The Bus Stops Here : Coronadans Fight to Force Tours to Take a Detour

If diesel smoke was all that tour buses spewed, Coronado residents might consider backing down. It’s the annoying patter they say they’re sick to death of--the running commentary, blared over the buses’ public address systems, lecturing paying passengers about one of San Diego County’s most exclusive communities.

“They slow down, and they say, ‘Now look. This is where all the rich folks live. Well, now this is where the Duchess of Windsor lived. Now you see in the driveway the Jaguars or the Mercedeses or the BMWs,’ ” said Doris Pray, a grandmother whose 27 years in Coronado have made her an expert on tour bus prattle.

Such gawking is harassment, Pray and other Coronadans say. It is abuse. And, these days--at least since September, when the Coronado City Council passed an ordinance to bar tour buses from most streets except state highways--it is against the law.

Technically, that is. Alarmed that the new law limits public access to the beach, the state Coastal Commission has prevented the city from enforcing it until the commission decides whether the ordinance violates the state Coastal Act. In the meantime, Coastal Commissioner David Malcolm says he already has made up his mind.

“You have a basically white community saying, ‘Stay out!’ ” said Malcolm, who has earned the enmity of some Coronadans by opposing several proposals he finds “exclusionary.” Malcolm, who is also a councilman in the largely Latino city of Chula Vista, believes the Coronado sensibility goes something like this: “God forbid someone from out of town and from a minority race would come into our city.”

Coronado’s civic leaders deny that racism has tainted their policy-making. But they acknowledge that, ever since the tiny 6-square-mile city seceded from San Diego in 1891, it has struggled to keep its distance from its larger mainland neighbor. Especially since 1969, when the elegant 2.23-mile San Diego-Coronado Bay Bridge linked the two cities for the first time, residents have chafed at the resulting surge in traffic--and, some say, crime--on their orderly, tree-lined streets.

Are Coronadans the victims of undue suffering? Or are they greedily trying to reap the economic benefits of tourism without paying the social price? Is Coronado, as one businessman charged at a public hearing this week, “the town that refuses to grow up”? Whatever the answer, Malcolm says, in recent months city leaders seem to be working harder than ever to keep out-of-towners at bay.

This fall, when the California Transportation Commission considered scrapping the $1 toll on the Coronado Bridge, Coronado Mayor Mary Herron successfully lobbied to extend the toll until 1995. Even though it had more than met its original goal--paying back nearly $48 million in construction bonds--the toll had other merits, Herron argued. By discouraging sightseers, she said, it kept Coronado’s traffic in check.

Then the city came up with a plan to create residents-only decal parking zones on a section of shoreline near the North Island Naval Air Station. The city said it needed the zones because Navy employees’ vehicles often block residents from parking near their homes. But Malcolm and Coastal Commission Chairman Thomas W. Gwyn cried foul, and they are appealing the ordinance on the basis that it limits beach access.

Then came the tour bus ordinance, which would keep most commercial buses from traveling the city’s most scenic coastal routes. In addition, the ordinance would force buses that drop passengers at the area’s biggest tourist attraction, the historic Hotel del Coronado, to travel 5 extra miles down the Silver Strand peninsula simply to turn around.

When he heard that, Malcolm said, he could only wonder what would come next. A wall around the city? A drawbridge?

“What gives this community the right to prohibit non-residents from parking?” asked Malcolm, who rejects as “absurd” the charge, leveled by some Coronadans, that he is a shill for the tour bus industry. “What gives Coronado the right to say people can’t go up and down the waterfront?”

Pray, who has made the anti-bus fight a personal crusade, calls it a matter of human decency. Given the buses’ long history of wrongdoing, she said, something has to change.

“You’re doing your lawn or something and whoops, here comes the (bus) down the street. Everybody’s waving, like we’re the bears in the zoo. That’s what we’re beginning to feel like,” she said recently. When the buses travel past the Coronado Golf Course, she said, “they’d poke fun at the golfers about how they were golfing.”

In other areas, “they were staying as long as six or seven hours on the streets in front of people’s homes with those confounding engines going,” idling noisily and blowing fumes that caused at least one woman’s drapes to rot, she said.

Who’s to know, she asked, if the buses were carrying passengers with less than honorable intentions?

“We have an alarming number of cars stolen in Coronado,” she said. “If anyone on that tour bus was up to mischief, then of course they’d know exactly where to go.”

Coronado is not the first California city to try to regulate tour bus traffic. In 1976, sick of being overrun by star-gazers, the city of Beverly Hills banned commercial sight-seeing vehicles weighing three tons or more from traveling on most residential streets.

The ordinance, which withstood challenges in the state Supreme Court, sought to eliminate what it called “all nature of nuisances . . . such as trespassing, knocking on doors, littering, trampling on shrubbery and flower beds, using the shrubbery for toilet purposes, making loud and raucous noises, removing items as souvenirs and generally disturbing the peace and privacy of the residents, most of whom are not celebrities.”

Farther north, the coastal city of Carmel passed similar regulations in 1977. Like Coronado, it, too, had to persuade the Coastal Commission that its rules did not rob the public of entree to the sands. It did so by including beach-side parking and drop-off points and by routing buses past pristine views.

At a public hearing in Coronado this week, many city residents said they would brook no such compromise. When their mayor suggested that they consider alternatives to the ordinance in order to increase its chances of winning Coastal Commission approval, 11 people rose, one by one, to say no.

Why, several asked, should we make it easier for the state to interfere?

“We have a perfectly good ordinance,” one man said. “We should not throw it away because one member of the Coastal Commission spoke up.”

“It’s been said we might lose it all,” said one of his neighbors, an elderly woman named Lula Coleman. “So what? We will start from scratch again. I’m willing to take that risk.”

The tour bus operators also spoke. They said the ordinance will create an economic hardship, adding 15 minutes to their routes and forcing passengers to endure “repetitive” views.

“I’m not here to endanger the species or the environment. But (the Hotel del Coronado) advertises all over the world. People come from all over the world to see it,” Chuck Ruane, the owner of the Goodall and Gray tour bus lines, said in an interview later. His message to Coronadans: “If you choose to live there, I think you’ll have to put up with it.”

For now, the buses continue to roll unrestricted through town, gushing well-rehearsed flackery as they go. Among the highlights: the church with the Tiffany windows, the house where Wallace Simpson lived before she married the duke, the grand Hotel Del, where Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis filmed “Some Like It Hot,” and, last but not least, the Hotel Del itself.

“It was the inspiration for the Emerald City in the Wizard of Oz,” said Midge Crockett, an Old Town Trolley tour bus driver, as she recently turned off the highway, hurtled past manicured lawns on a quiet residential street and parked at a shorefront bus stop that the ordinance would abolish.

“And this,” Midge said, “is the most beautiful beach in California.”