Voila! A City

Colette Fatosme stood atop a grassy hill above the coastline at Dana Point, letting her dog Chiquita run free and availing herself of one of those million-dollar panoramas that are a dime-a-dozen along the south Orange County shore.

Directly below, the hundreds of boats in Dana Point Harbor gave silent testimony to the affluence and pleasure-seeking bent of Southern California. Out on the sea, the late-afternoon sun cast a glistening net over the water as a solitary boat bobbed on the surface like a tiny piece on a giant blue game board. Down to the left, around a horseshoe bend of the coastline, people whiled away the time on the sands off the community of Capistrano Beach.

From this view high on the hill, it is easy to see why Richard Henry Dana fell for this stunning package of cliffs and shoreline when he first saw it in 1835 and described it in his novel “Two Years Before the Mast.” Dana liked the coastal coves so much, according to local historian Doris Walker, that he called it “the only romantic spot in California.”

But on this sunny day, a century-and-a-half after Dana’s visit, the sounds of silence are broken by carpenters’ hammers, working on the hull of a house 100 yards behind Fatosme. Since this is Orange County, one presumes the house will be finished and fully furnished before the sun sets.

“When we came here three years ago, it was quiet and nice,” Fatosme said, surveying the expanse of housing that an inland view affords. “That’s what I liked. Suddenly, all this development. Look at those houses. They’re packed in like chicken boxes. It’s scary.”

Welcome to Dana Point, a one-time hideaway but now a city-in-waiting.

Next January, Dana Point will drape one arm around Capistrano Beach down the coast and another around a large chunk of Laguna Niguel up the coast and, voila, Orange County’s newest city will be open for business--the result of an overwhelming 80% cityhood vote June 7. The three areas will merge into one city of about 26,000 residents, with Dana Point supplying about 60% of the start-up population.

From birth, this tripartite city-by-the-sea will be one of Orange County’s wealthiest, says Harry Weinroth, a San Juan Capistrano financial consultant hired by the civic group that pushed incorporation. It will be a city that caters to the tourist trade, studded now with the Dana Point Resort in Dana Point and with the centerpiece Ritz-Carlton along coastal Laguna Niguel, and augmented by Dana Point Harbor as another magnet for out-of-towners.

Mike Eggers, one of the newly elected city councilmen, said preliminary projections indicate that the city will have a $3-million surplus its first year. To translate that to workaday politics, Eggers noted, for example, that a recent study indicated it would cost $700,000 to upgrade the roads within the new city. “A lot of cities would have to do a five-year project to pay for something like that,” he said. And while there is no formal budget yet, he noted, “Our first year shows us spending $500,000 on roads.”

But what remains to be seen is whether Dana Point, which was a state of mind long before it dreamed of becoming a city, will retain its charm. For despite its scenic beauty, Dana Point never got the attention that Newport Beach or Laguna Beach got--and no one minded. Sure, it has its own celebrity--but it’s not Jack Nicholson; it’s Alan Young of TV’s “Mr. Ed” fame.

For a long time, no one cared if Dana Point was slow in getting telephones or if TV reception was a little fuzzy. And local people even talked with a certain amount of affection for “The Pits,” a neighborhood of low-rent, high-density apartments that will never get confused with Three Arch Bay farther up the coast.

“Nobody really thought of it as a city,” Walker said. “People still say, ‘A city? Dana Point?’ ”

Complicating things for the new city’s identity is that it will, in essence, be three cities in one. From the Pits to the Ritz--it will be a true hybrid.

Eggers said the council, which includes three Dana Point residents and two from the coastal Laguna Niguel area, is aware of the new city’s unique situation.

“The one thing everybody is most concerned about is how three distinct communities will merge in a new city,” Eggers said. The answer, he said, is that no one will force the issue. “I don’t see the city of Dana Point being a melting pot where we lose the identity of the three areas. I think you’ll see the three areas working together in harmony but each fighting fairly hard to maintain their identity and individual heritage. I don’t think you have to have a city where everyone marches to the same drummer.”

The merging of the coastal communities with Dana Point and Capistrano Beach was tinged with controversy. The coastal communities--13 subdivisions--had been identified more in the public’s mind with Laguna Niguel until a majority of their residents voted last November to join the proposed Dana Point-Capistrano Beach union. That vote prompted a county agency to include the coastal communities in the proposal for Dana Point cityhood.

The inland residents of Laguna Niguel, who have been working to start their own independent city that would have included the entire coastal strip, have filed suit in an attempt to reclaim the area. That suit is pending in Superior Court in Santa Ana.

Neither Capistrano Beach nor the private coastal communities are being asked to identify themselves as Dana Point, Eggers said. A questionnaire has circulated among the various communities asking about settling on a common name for themselves, such as Monarch Bay, but Eggers said he doesn’t consider it a vital matter.

If there is a common bond among the three entities, it is the Pacific Ocean. That, at least, is the prevailing wisdom on why the 13 communities--with developments of up to 900 homes--opted to go with Dana Point. The thinking was that residents had more in common with the beach towns of Dana Point and Capistrano Beach than with inland Laguna Niguel. That, however, doesn’t mean there is necessarily a harmonic convergence at work here.

One merchant in the Monarch Bay Plaza, insisting on anonymity, said, “Dana Point’s got a whole different climate and feel about it. There’s a lot of renters. (Monarch Bay) is a very stable area. The image and feel of our community is totally different than Dana Point.”

If there is an air of superiority blowing in from the coastal communities, it could be traced to money. Weinroth’s revenue projections indicate that the coastal area will generate about 30% of the new city’s first-year revenues, while making up only about 20% of the population.

However, that disproportion is largely attributable to the presence of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which carries a Laguna Niguel address but falls within the new city’s boundaries. Clearly a coup for the new city, the world-class hotel is expected to generate, by Weinroth’s admittedly “conservative” estimate, at least $1.8 million in bed tax for the new city--nearly 20% of the projected first year’s revenue for the new city. In addition, the prestigious Hemmeter Corp. is planning a hotel-retail complex that also would be within the city’s boundaries.

While no one challenges the pedigree of the Laguna Niguel coastal residents--one realtor said many residents are world travelers and that homes in the area can cost upward of $5 million--Dana Point backers contend that their city is maturing.

Many residents interviewed pointed with pride to Dana Point’s vintage California live-and-let-live philosophy. The image of Dana Point, 7-year resident Cheryl Pruett-Guseman said, has always included a “kind of casualness. I don’t want to see it get too formal or snobbish.”

While the Ritz-Carlton is a “really pleasant getaway,” she said, “I imagine a lot of residents in Dana Point don’t think of themselves as wanting a strong Ritz identity. They’re Dana Point, and they’ve always thought of Dana Point as laid-back and comfortable and funky.”

Over the years, funky has blended into something futuristic, as Dana Point started tapping the potential that many people thought was there. The harbor, operated by the county, was built in two phases during the 1970s, with about 2,500 boats moored there.(When cityhood arrives, both sales tax and bed tax revenues now going to the county will go to the new city. Revenues from the harbor itself, however, from shop leases and slip rentals will continue to go to the state and county.) The proliferation of shops and restaurants in the harbor, sporting motifs from seafood to Italian to Cajun, have given a cosmopolitan air to the harbor town.

In the older parts of Dana Point, local leaders succeeded in getting tougher county zoning codes to offset the high-density apartment building. And in recent years, a local planning committee pushed through a New England sea coast architecture to give new commercial construction projects an element of uniformity.

In short, longtime residents say, Dana Point has grown up. “When I first got here (25 years ago),” Walker said, “there weren’t a half-dozen people you’d want to run a city.”

As Dana Point matured, it spawned the natural proliferation of new homes in recent years (some, according to one realtor, with price tags as high as $2 million). That begat the roar of traffic along Coast Highway that can be so noisy that one employee at a roadside restaurant said it is sometimes hard to hear on the telephone from inside the building.

But to some, neither traffic nor population booms can detract from the essence of Dana Point. Pruett-Guseman, who commutes to Orange, said, “Driving into Dana Point from the north makes me still really appreciate why I moved there. I can’t think of any view, whether it’s Puerto Vallarta or wherever, that’s nicer.”

Several longtime residents spoke fondly of the “old surfer” crowd that lived in Dana Point. The area developed a reputation as a “party town,” a reputation that longtime residents say was never accurate.

“In the early ‘60s, there was a group of hippies that lived here,” said Steve Bosheff, 36. “There were very few houses then. I think that’s where the image started, but I’ve never seen any big blowouts here. Now I see more action at Olamendi’s (a Mexican restaurant) on a Friday night than I see on my street in a month.”

Bosheff said Dana Point has gotten “more businesslike” in recent years. Asked if a “surfer crowd” still existed, he said, “Yes, but they’re very hard to find. They’ve all grown up and gone their ways. . . . We’ve got some photographs at Dana Point before the harbor went in. They had surf breaks that lasted a good quarter-mile on really good days. When the harbor went in, it destroyed a good surf area.”

Does he miss those days? “I long for the old days,” Bosheff said, “but I own my own house now.”

For those who don’t, they have gotten a whiff of the future and it smells an awful lot like high rents. Timmi Sommer, a mental health nurse, has lived in the same two-bedroom apartment in Dana Point for six years. In that time, she said, her rent has risen from $350 to $785, a 125% increase.

She worries most about the traffic. “There’s a lot of houses going up and there’s only one PCH,” she says. To her mind, that is a bad equation. She fears that “Dana Point is trying to become another Laguna Beach. Consequently, rents are going up. In this area, they’re pushing the oldies but goodies out.”

Sommer said she has seen a man sleeping outside an apartment on a cardboard bed and suspects, like others interviewed, that some apartments are housing more than one family. “This is the first year I’m getting a little edgy, thinking of going someplace a little quieter,” she said.

Hedy Heller works in a marine equipment store on Coast Highway. She has lived in Dana Point for seven years and before that for 16 years in Laguna Beach. “What it used to be like was that everybody drove carefully. They weren’t in a hurry. I felt safe. Now I don’t. They drive the street like a freeway. It’s scary.”

She has watched the embryonic city breaking out of its shell and isn’t sure she likes what she sees. “I never thought about moving up north (around Santa Cruz), but now I’m really considering it because of the roads. All the new homes, all the people. You can’t even go to the grocery store and walk around nicely. You can’t go get pizza and get help immediately. It’s changed dramatically even in the last year.”

If that sounds like a familiar lament in Orange County, Dana Point’s history probably makes the feelings more intense. Walker attributes it to Dana Point’s self-image as an undiscovered gem.

“I think people who live here tend to be a special kind of people. It’s a combination of being humbled by being in this setting and not having totally worldly orientations. They get together without caring who does what or who drives what. When I moved here 25 years ago, nobody knew where it was. The county map stopped at Newport Beach. This was kind of a beach outpost. It was tough to get here.”

That was even more true in Capistrano Beach, tucked away even more than was Dana Point. Its commercial strip is a relic of the past, but its residential section known as the Palisades is a picturesque and expensive neighborhood where homes can top $1 million. And there is Capistrano Shores, the gated beachfront area where lots alone can exceed $1 million.

Gary French, who works for Beach Cities Glass in Capistrano Beach, voted against incorporation. He was concerned that the new city would not be as responsive to Capistrano Beach as was the county.

“I figured we’d get swallowed up by Dana Point, that their interests wouldn’t be the same as the people who live and work here.” To French, Capistrano Beach remains “like a small town, surrounded by sprawling suburbia. I consider us a little island. Capistrano Beach is trapped in a time warp between Dana Point and San Clemente.”

But the new city leaders note that many cities run the economic and cultural spectrum and that such diversity can be a plus. They also hasten to note that growth won’t be unending.

Dana Point is nearly “built out,” councilman-elect Eggers said, noting that the new city’s total population is projected to peak at 30,000. But even that would represent a 20% increase over the current population.

That may scare some people away. It may appeal to others. “While there is that combination of fear, or excitement of ‘What are we going to become,’ ” Cheryl Pruett said, “everyone is leery of change. It’s not that change isn’t good. I think that’s why people voted for cityhood, but we want controlled change where we really have our hands on what’s going on.”

DANA POINT AT A GLANCE--Here are the boundaries of the new city of Dana Point. Population: About 26,000. Median Income: $33,847 Median Size of Household: 2.3 persons Racial/Ethnic Mix: 96.5% White; .05% Black; 2.9% Other. Zip Codes: 92677, 92629 and a portion of 92675. Points of Interest/Attractions: Dana Point Resort--300 rooms each with a view of the ocean. Ritz Carlton hotel--Hugs top of cliffs with a Mediterranean exterior and Italian decor. Orange County Marine Institute--Lectures and classes about the ocean. Tall Ships--Pilgrim permanently docked here, Californian (state’s official tall ship) uses Dana Point as home port. Doheny State Park--Outstanding camping facilities. Christmas Festival--Weekend of Dec. 10, includes parade of decorated boats. Tall Ship Competition--Sept. 25. Fireworks Display--July 4 from barge in harbor. Gated Communities: Niguel Shores Links Point Mill Pond South Peak Lantern Bay (2 communities) Salt Creek Beach Terrace Capistrano Shores Monarch Bay Dana Light Harbor Creek Chelsea Point Lantern Hill