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.
