Town’s Battles Take on Look of Wild West : Politics: San Juan Bautista’s former police chief, who strode down the street with his six-gun strapped to his side, has gotten in trouble with the law. Three members of the City Council have been ousted.

In this mission town rich with California lore and tales of old-time gunfights, some people are taking their ties to the Wild West a little too seriously.

In the last year, local politics have taken on the look of a barroom brawl. Three City Council members have been ousted in a recall. The San Benito County district attorney recently won a conviction of the town’s police chief, and plans to prosecute the city engineer next month.

All the feuding might seem comical, except that in San Juan Bautista, few people are laughing. This is a place where infighting has gotten out of hand. Along the way, careers have been ruined and lives have been changed. Many of the town’s conflicts are rooted in the divisive issues of growth and development. For many, the wrangling has gone beyond politics: It’s personal.

“You think Lebanon is bad,” said Councilman Robert Paradice, part of the slow-growth council majority that took control in the June election. Start asking about local politics, he said, and “you’ll hear 25 points of view--and everyone of them is the absolute truth.”

Paradice holds out hope that things will quiet down now that the recall is over and the criminal investigations are winding down. But he and two other council members face reelection in November, and animus still festers.

“I figure the new council will bankrupt the town,” said Richard Hill, the former mayor who lost his seat in the March recall. “Without new growth we’re eventually going to go into the hole.”

Hill is trying to sell his house and said he will move from town.

“No one can believe it. It’s one thing after another,” said Rebecca McGovern. The target of an early salvo in the feud, McGovern was ousted as Chamber of Commerce director in 1988 because of her preservationist beliefs, she said.

McGovern said town politics are “nasty, nasty, nasty.” So intent was the Boston native on preserving her town’s historical flavor that she spearheaded the recall. “You have to stand up,” she said.

San Juan Bautista, with 390 acres and 1,600 people, has changed little over the years. The railroad long ago bypassed the town, 100 miles south of San Francisco. More recently, U.S. 101 skirted it. Even now, there’s no stoplight or fast-food outlet and some sidewalks are made of wooden slats.

Its one industry is tourism. Each year, hundreds of thousands of people visit Mission San Juan Bautista, the surrounding state park devoted to California history, and a summer crafts fair.

During the 1980s, one of the town’s most entertaining side attractions was former Police Chief Lonny Greywolf Hurlbut. Looking like he stepped off a Hollywood set, he’d stride down the main street in his boots, Western shirt, black vest and cowboy hat, with a six-gun strapped to his faded blue jeans. To play up the image, the Ohio native learned to ride a horse.

In recent years, however, he found himself in embarrassing situations. One night in Monterey, he pulled a gun on a group of young men and was charged with brandishing a weapon. He was convicted of a misdemeanor. Another time, he suspended himself for being asleep and unable to break up a brawl in a bar.

In time, his popularity waned. “He wanted to be a movie star,” McGovern said. “He didn’t want to enforce the law.”

Last year, the local Cultural Resources Board concluded that businesses were flying U.S. flags too low in an effort to attract customers, and asked Hurlbut to enforce an ordinance requiring that the flags be removed, or raised out of face level.

“I flat-ass refuse,” the chief, a Korean War veteran, said at the time. City Administrator Thomas Mancini, a Vietnam veteran, also refused, declaring, “Too many people paid the price for that flag.”

To protest the order, Hurlbut paraded down the town’s main street holding Old Glory, flanked by four uniformed shotgun-toting police officers. It was his way of quitting, though he said if the town ever needed him, he’d return.

The City Council, meanwhile, went through five police chiefs in 1989. Finally, late last year, the council turned again to Hurlbut. That was the final straw, and McGovern organized the recall.

“It was not a good political move to hire him back. My popularity took a nose-dive,” said former Mayor Hill, who also was a reserve officer and a good friend of Hurlbut’s.

Hurlbut was back on the job only a few months when, in March, his strongest supporters were recalled. Later that same month, Dist. Atty. Harry Damkar charged Hurlbut with conspiracy and tampering with evidence. A week ago Saturday, a jury in the San Benito County seat of Hollister returned a guilty verdict. The City Council fired him after the conviction.

The case dates to Easter, 1988, when San Juan Bautista police arrested a young woman on four charges, including a misdemeanor count of possessing a small amount of marijuana.

For reasons even his strongest detractors cannot explain, Hurlbut produced more marijuana, and told Sgt. Marjorie Day and Officer Richard Allerton to add it to the woman’s weed. Hurlbut thought that if he increased the amount to more than an ounce, the woman would face a felony, Damkar contended.

“Within a few minutes, I realized there was no joke,” testified Day, who has left police work. “It was expected to be added.”

When she and Allerton protested, they testified, Hurlbut accused them of being too honest. They relented, and Day, at Hurlbut’s direction, called the San Benito County Jail to have the charge increased to a felony.

Whatever Hurlbut’s motive, the plan did not work. In a plea bargain, the woman pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor. Her lawyer, Anna M. Caballero of Hollister, said she will ask a San Benito County judge to have the charge withdrawn, given Hurlbut’s conviction.

Daniel Jensen, Hurlbut’s lawyer, said he is shocked at the verdict. He had been so confident of victory that he didn’t put on a defense, he said. He added that the raucous politics of San Juan Bautista are at least partly to blame for his client’s conviction. “He became the focus” of the battles, Jensen said.

Hurlbut denied wrongdoing, charging that his accusers were out to get him.

San Juan Bautista’s politics took a mighty turn for the nasty last year when the City Council kicked then Mayor Kurt Larrecou off the council, citing a little used law that allowed them to remove a council member who had missed a monthly meeting. Larrecou, elected in 1988, had been a slow-growth advocate.

“What I found here,” he said, “was a great conspiracy.” Larrecou fought back by going to Damkar, and the San Benito County Grand Jury.

In an interview, Damkar said his office has investigated or continues to look into 68 separate allegations, all of them originating in the last year. They range from charges of voter fraud to one in which a councilman got into an argument with a constituent at a council meeting and finally said, “Let’s take this outside.” In a press release, Damkar announced that he cleared the councilman. But he noted that the councilman’s call to take the argument outside could be construed as a “juvenile schoolboy challenge.”

“San Juan Bautista for so long has operated in its own sphere,” Damkar said, trying to explain the town’s continued problems. “It’s clear that a new direction has to be taken in San Juan Bautista. The old days are over.”

One of Larrecou’s accusations did result in charges. The case involved remodeling a downtown building. Roger Grimsley, a private engineer who has the contract to be San Juan Bautista’s city engineer, faces a misdemeanor count of obstructing an investigation by the state Department of Consumer Affairs.

The remodeling project manager had paid Grimsley $750 to act as the project engineer. According to the charge, Grimsley failed to tell the state investigator that as city engineer, he also inspected the building. The state investigator had been looking into suspected building code violations. Grimsley has pleaded not guilty.

For many people in San Juan Bautista, all the fighting has become tiresome.

“It’s just a big power struggle,” said Ely Schriver, a retired military man, who settled into what he thought was a “nice decent little town” five years ago. Schriver prefers to run his clock shop and avoid political discussions. In San Juan Bautista, he said, “you can cut your own throat if you say the wrong thing.”