Variety Is Name of Game in Council Race : Elections: Seven contenders ranging from a 71-year-old retiree to an 18-year-old college student are running for three seats in San Clemente.

Generation X wants a seat. So does a former school superintendent who can recall the early days of the Roaring Twenties.

In all, seven candidates spanning seven decades in age are seeking three at-large seats on the San Clemente City Council on Nov. 8, an election described by local officials as crucial to the continuing growth of the county’s southernmost city.

With developers knocking at City Hall’s door for the chance to build in San Clemente’s back country east of Interstate 5, the real estate recession appears to have bottomed out, at least in this coastal city of 43,000 residents. The city also appears to have moved on after weathering a potential firestorm last October when a white San Clemente High School senior was killed in an attack by a group of alleged local Latino gang members.

The second half of the 1990s should be a time for progress, said City Manager Michael W. Parness.

“This is going to be a critical four-year period,” said Parness, who has been the chief executive of San Clemente since 1989. “We have spent the past few years working on a new General Plan, specific plans and design standards. . . . Now we have to focus on implementing these policies.”

So who is best to watch out for the city’s best interests as members of the five-person council?

The choice is between three candidates--including two incumbents--who are backed by the powerful San Clemente Chamber of Commerce, which has its own political action committee and has controlled the local races recently, and the remaining four who say they stand for change.

The chamber wants the city’s approximately 23,000 registered voters to return incumbents Joseph Anderson, 52, an insurance executive, and Truman Benedict, the 71-year-old retired superintendent of the Capistrano school district, to new four-year terms. Both were elected in 1990 and insiders say both had to be persuaded to run again.

The chamber also backs Steve Apodaca, 43, a six-year San Clemente resident and member of the Planning Commission, who would be the city’s first Latino council member. Apodaca, who is also an insurance executive, believes business development is the key to the city’s future.

The challengers include Patrick M. Ahle (pronounced ail ), 37, a deputy city attorney for Anaheim; Jim Dahl, 51, a longtime San Clemente firefighter and former president of the local firefighters association; George Moulison, 57, a retired quality control executive, and Jamie Rogers, 18, a 1994 San Clemente High graduate who now is a history major at Saddleback College.

Ahle and Moulison have pounced on new water rates as a campaign issue. The new, more complicated rate structure recently approved by the City Council has caused an uproar, partly because it hit homeowners hard while giving breaks to hotel, motel and multiunit landowners under the theory that these businesses had been overcharged in the past.

Rogers wants to get involved in local government and believes more people her age should be active in the city’s political process.

Whoever wins will have much less government to run than in previous years. Gone are the San Clemente police and fire departments, both handed off to the county in two recent cost-cutting moves that sliced 115 employees from the city payroll.

Other privatizing moves have cut a total of 184 positions, an overall 48% decrease in staff.

What is left is a streamlined city staff to deal with the coming years when local revenues will continue to be harder to generate, Parness said.

Still, optimism runs high in 66-year-old San Clemente, a 17-square-mile community divided by Interstate 5 and bordered on three sides by the Pacific Ocean, Camp Pendleton and the 40,000-acre Rancho Mission Viejo. Parness says the city has “turned the corner” from the old days of “San Calamity,” when a financial crisis and years of deferred maintenance to city streets, storm drains and sewers ate up all reserve funds and threatened to cripple the community.

After four years of fiscal belt-tightening, the city again has a 4% reserve in its $21-million annual operating budget, a smaller budget than the one adopted by a previous council four years ago, Parness said.

But things are happening quickly. Centex Homes this month won approval of a 162-unit development in the city’s Forster Ranch area and a 600,000-square-foot commercial development slated for the intersection of Avenida Pico and Avenida La Pata is working its way through city commissions. In addition, a potential college site is being studied by the Saddleback Community College District and a time-share project is being negotiated for construction near the city pier.