Assemblyman should abandon lost-cause ideas

Assemblyman Chuck DeVore has decided to take a “strategic retreat”

from his two ill-conceived bills to permit 30 more years of private

use at Crystal Cove State Park in return for some dough for the

cash-strapped state.

Apparently realizing that he had zero support for the legislation

-- which has been lambasted by parks supporters and others -- DeVore

announced this week that he will drop the bills instead of taking

them to a committee where they would have undoubtedly foundered.

As DeVore told a Pilot reporter, he didn’t want the failure of his

very first piece of legislation to taint his budding political

career.

DeVore has more to worry about than some bills that failed to get

traction in Sacramento.

The fallout of this special-interest legislation -- proposed some

two decades after the tenants had promised to leave the land and turn

it over to the public -- isn’t pretty.

It’s hard to understand why the assemblyman is still championing

the cause of the beleaguered trailer-park tenants and their

representatives, who, as we learned after the bills surfaced, include

the assemblyman’s former campaign finance manager. El Morro trailer

dwellers were significant contributors to DeVore’s 2004 campaign.

DeVore is still working overtime to try to quash state parks plans

for this prime spot. He now plans to try to convince the governor to

step in and halt evictions for nearly 300 mobile-home tenants who

still haven’t left.

We doubt that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger -- even back in his

golden days after the recall -- could sell the idea of reneging on

this special parkland and allowing it to remain unavailable to yet

another generation of the public that paid for it.

DeVore evidently knows when he’s beaten, but he doesn’t know when

to quit.