Keeping tourism small

Local citizens battle proposed hotels in an effort to keep what attracts visitors intact

BY ANNE QUINN

It’s a sad fact of love and a liability for the tourism industry: what initially attracts is often the very characteristic that lovers try to change.

Everyone is a tourist as soon as they travel somewhere else. But few consider the ways they alter the environments they visit. Therein lies the concern.

For local residents of towns like Cayucos, Pismo Beach, and Grover Beach, the concern lies in how large hotels will alter the character of the towns they love.

For larger tourism meccas like Hawaii, the concern lies in the impact of millions of visitors on a place whose beauty is fragile.

The two areas represent different ends of the same spectrum. Tourism, often touted as the only truly "clean" industry, is often sought out by communities wishing to establish a vibrant economy. But unlike the saying, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.

Pictures of Hawaii show palm fringed beaches ringing azure seas. But underneath the water the coral is breaking under the strain of millions of snorklers who grab it for balance or slap it with their fins. Coral only grows at the rate of one inch a year, but the Hawaii tourism industry is growing much faster than that. Travel folder pictures never show construction workers tearing down ancient rock walls built by the original Hawaiians and tossing them aside to excavate for new condos, but that is happening today.

Seemingly killjoys to some, the Sierra Club filed a lawsuit against the Hawaii Tourism Authority saying that an environmental impact assessment should be done before it awards a contract to market and increase Hawaii Tourism, which presently draws 6.7 million visitors a year. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin called the suit the "Sierra Club’s bid to wreck tourism."

Yet the suit raises similar questions for other places where tourism is having an impact. Some areas with big tourist draws wish they could turn back the clock and return to the point that SLO County is in now, when the goal is to increase tourism, not mitigate its impacts. But the lessons these larger tourist areas may be teaching is that mitigation should be a journey, not a destination. In other words, start mitigating early in the growth of tourism, or you may find yourself doing damage control later, when its too late.

"Fancy a tourist destination with bacteriologically contaminated drinking water, overgrazed and eroded mountains, polluted rivers, rapidly declining fish stocks, carcinogenic chemicals used by fish farmers and an ocean of domestic garbage. Sound like a nightmare? This is County Mayo, Ireland, today," reads a commentary on the environment and tourism by an Irish environmental group.

A coalition led by the Austrian Friends of Nature International is pressing for a European Union sustainability strategy due to fears that tourist arrivals in Europe will double to 720 million by 2020. According to their study, European tourists are increasingly turning away from environmental friendly forms of transit such as trains, and renting cars and taking quick flights between countries. The group is proposing charging by the kilometer for road use, and increasing landing and takeoff charges for flights under 500 miles to offset pollution.

Spain was the first country to levy an "eco-tax" on tourism in a measure to protect its delicate island, Minorca. Revenue from the tax is to be used to mitigate the effects of mass tourism from the environment.

The SLO County Visitor’s and Conference Bureau’s recognizes the environment as a "key attribute" in it’s campaign to market the county as "California’s natural escape." One stated strategic goal is to protect and preserve the aesthetic, historical, agricultural and cultural assets of SLO County. But whereas its marketing strategy is specific, how it will reach its preservation goals is unspecified.

Locally, cities tax tourism with transient occupancy tax, which is a percentage (from 7 to 10 percent depending on the city) of hotel/motel room rates. This goes directly into the receiving city’s general fund and is not used to compensate for any environmental damage.

Pam Marshall-Heatherington, the executive director of the Environmental Center of San Luis Obispo or ECO-SLO, said that she wishes Conference Bureau would look at tourism more holistically, especially if it is promoting the county as natural. "We are fighting having a golf course at San Simeon Point along our most unspoiled coastline. Recently, I sat in on meetings on wineries held by the Agricultural Commissioners office and my question was ‘are these tourists sipping wine in a pesticide free zones?’ This [tourism] is not happening in a vacuum," she said.

The Central Coast is still a small player in world tourism, and residents, hoping that the emphasis stays on the word "small," are appealing–literally, through the courts and to the California Coastal Commission–to keep the character of the towns they love alive.

But smallness as policy is risky, because developers rarely think small. They are the risk takers, the agents of change. And the most successful of them think big.

But big isn’t a word that usually appears in tourist brochures for Central Coast’s laid back beach towns like Cayucos.

"Cayucos looks like a place in California is supposed to look. Not like anywhere else," extols the Pelican network website, www.pelicannetwork.net. "With all the bold greatness around, the folks who like to sell things were intimidated by this greatness and needed to reduce it to a monotonous mediocrity. Drive ups. Tract homes. Thankfully however, owing mostly to the character of the people who selected the Central Coastal California to live, some places were spared the monotony. A splendid little example is Cayucos. It’s quiet, inspiring and mostly natural, it’s real California."

A for-sale sign now hangs at the edge of a Cayucos lot on the corner of Ocean Avenue and E street. Its asking price is $1.425 million, according to Dale Kaiser, owner/broker of Dale Kaiser Real Estate. This lot comes with entitlements for the Victorian Inn, a future 30-unit, four-star hotel, originally proposed by developer Rodney Miles of Laguna Niguel. The lot is vacant, untouched. It hardly looks like a battle ground where a fight was waged to keep the character of Cayucos, but it was.

In 1999, Miles proposed a three-story 30-unit motel (called the Victorian Inn) with a subterranean parking structure including 35 spaces for that lot. Since the project was compatible with the zoning, it was quickly approved by county planning. Residents who were opposed to the structure on the grounds that it didn’t fit Cayucos appealed to the County Board of Supervisors. When that failed, 16 residents formally appealed the project to the California Coastal Commission.

"It was a very painful and frustrating deal, there was a lot of back and forth," recalls Bruce Gibson, president pro-tem of the Cayucos Advisory Council. But, he said, the experience taught residents a valuable lesson.

"That building brought up the fact that existing planning standards for the area allowed the possibility of a lot of projects that were not appropriate for Cayucos," he said. "It educated the community as to how its community buildings are constructed or not constructed."

According to Gibson, Cayucos design standards allowed buildings to be constructed 30-feet above the average natural grade of the slope. "They put a stake in the low end and another in the high end, and then determine the middle. That’s where they place a 30-foot pole to determine the new building’s average height," he explained.

The only other design criteria for Cayucos was that new developments had to be "compatible with existing developments." "That statement leaves a huge amount of room for interpretation," he said.

Residents did not like the way that developer Miles was interpreting that criteria.

"The Victorian Inn was a gigantic, blocky thing. The proposal to bury the parking under the structure coupled with the fact that the lot slopes allowed him to build a structure that towered 37 feet above the height of Ocean Avenue."

Cayucos’ residents used the second criteria–compatibility with existing developments to appeal to the Coastal Commission. Resident Ron Wilson surveyed every community building in downtown Cayucos and created drawings to show that the imposing structure of the Victorian Inn just didn’t fit. "Ron Wilson did a remarkable job," said Gibson. "He proved that the Victorian Inn as originally proposed was twice the size of the biggest building in the downtown."

The Commission demanded a redesign of the building, and the resulting proposal is for a project half of the originally proposed size. It also specified that the "rhythm of roof heights and styles be more in keeping with the existing downtown commercial buildings of Cayucos."

Cayucos residents won their battle, and when Miles sells the lot with these hard-won entitlements, he will eventually profit from it. But someone else will have to build it.

Another project Miles initiated was bought by Cambria developer Mel McCollach, who also built the small Blue Dolphin Inn in Cayucos. This project is currently under construction next to Schooner’s on Ocean Avenue at the base of the pier.

The difference between working with Miles and working with McCollach was "like night and day," according to Gibson. McCollach came to the Cayucos Advisory Council on his own initiative and showed them his design, asking for community input. Once again, Wilson created mock-up drawings showing how the proposed project compared with existing buildings.

"When he (McCollach) saw the drawings and saw how high it was he said, ‘I didn’t realize that,’ and revised the project, lowering its height and opening up public space," Gibson recalls. Now the hotel, called The Tides, is being built. "I hope its works out," Gibson said. The base of the pier is very strategic corner–where a hotel could either enhance or destroy the character of Cayucos. "We’ll see," he said.

The only city with a zero next to its transient occupancy tax figures is the City of Grover Beach, but that soon could change, substantially. This month, the city is reviewing proposals for a 125-room beach hotel to be built at the end of Grand Street directly on Pismo State Beach. Hopefully, officials in Grover Beach have kept an eye on a battle that has been going on next door in Pismo Beach since 1998.

The controversy centers around four acres of land east of U. S. Highway 101 near the Fourth Street exit, bordered by James Way and Shamrock Lane. It has been zoned commercial since 1986. In 1992, zoning on the land surrounding it was changed to residential. Now the land for the proposed hotel is surrounded by houses, filled with people who don’t want to live next door to a hotel.

Pismo Beach residents have been fighting to get the height of the proposed hotel lowered since 1998. The project, called the El Camino Real Hotel, is a 130-room hotel that is designed with two wings that meet in a central tower.

In 1998, the Pismo Beach planning commission rejected the project. Arroyo Grande developers Lee Webb and Ed Dorfman appealed to the City Council. At a raucous city council meeting, the council approved the project.

Pismo Beach receives more hotel tax revenue than any other city in the county–$3.3 million just last year. The El Camino Real Hotel is estimated to provide the city with $150,000 additional revenue annually.

The City allowed developers Lee Webb and Ed Dorfman to proceed with its plans to build according to a definition outlined in its general plan which says that buildings should be 35 feet above the existing natural grade of the land, (meaning land that has been untouched).

Since this project is also on a hill, opponents say that interpretation means the tower, which is on the up-slope of the hill, could be as high as 52 feet. This would interfere with their view of the ocean and shine brightly into their homes at night.

Residents began meeting and studying planning laws in each other’s homes. Irvin J. Miller said he spent "hundreds of hours" at City Hall, trying to get answers from the Pismo Beach planning department.

At first city employees were very helpful, he said, but after a while as soon as an employee started to assist him, supervisor Carolyn Johnson, the planner in charge of the El Camino Real project, would come out and abruptly announce a meeting.

Soon, however, Miller got to the place that he knew the city’s laws better than many of its employees did anyway, he said.

He discovered a commercial zoning ordinance which he thought should supersede the general plan when it came to regulating commercial properties. This zoning ordinance said that a building could only be 42 feet higher than the finished grade, meaning the deep hole that has to be dug for the foundation. If he was right, this meant that the building had to be lowered.

Miller and other residents took up a collection to hire lawyer Paul Geihs to represent them in SLO County Superior Court. Developers Webb and Dorfman hired their own lawyer and also paid the city attorney’s fees because Pismo Beach has a clause in its permit application process that specifies if a project is contested, the developer pays the city’s litigation costs.

Miller quoted radio commentator Paul Harvey when he explained why he took the city to court. "I agree with Paul Harvey when he said that the cities across America have been taken over by the developers and the contractors who ignore the law.’

Judge Barry Hammer upheld the citizen’s contention that the commercial zoning ordinance was the regulation to be used over the general plan. This meant the measurement had to be taken from the finished grade, and the tower would have to come down. Miller and others were elated. The Judge also specified that the developers had to pay Geihs $25,000 in fees, so the citizens could be reimbursed.

The developer’s architect altered the architectural plans of the hotel, but the roof line was only lowered a little over two feet. Furious, the residents asked why.

Apparently, Judge Hammer’s ruling that the Pismo Beach commercial zoning ordinance superseded its general plan sent the city back to review the ordinances. There they discovered a regulation that could aid the developers: If the lowest floor is considered a basement, it doesn’t count when the height is measured.

Pismo Beach planning director Randy Bloom explained that the developers eliminated doors to the outside from the lowest level and are now not excavating any dirt in front of the area where the doors once were, making the first level of the El Camino Real Hotel a basement.

The residents felt the city’s determination to call that area a basement was a sham, especially since a corridor leads directly from it to the first floor rooms. They filed an appeal in the State of California Second Appellate District, where their interpretation of the law was upheld by a judge. "I don’t know how they are going to ignore it now," said Miller.

The skirmishes between the residents of Cayucos and Pismo Beach land developers have served to sharpen residents understanding of planning laws.

They’ll need it to preserve the Central Coast’s laid back charms, to make sure it’s still the kind of place that feels like an old movie set.

That’s one of the virtues of Cayucos touted by the writers at Pelican Network, who perhaps thought of it when they drove down Theater Drive.

"California is a movie here. You can almost see John Galvin getting off a Greyhound, James Dean cruising by in his Spyder, or Marlon Brando lurking on his Indian."

That is, as long as a hotel is not blocking your view. Æ

Anne Quinn is always a tourist at heart.