By ANDREW GUMBEL
PEBBLE BEACH - What Clint Eastwood wants, Clint Eastwood gets. That much is undisputed around Carmel, the affluent California coastal town that the gravel-voiced Hollywood star has made into a virtual fiefdom thanks to his passion for golf and his forays into the worlds of politics and property development.
A downtown shop and office complex, a wooded hillside with spectacular views up the coast, a private golf course: all these things have passed into his hands with remarkable ease over the years, without the wrangling over planning permission, water rights and protection of rare trees and grasses that habitually greets any other applicant.
Eastwood's friends say he is simply a savvy businessman with the right mixture of civic generosity and entrepreneurial flair to impress the county officials.
His critics, however, take the view that he has simply used his celebrity, and the charisma that comes with it, to railroad the local authorities into indulging his every whim - to the detriment of the beautiful forests and rolling hills of the Monterey Peninsula, and to the increasing consternation of the area's other residents.
And now he is embarking on his most ambitious project yet, an expansion of the Pebble Beach resort - site of the most recent US Open golf championship - which he bought along with a consortium of high-profile partners last year.
The plan is to build an eighth 18-hole golf course, complete with clubhouse and other facilities, 160 hotel rooms and several dozen new houses.
All of which sounds fine in principle, except that the 2025ha resort happens to be built into one of the most precious forests in the world, the seedbed of the much-prized Monterey pine, which can ill afford to be further chopped back.
It does not help, either, that there is no obvious source for the extra water that will be needed.
Similar plans have been proposed for Pebble Beach for the past 20 years and have either been stalled or defeated. But Eastwood and friends have now come up with a new tactic. They have drawn up a referendum proposal that would effectively throw out all the old planning rules.
They have done this without consulting or even informing the residents. Instead, they have sold it straight to the county Board of Supervisors, dazzling them with the prospect of a sharp increase in tax revenues. And they have packaged it as a plan that is actually environmentally friendly - mainly on the grounds that it is less extensive than an earlier company proposal to build more than 300 new houses.
Already, professional signature collectors hired by the Pebble Beach Company have fanned out across Monterey County telling voters to support Clint's efforts to save the trees (they are being paid as much as $US3 [$6.22] per signature for their pains). Since few people have the time to read and digest the 9000-word referendum proposal, most are swallowing the attractive-sounding proposition and signing on the dotted line.
If the requisite 9000 signatures are collected by the middle of next month, the proposition can either be put to a full popular vote in November or alternatively can be enacted immediately by the county supervisors - although either way there is likely to be a fierce battle waged in the courts over the legality of tossing away Pebble Beach's planning rules.
Eastwood's opponents are the first to admit they have little chance of winning this one. Many of them are retired, with limited resources and little possibility of generating much political heat in an intensely conservative community that finds it extraordinarily difficult to think any ill of a movie star.
The 69-year-old actor has been pulling off the same publicity coup for years. Only once, back in the mid-1980s, did the local authorities dare to oppose his plans and they ended up paying for it dearly. He wanted to expand a restaurant he owned in Carmel, the Hog's Breath Inn, into an office and shopping complex. When he was told he could not, he became so enraged he ran for mayor, swept into office and promptly fired the entire town planning commission.
"There have been various efforts to sue him. But in a court of law, if Eastwood is on one side he usually manages to win. He has limitless resources and excellent lawyers," said Corky Matthews, an environmentalist who lives a few kilometres from Eastwood's exclusive Tehama course. She has petitioned officials all the way up the state hierarchy to try to protect the local habitat and stop rampant growth, but to little or no avail.
"He has a lot of friends in high places. They all just roll over for Clint."
- INDEPENDENT
High-stakes game: Eastwood versus the Monterey pine
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