Plan to Fell 17,000 Pines Decried

Fresh from his Oscar win for best director, Clint Eastwood now faces a far different audience in his other career as a Monterey County resort owner and developer.

Environmentalists are crying foul over plans by Pebble Beach Co. -- Eastwood is one of three principal owners -- to cut down 17,000 Monterey pines for a new golf course, expand hotel facilities and build employee housing near the storied Pebble Beach links.

Eastwood, a former mayor of nearby Carmel, has stayed on the sidelines as the controversial development plan has worked its way through government agencies.

After more than four years of preparation, including a ballot measure that approved the plan with strict environmental conditions, the proposal finally reached the Monterey County Board of Supervisors last week. But the board ran out of time and delayed its decision until March 15.

The plan, along with the ballot measure, must also win the approval of the California Coastal Commission.

Opponents said they would be on hand when it came back before the Board of Supervisors. The Sierra Club plans to submit 3,500 cards signed by members who are urging the board to reject the proposal.

“This is the most significant project constituting more catastrophic destruction of coastal resources that has been proposed anywhere on the California coast in the last 15 years,” said Mark Massara, director of the Sierra Club’s California Coastal Program. “They are going to chop down tens of thousands of Monterey pines.”

Alan Williams, president of Carmel Development Co. and manager of the project for Pebble Beach Co., counters that the plans are a textbook example of sound environmental stewardship and would preserve large chunks of the 5,300-acre Del Monte Forest and its signature pines.

Pebble Beach Co. owns about half the forest property, and the project would exhaust the firm’s land holdings suitable for construction, leaving the rest as open space. The other land in the forest is also in private hands, subdivided into 3,040 home lots, with only 140 empty spaces left.

The development project includes adding 160 hotel rooms, 60 employee housing units and the golf course on 100 heavily forested acres. Eleven of the guestrooms would be built at the new golf course, with the rest added at the existing Lodge at Pebble Beach and Inn at Spanish Bay. The plan also includes 33 new home lots, the relocation of an equestrian center and a new entry gate on California Highway 1.

The Del Monte Forest is a unique ecosystem of lofty Monterey pines spilling down steep hills to cypress-dotted beaches and rocky shores. The company’s Pebble Beach Golf Links, carved out of the forest, hugs the shoreline and is considered one of the world’s great courses, with a round of play costing $425. Pebble Beach homes can fetch up to $20 million.

Although opponents have expressed concerns about how the development would affect wetlands and wildlife, the destruction of trees to clear the land for the course is at the heart of the protests. The Monterey pine is rarely found in the wild, and the Monterey Peninsula holds the largest natural forest of the trees in the world.

The project closely follows the guidelines of voter-approved Measure A, passed in 2000. The company sponsored the ballot item to blunt the stiff opposition to development that previous owners faced when they tried to build on the land. Measure A scaled back the number of proposed new homes and promised to leave 800 acres of open space, winning over voters.

In a letter sent to Monterey County supervisors Feb. 28, Coastal Commission Deputy Director Charles Lester said county action should be delayed at least until after the coastal panel decided if Measure A conformed to state laws. Lester suggested that some important land-use and environmental questions about both Measure A and the project remained unanswered.

The link between Pebble Beach and Hollywood predates Eastwood. Silent film stars once patronized its hotels and played its courses. The Del Monte Golf Course opened in 1891, and is the oldest course west of the Mississippi. Twentieth Century Fox bought Pebble Beach Co. in 1978 when the studio was flush with profits from the first “Star Wars” movie.

Then, a Japanese businessman purchased the company in 1990 at the height of the Japanese bubble economy, then resold it to other Japanese investors in 1992.

Eastwood, Peter Ueberroth and golf legend Arnold Palmer headed an investment group that bought the company in 1999.

The three, together with other investors, pitched in $400 million toward the $820-million price tag, which includes the Pebble Beach links, three other golf courses and three resorts. The company employs 1,600.

Although Eastwood has not actively participated in the approval process, his name invariably crops up in discussions of the project, adding an element of celebrity unusual in development debates.

Developer Williams said Eastwood’s movie reputation could make a difference in the development’s fate. “I think what comes forward here is the integrity of the man,” Williams said. “He puts as much into this as his movies.”