Visionaries Seek to Turn Village Into Utopia
They call their village Caspar the Friendly Ghost Town, an apt description for this North Coast map speck, with its 300-odd residents and nine improbable enterprises: A preschool, two massage practitioners, an acupuncturist, a printing company, a roadhouse, a recording studio, a catalog venture selling meteorological supplies and a synagogue.
The primary resource here is land, and the bulk of Caspar is up for sale--200 acres of headland and meadow 160 miles north of San Francisco, owned by a reclusive rancher. But that’s not the news--or rather, that’s just a very small part of it.
The story is what may happen to that land, the former site of a thriving sawmill and company town, both of which disappeared in the mists like Brigadoon.
The Casparados, as residents call themselves, have detailed plans to turn their unincorporated village into a miniature mecca of sustainability, complete with dedicated open space, electric vehicle charging station, widespread solar power and affordable housing. Oh, and they want a bakery.
When they’re done, they hope to have some agriculture--enough to make this isolated area a bit more self-reliant--some light industry, perhaps a hotel, and residences clustered to protect the view and delicate local plants and animals.
Utopian? Perhaps. Micromanaged? Definitely, by a motley crew of the mostly wealthy and artistic who have spent more than a year and a half--some even seeking therapy in the process--to achieve a goal that is elusive nationwide: the creation of a working town with little environmental impact.
First, though, they have to buy the place. To do that, they need about $6 million, but they figure that in a pinch they can raise at least a sixth of that among themselves. Together the disparate group has embarked on an experiment in no government, a months-long effort to answer a thorny question: Can scores of fiercely independent individuals join together to make themselves a hometown, a place where they feel they all can belong, for perhaps the very first time?
“Caspar is a place where misfits go,” declares Michael Potts, author and board member of the just-formed Caspar Community, a nonprofit organization. “Until this movement . . . the only distinction Caspar had was that it was a settlement of junkyard dogs.”
The residents are junkyard dogs with a plan for their hometown’s next 100 years and--now--a shared vision for community and sustainability that towns throughout the country are striving for, though generally in far less colorful fashion.
The Internet is lousy with Web sites sporting names like the Center for Livable Communities. In the fall 1998 election alone, more than 200 ballot measures nationwide addressed issues surrounding unmanageable sprawl.
“There are a lot of people today trying to make their communities more sustainable. It’s the utter buzzword,” says Randy Hester, who has traveled the world creating community plans and helped draw up the blueprint for the new Caspar. “This [effort] does stand out. There’s just no question.”
It stands out, experts say, because of an odd combination of circumstances that together mean Caspar residents could actually pull off their unusual dream:
* A prime chunk of land put up for sale, which is owned by a single entity willing to take the very long, high road, instead of going for a quick deal with the highest bidder.
* A community with the sophistication, patience and money to create a futuristic but workable plan for land they as yet do not own.
* A difficult and novel 20-month process during which the local populace pulled together to figure out a future--and became a community along the way.
“What caught my attention here is not just how beautiful it is, but how organized you are,” Andrew Vesselinovitch, field representative in the Trust for Public Land’s San Francisco office, told the Casparados at a community meeting this spring. “This is really wonderful and is what sets you apart.”
Mill Once Was Prosperous
Caspar has often stood out in one way or another. From 1861 until 1955, the Caspar Lumber Co. operated a sawmill that bordered on lush redwood forest where Caspar Creek poured into the Pacific Ocean. During its early years, the mill--which was supplied by its own railroad--was on the technological cutting edge of processing enormous old-growth logs.
“Maybe it’s the genius of this place,” muses Potts. “Caspar has been on the cutting edge of technology and social change since humans have been here. . . . In this little place they invented the way to deal with big redwood trees. . . . We’re trying to make a similar revolution.”
How they have launched the revolution is just as important to the Casparados as what they eventually hope to accomplish. The Caspar Community recently completed the first draft of the official plan for the village, which is a distillation of Northern California at its most eccentric--part rich-man’s hideaway, part New Age neighborhood, part studio for Sheryl Crow’s former record producer, a Muppets writer and a drummer for the Byrds of ‘60s rock fame.
The collective vision for Caspar’s future is even quirkier than the tiny town’s present. A few highlights:
* No new building or planting would be allowed if it interfered with the views from any existing structure or from any of the “sacred sites” (headlands, duck pond, downtown) identified by residents.
* In an effort to maximize the town’s reliance on solar power, new structures and plants would be prohibited if they come between existing homes and “access to sunshine.”
* No planning decisions would be allowed if they negatively impact native species, including coho salmon, the white-tailed kite, gray whales, burrowing owls, shore pine and Sitka spruce.
* Any commercial development would have to “support neighboring residences with supplies and employment.” Translation: No T-shirt shops, no postcard joints, no Mendocino.
“I would really like to see a town that focuses on serving the coastal community as its primary purpose,” says singer-songwriter Meridian Green, who has lived here for the past 26 years and dedicated her latest CD, “In the Heart of This Town,” to the Caspar effort.
Visitors will probably want to stop by as they make their way up narrow, scenic California 1, she acknowledges, but she’s tired of towns that dedicate themselves to tourists “at the expense of having community.”
“When I first came here, I put my feet on the ground and felt for the first time a real power source coming up from the ground,” she says. “It’s very powerful to be in the right place.”
Now that they’ve all arrived, are the Casparados simply trying to keep out the commoners--a NIMBY ploy in “NorCal” clothing? They argue otherwise, and most local government and conservation officials agree.
Must Navigate Bureaucracy
The Caspar Village proposal, which must eventually wend its way through the Mendocino County planning process, is not devised to keep out development. Rather, its architects contend, it is a means to control the elements that would comprise their community.
“It isn’t just pulling up the drawbridge and saying ‘no more development,’ ” says Linda Ruffing, a Mendocino County planner. “I don’t think it’s elitist. It’s more an effort by people very concerned about their community to plan for their future at a very opportune time.”
The Caspar plan is the product of months of hard-fought consensus-building, which began when news trickled out that Oscar Smith, president of the Caspar Cattle Co., was planning to sell nearly 300 acres along the rugged coast between Mendocino and Fort Bragg.
The reclusive Smith has declined to comment on the Casper plan. His taciturn nature is in stark contrast to the Casparados themselves, who have talked their plan to life by talking it to death.
For majority rule is not good enough here; consensus is required. Before any decision is made on any matter large or small, dissidents must be talked into the fold--an arduous process if there ever was one.
“The North Coast is just full of people who are so independently minded that you can never get three people in a room to agree if they’re going to go for a walk or not,” says Hester, a professor of landscape architecture at UC Berkeley who helped fashion the plan. “It’s beyond me how people in Caspar did this.”
It was almost beyond them. At first the group brought in a facilitator to help them work out their differences and keep the planning process moving smoothly. At one point, not even that was enough.
Remember, this is a place that is not quite a place, an unincorporated area with no town government. The Caspar Community has a board of directors, but it took nearly two years for the group to even consider putting anyone in charge, largely because no one here trusts authority.
In fact, anyone who shows up at the regular meetings gets to help mold Caspar--an effort so taxing that two neighbors and community board members went to therapy together to figure out how to get along with each other.
The Casparados are now putting the final touches on their village plan. They have hired a full-time community coordinator and are starting to apply for grants to help buy big chunks of Smith’s land for permanent open space.
The California Coastal Conservancy is negotiating with Smith to buy and preserve an additional 80 or so acres of Caspar Beach. The Legislature recently appropriated $1.8 million toward that effort.
The Trust for Public Land, which negotiates options with willing sellers to keep crucial land out of development while locals look for money, stepped in to the fray in mid-March.
Each week, the new Caspar comes one step closer to reality, but a great deal of work still lies ahead. Land must be brought under local control, zoning changes must be negotiated with a so-far sympathetic county government, money must be raised.
“They’re in an interesting position,” says Julia McIver, project manager for the California Coastal Conservancy. “They are doing all of this planning on someone else’s property, and none of this is included in the county’s planning.
“It definitely shows a considerable amount of wishful thinking,” she says, and then she softens. “No dream was ever accomplished without the dream.”
