Pristine oceanfront property owned by all

BYRON DE ARAKAL

So now we know that the good residents of Soweto By The Sea (read: El

Morro Village) tossed a few dozen cookies into freshman Assemblyman

Chuck DeVore’s campaign lunch box this past election cycle. That puts

a bit of a stink on the legislator’s errant crusade to preserve parts

of El Morro as a kind of hybrid time share for campers of the upper

tax bracket.

The odor thickened when DeVore brushed off the campaign

contribution connection. “My position [on El Morro],” he told the

Daily Pilot, “was set before I got money from these people.”

Fair enough? I guess. But transparency might have been better

served -- though perhaps not the assemblyman’s election chances --

had DeVore lifted the curtain on his “position” prior to Nov. 2. The

state of El Morro, as I recall, was neither central nor peripheral to

DeVore’s campaign.

Now, while these are juicy little political novellas, they are not

meaningful to understanding why DeVore’s El Morro adventure is

misguided. Rather, it is simply bad public policy to imprison

valuable public parkland in a state of perpetual class apartheid in

the interest of symbolic short-haul budget management.

Yet that is precisely the outcome DeVore’s legislation would

produce.

The assemblyman’s blueprint -- carefully bracketed in two separate

pieces of legislation -- cobbles together a lease extension for the

tenants of the 32-acre El Morro Village trailer park, which is part

of the 3,000-acre Crystal Cove State Park.

The success of either bill would put the skids to the tenants’

imminent eviction from the public’s land, providing them a 30-year

reprieve in paradise instead. In return, the tenants would write a

$50 million check to the state and either pay rent at market rates or

rates that would produce no less than $3.2 million a year

villagewide.

All tolled, DeVore’s plan would funnel something like $146 million

into California’s coffers over the next 30 years.

I’ve always known DeVore to be a bright and articulate guy. And

most might entertain him for a moment when he says the state parks

department’s $14 million plan to turn El Morro into a public

campground is “fiscal insanity,” seeing how California’s tab for

deferred maintenance on its current parks is somewhere around a

billion dollars.

But then one wonders: How does denying full public access to all

of El Morro for an additional 30 years in exchange for a puny $4.8

million a year salve California’s budget wounds?

The short answer is it doesn’t.

What it does do is allow a clique of fortunates to continue 24/7

habitation of pristine oceanfront property owned by all of us while

excluding the rest of us from the same luxury. And to quarantine even

a sliver of El Morro’s magnificent landscape from full public access

for the sake of a symbolic budget gesture is crummy public policy.

It also ignores recent and important public sentiment expressed in

the voting booth.

Newport Beach voters filleted Measure L -- nearly skinning Stephen

Sutherland alive in the process -- because they had no interest in

leasing public parkland for any kind of private use, even if that use

would have put $150 million into the public’s wallet.

My bet is a generic strain of that very sentiment expressed in the

Measure L vote occupies the minds of most California taxpayers.

They’re just not interested in consigning treasured parkland to the

exclusive use of a few so we can feel better about the health of the

public’s budget.

While DeVore’s fiscal conservatism is laudable, his El Morro fiat

is wrong. California taxpayers deserve full, unfettered access to the

land they pay for and own.

* BYRON DE ARAKAL is a writer and public affairs consultant

residing in Costa Mesa. Readers may leave a message for him on the

Daily Pilot hotline at (714) 966-4664 or contact him at

[email protected].