Development Foes’ Tactics Stir Ruckus in San Juan Capistrano : Politics: Grass-roots group angers city officials and mission leaders, who decry its stridency and refusal to compromise.

When a combative grass-roots group arose here two years ago to battle what it considered a pro-development trend downtown, it set off a chain reaction that began by angering developers and most recently has penetrated even the sacred walls of the San Juan Mission.

The group, Friends of Historic San Juan Capistrano, has employed vocal and confrontational tactics rarely used in this tightknit community, and in the process has touched off a firestorm. In public forums, at information booths and on picket lines, members have lambasted City Council members as pro-growth, accused builders of jeopardizing historically significant artifacts and accused the city manager of snubbing challenges to the city’s redevelopment plans.

In recent weeks, the disagreements have grown so loud that Msgr. Paul M. Martin, the mission’s head pastor who rarely speaks out on lay issues, used full-page advertisements in two local newspapers to admonish leaders of the Friends. Two Friends backers, David Belardes and Mark Clancey, had publicly blasted mission officials on a variety of issues, and Martin used his ads to respond.

“During the past few months, David Belardes and Mark Clancey have taken it upon themselves to attack the historical privacy of the Catholic Church; its internal managerial organization; its goals; as well as other matters considered to be confidential in nature,” the monsignor’s advertisements said. “I considered such attacks against Mission San Juan Capistrano and its policies to be personal attacks against me.”

Friends leaders say they did not intend to attack Martin personally, but they vow to continue their feather-ruffling methods.

“(Our) people depend on us to ask these questions, and they may tick some people off,” said Belardes, who also heads the local group of Juaneno Indians. “Maybe this means we are asking the right questions. We call them as we see them and if people don’t like that--tough.”

Throughout 1988 and 1989, the Friends demanded archeological excavations on construction sites near the mission and asked the city to scale back tentative hotel and retail center plans for a six-acre redevelopment site known as the Historic Town Center.

City officials paid more than $500,000 for archeological exploration on the town center site, but deny that the Friends were responsible for a recent announcement to replace hotel and retail center plans with an archeological park and museum. The city says the changes were made to preserve previously unknown, 18th-Century building foundations uncovered during archeological digs.

“The Friends are taking credit for a lot more than they are entitled to,” Councilman Anthony L. Bland said. “They jumped on the bandwagon (after the archeological digs) and said ‘Save the Stones!’ ”

Although the Friends are no strangers to controversy, three of the group’s members are candidates for the council this year, thrusting the organization into the spotlight anew. And even some of the organization’s founding members are growing concerned that its tactics may make the Friends their own worst enemy.

Clancey and two other members of the group are among 14 candidates running in the Nov. 6 election for three open City Council seats. The other two Friends are Roy Byrnes, a former San Juan Capistrano mayor, and new member Robert Davies, a former longtime city planning commissioner. All three said they are running as individual citizens. The Friends organization does not plan to endorse any candidates.

Bob Dunn, a founding Friends member and a one-time medical aide to former President Richard M. Nixon, said that squaring off with church officials has hurt the group’s public image and cut into its original membership, which includes several mission volunteer tour guides.

“The mission is the centerpiece of town,” Dunn said. “And you can’t go against the autocracy of the Catholic church. It’s futile. I still support the original goals of the Friends--to preserve the downtown area--but not these knee-jerk reactions.

“It’s a matter of diplomacy,” Dunn continued. “Politics is the art of compromise. Nixon taught me that years ago and I never forgot it.”

Citing the Friends’ unwillingness to compromise, some longtime residents are harshly critical of the group, saying it has magnified the complaints of a few disgruntled locals at the expense of the community.

“There are a few people stirring the pot lately, and I’m not so sure it is the correct approach in this town,” said developer Ted Stroscher, who spent seven years winning approval to build Plaza Del Obispo on land his family farmed in the 1880s.

“I don’t like extremism on any side,” Stroscher said. “One group--whether it is developers or historians--should not totally have it their way.”

Stroscher and others often portray the Friends group as being single-minded in its opposition to development, but Clancey disputes that characterization.

“I think that’s an unfair observation,” he said. “We’re not just hung up on development. We’ve advocated for some time the establishment of a nonprofit cultural heritage foundation, something that was called for in the General Plan as far back as 1974 and never carried out. But now, lo and behold, included in the council’s new plan for the historical plaza, the adoption of the nonprofit foundation.”

Still, Mayor Gary L. Hausdorfer, a three-term incumbent and the only council member seeking reelection, said that despite the Friends’ lofty rhetoric, he has long suspected that their real ambition is to seat members on the council.

Bland, who is giving up his post on the council, agreed. “The Friends have never really done anything in a cooperative, positive manner,” he said. “Everything is antagonistic and warlike.”

Even as the election fast approaches, the high-profile clash between Friends leaders and local church officials shows few signs of abating. On Thursday, Belardes received a letter from Martin informing him that after 10 years of using the Mission School, the band of Juaneno Indians would no longer be allowed to do so. Belardes accused Martin of ordering that move in retaliation for Belardes’ criticisms of the church.

Mission spokesman Robert McCreary said the move is based on a new policy that only parish-related groups can use the mission grounds for free, adding that a local basketball team received the same letter.

Inside and outside the mission, the Friends continue to attract vocal backers and critics alike. But even those who disagree with the group and its methods generally agree that it has emerged as a central character in the city’s political debates and that it is unlikely to go away.

City Manager Steven Julian, who has come under fire from the Friends, nevertheless said they have had some impact. “I wouldn’t give them all that much credit for what we’re done” with the plans for Historic Town Center, he said. “But we’re probably a little more exacting (because of them). We make sure that we dot our i’s and cross our t’s. You know if you make a mistake somewhere you’re going to hear about it.”