DANA POINT : Residents Criticize Redevelopment Plan

The first public hearing on the city’s controversial redevelopment plans drew a packed crowd and some angry reaction this week, much of it from a residents’ group formed to fight the plan.

“I find the redevelopment to be an affront to my intelligence and sensitivity,” resident Fred Leek told the City Council. Leek said he “will work for change in city government if this particular program is followed through against what appears to be the general consensus of people in this room.”

Leek’s comments won a loud round of applause from most of the crowd.

Members of Concerned Citizens Against Redevelopment, formed several months ago, spent the early part of the week handing out leaflets in supermarket areas and local business districts urging residents to attend Tuesday’s meeting.

“The city has already alienated most of the business district,” said Bill Walter, a Dana Point real estate agent and member of the anti-redevelopment group. “We believe the city has been wasting our money on this plan for a long time.”

Members of the group claim the council is unjustly reshaping the city at the residents’ expense. Group leaflets accuse the council of secret development plans and attempts to control private property, accusations the council members steadfastly deny.

Before the meeting, Mayor Bill Bamattre reiterated the council’s promise to heed the concerns of the residents. But most of the anti-redevelopment remarks are premature, Bamattre said, because the agency has not yet proposed a final plan.

“When we come up with the final redevelopment plan, then we can look at it at a public hearing and decide whether to go ahead,” Bamattre said. “The idea of these hearings is to identify issues. . . . This wasn’t supposed to be a soapbox to attack redevelopment.”

Opposition to the city’s proposed redevelopment began to surface last fall, shortly after the establishment of the Redevelopment Agency with the City Council members as its directors and a budget of $292 million.

The agency has targeted four areas of the 6-square-mile city for possible redevelopment: the Capistrano Beach “bowl,” small homes and businesses below Interstate 5 near Doheny State Park; the couplet, a business area downtown inside a split of Coast Highway into two one-way streets; the lantern district, a crowded mix of apartments and homes on the hillside above the couplet, and the bluffs, directly above Dana Point Harbor.

In the midst of the redevelopment planning, the council is writing the 2-year-old city’s initial General Plan. Before any final decisions on redevelopment can be made, Bamattre said, the council must designate a land-use plan for the city.

“Once again, everyone who is attacking redevelopment is way ahead of us,” Bamattre said. “First we have to make decisions on how the land will be used.”