Mexican Resort to Rise With Eye on Environment : Tourism: Nayarit state wants to be a model for similar developments, avoiding the pollution and other problems of nearby Puerto Vallarta.

For a generation, the fishermen and farmers here in Nayarit state gazed with envy across the bay at Puerto Vallarta.

They envied the glamour when the Hollywood press descended on the sultry Pacific port in 1963 to chronicle the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton romance. While thatching lean-tos with palm fronds to improvise beach restaurants, they envied Puerto Vallarta’s international airport and the air-conditioned hotels that were built with federal and foreign funds.

Most of all, they envied the jobs that tourism brought. And they waited with increasing impatience for the government to fulfill promises of resort development along their own coast, the northern third of Bahia de Banderas (Banderas Bay).

But soon, the people of Nayarit believe, it will be Puerto Vallarta’s turn to be envious.

“We used to feel cheated by all the postponements,” said Salvador Machuco, the portly, balding leader of Cruz de Huanacaxtle, a 33-family fishing village. “Now, we say ‘blessed delay.’ ”

The delay has left their tiny coastal state of fewer than a million people nearly untouched, the perfect laboratory for an international effort to find a way to develop tourism with minimal harm to the environment.

While Puerto Vallarta struggles to repair the damage from three decades of unbridled development, Nayarit is preparing to enter the spotlight as an environmental model for budding resorts all over the world.

The Cousteau Society and the University of Florida Center for Wetlands are the most recent additions to the team of consultants advising the state government on how to mix tourists and nature. An environmentally and socially sound development in Nayarit would be “a success story that we can carry around the world,” said Jean-Michel Cousteau, director of the 300,000-member oceanographic society that his father, Jacques, founded in 1973.

Under an agreement signed this month, the society and the university will assist in creating a computer model of the Nayarit coast that will predict the environmental and economic effects of various development alternatives. State officials can use the model to design an ecology-conscious land-use master plan for developing Nayarit’s 100 miles of coastline.

The model will be created by two Mexican students who will be chosen this summer for a two-year graduate program at the University of Florida. There, they will learn ways to measure how different parts of the coast might be affected by development. After completing their studies, they will design the computer model at the Cousteau Society’s offices in Los Angeles. Until the work is completed, Nayarit Gov. Celso H. Delgado has extended a moratorium on construction along the coast. The only exception is an area of Nayarit just across the state line from Puerto Vallarta, which is in Jalisco state. Delgado halted development in the area, Nuevo Vallarta, two years ago when he took office. It will be allowed to resume this summer, under new rules.

“In Bahia de Banderas, we are going to build a resort mega-project where the most important consideration is ecology,” Delgado vowed.

That would be an important step for Mexico, where tourism is second only to oil as a source of foreign exchange and where environmental concerns must be balanced against the need to raise dollars to make payments on the developing world’s second-largest debt load.

Under those conditions, international expertise alone will not ensure ecologically balanced development.

Success will depend in large part on Delgado’s ability to attract investment while insisting on better treatment of the environment--and of the people of his state. He will demand such things as lower buildings, fewer palm trees being chopped down, more sophisticated water treatment and better employee benefits--such as housing--than has been the case at other resorts. It is likely to mean resisting pressure from developers, industrialists and even some of his constituents.

For example, state officials want a master plan that will prevent resort development from disrupting existing communities. However, the fishermen of Cruz de Huanacaxtle--perhaps not fully aware of the environmental damage that tourist development can cause--are eager to have their own international hotel.

“If an investor wants a site where there are already houses, we’ll gladly move and clear that block,” Machuco said during an interview at his open-air restaurant overlooking the bay.

Still, his enthusiasm is tempered by the knowledge that the wide range of fresh seafood on his menu--from fresh-water oysters to Pacific red snapper to crab--is possible only because the bay and its estuaries are unpolluted. “We don’t want to repeat mistakes made by others,” he said.

Such citizen environmental consciousness assures that the master plan developed by the Delgado administration will be followed after he leaves office in four years, said state official Griselda Alvarez.

Alvarez runs the Nayarit state government representative office in the Bahia de Banderas area from a two-room stucco building a few steps from the beach. Like many of the people involved in the plan, she calls herself “a Nayaritan in my heart,” although she was born in neighboring Jalisco.

Alvarez has been around politics enough to recognize that Mexico’s ban on reelection to all elective positions often undercuts political continuity, causing new administrations to shelve even the best ideas of their predecessors.

Despite that, she is optimistic that the master plan will be followed by subsequent state administrations.

“People have become sensitized to environmental issues and have become their principal defenders,” she said. “They will not allow changes in something that is done well.”

Should their convictions begin to falter, members of Delgado’s team said, they need just look across the bay for inspiration.

Claudio Javelly, a college student who volunteered to spend the summer helping with the project, disparagingly pointed out the dusty, littered roadway shoulders and the drying, 6-foot palm saplings at the northern entrance to Puerto Vallarta.

“This is the first thing tourists see driving in from the airport,” he said. “And they think, ‘I could have gone to Hawaii.’ ”

Puerto Vallarta still has the quaint, cobblestone streets, red tile roofs and crown-topped church steeple for which it is well known.

However, except along the sea wall, visitors can no longer see the ocean from the main street. Hotel and condominium towers block the view. And aesthetics is not the only worry, Alvarez said. The federal tourism fund, called Fonatur, is helping finance programs to improve drainage and waste disposal, but repairing those systems is costly and time-consuming.

Alvarez is also concerned about the social unrest that unplanned resort development can provoke.

“We don’t want to create the kind of inequality that exists in Vallarta,” she said, “where people work in a five-star hotel and then go home to sleep on a petate, “ the woven mats that substitute for beds in impoverished rural Mexico.

Alvarez speaks of Puerto Vallarta because she knows the problems there. She represented the federal secretary of tourism in the resort before accepting her current position. The troubling situation she describes is common to Mexico’s older tourist destinations.

Ecological problems associated with resorts are difficult to document. It is not the type of issue that the Mexican government--which spends millions of dollars each year on advertising to promote tourism--wants publicized, said Rene Arvizu, the Cousteau Society director for Latin America.

Nevertheless, the problems exist.

On a recent trip to Acapulco, perhaps the country’s best-known beach resort, Arvizu took a harbor tour. “You see dead ducks floating in the bay,” he recalled. “And the water--this is not a place you want to swim.”

Seeing those examples, Nayarit’s government decided to act two years ago when environmental problems threatened the southern tip of the state--the area closest to Puerto Vallarta.

Development was advancing up the bay and across the state line to Nuevo Vallarta, where there was a plan to transform three miles of beach and an estuary into a nautical tourist center.

Before Nayarit’s moratorium was imposed, hotels with a total of 450 rooms were built, along with a 270-boat marina and enough roads, electricity and water to supply 3,000 rooms.

Wealthy Mexicans bought lots along six miles of natural canals, uprooted mangroves, where migrating birds had nested, and put in concrete and stone to reinforce their waterfront. About 125 houses have been built, and parts of the canals resemble a gentrified Venice, Calif., more than a tropical bayou.

A 1988 change in federal and state administrations provided Delgado’s new regime with an opportunity to halt those changes. In response to a request by the state, the federal government granted Nayarit the right to take over administration of the 10,000-acre coastal real estate trust, which had been created 18 years before.

Delgado also asked the federal government to approve the moratorium on construction while transfer of the trust was discussed. That meant putting on hold $1.2 billion worth of hotel projects, some already under construction.

The transfer was completed a year ago, but projects have remained on hold until an environmentally centered master plan can be developed.

“It’s been rough,” said Filberto Ramirez, president of the 92-member Jarretadea ejido --communal farm--just down the two-lane road from Nuevo Vallarta. “Without the construction, there has been nothing, no work.”

The farmers have tolerated the delay in the hope that orderly development will bring them the services they want, beginning with a covered public market and a junior high school.

Later this month, they will learn whether it was worth the wait, when the first phase of the state master plan, covering only Nuevo Vallarta, is announced.

“This will be the only area available for development” until the computer model is finished, Alvarez said. “The infrastructure was here, so we decided to go ahead.”

But the development rules will be strict, she said: no buildings higher than the palm trees at each site, no more mangrove cutting and a limit on hotel rooms--3,000 units. Hotels will be expected to recycle water--using it in irrigation systems--and to provide housing, schools and hospitals for their workers.

The state government will also be asking investors for a history of other resorts they have developed, Alvarez said.

“Companies that are not interested (in following those rules) need not come,” she said. “We are not running the trust like a real estate company.”