City Headstrong About Headlands

* After spending more than a million dollars and losing in three different courts and getting thousands of cards, calls and letters--all saying the city of Dana Point is doing the wrong thing on the Dana Point Headlands--you might think city staffers would reexamine their position.

You fight your battles when you can, but when you lose--and lose again--as the city has recently done at the Headlands, at some point reasonable people tell themselves that it might be better to settle now, rather than lose it all later.

A few weeks ago, after winning yet another court battle against the city, after yet another judge told the city it cannot force a property owner to build something that cannot be built, the owners of the Dana Point Headlands put up a white flag of truce.

Let’s talk, they said, and while we do, we’ll take advantage of a state law that says when parties submit disagreements to mediation, neither side can later use the delay as a reason for further court actions.

It was a reasonable offer, and a generous one, considering how badly the city was losing in court after court. The city did finally agree to mediation, but could this be an honest attempt to solve the problems, or just a smoke screen?

The city continues to pay the high cost of litigation, challenging property rights, unwilling to accept what many people say is a superior plan for the Headlands, and for what? The right to build a hotel on Strands Beach? The right to tell veterans they cannot have a memorial at the Headlands?

Einstein once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over, then expecting a different result. Could Einstein have been thinking of Dana Point?

MIKE RODARTE

Monarch Beach

* Until recently, I had never attended a meeting of the Dana Point Planning Commission, much less spoken there. But then I learned that the commission was going to be talking about the Headlands, so I decided to head on down, mostly out of curiosity, maybe even to speak.

I’ve always considered the Headlands to be the heart and soul of Dana Point--even if most of the people who live here have never been there because it has been fenced off for years.

As someone who walked this 100-plus-acre parcel, I just wanted to make sure the Planning Commission knew what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we in Dana Point had at the Headlands.

I thought they would probably already know. And that talking in front of my hometown Planning Commission would be a simple, almost folksy, thing to do.

I was wrong on both counts, as I learned from one of the very first speakers at the meeting. The speaker was telling the Planning Commission how the city’s plan would cause us to lose a veterans’ memorial, a lighthouse, public open space and lots of other things when the chairman told him he had to stop talking.

The chairman told the speaker that he was not allowed to say those things because the Planning Commission was talking about the city’s General Plan for the Headlands, and not anything else. What that meant no one really knew, except that we were not allowed to tell the Planning Commission their plan would eliminate these public amenities.

Several other people were not allowed to speak--all, by some coincidence, people who disagreed with the city’s plan and wanted to consider the property owner’s ideas.

So much for our small-town, folksy Planning Commission. This was just like how they did things in the big city: The fix was in, and everyone knew it except for us plain old citizens who came down to talk.

SUSAN WEST

Dana Point