wyatt Hart.

The general-obligation bond scheduled for the April, 1990, ballot requires a two-thirds vote to pass.

“Almost everybody in the room supported it,” Draper said of the group that included representatives from local youth sports organizations, senior citizens, historic preservationists and farming families.

In a recent telephone poll of 400 registered city voters, 85% said they would like to see the land retained as open space. Sixty percent said they would support a bond if the payments were no more than $10 per month, Mayor Gary L. Hausdorfer said.

As proposed, the 20-year bond would create average payments of $5.83 per month for homeowners and $2.29 per month for mobile home owners, Hausdorfer explained, adding that business property owners would also be assessed.

At a Thursday press conference to announce the bond, a developer in escrow on a portion of the targeted property said the landowners, John and Roger Swanner, would not complete the sale because they are waiting for the outcome of the April special election.

“We’re in a holding pattern,” said Cody Small, president of Costa Mesa- based CMS Development, which is the only developer in negotiations on any part of the area. The company has plans to create two-story office buildings on a 40-acre site fronting Camino Capistrano, Small said.

The Rev. Robert H. Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral Ministries in May spent $5 million to buy a 77-acre ranch next to the proposed park. The ministry plans to create a 40-acre cemetery and a 16-acre care facility on the site, which adjoins its 93-acre Rancho Capistrano in the northern tip of the city.

After several thwarted attempts by city officials to raise money through federal, state and private channels, it was decided that the bond issue would be a last-resort method to generate enough money to purchase the farmland and to convert it by 1992 into playing fields, a community center and an orange grove.

“Most kids have never been close enough to an orange tree to see an orange on it,” Mayor Gary L. Hausdorfer said recently.