DANA POINT-Everyone may grow a year older on January 1^st, 1999, but Dana Point, The City, turns ten today. In the insert to the Dana Point News, dedicated to the City's ten year anniversary, the city's timeline begins in 1985, which is to virtually re-write history, because cityhood efforts had been tried three or four times before 1985, but they were mentioned nowhere in the insert. It's the News' approach to Dana Point history, which feels free to write out individuals its editorial staff objects to, just like Stalin used to do, when people he disqualified from Communist Party membership, all of a sudden turned up in historic photos as shrubbery.

Dana Point in the 1970s extended no further than the so-called Lantern District. At that time, Capistrano Beach had cityhood intentions of its own, and both towns carried on a rivalry that in some ways has lasted to this day. The problem we face, however, is that the communities of Dana Point and Capistrano Beach were actual vibrant societies, and when the official municipal government got set up in 1989, its first efforts were to derail the people whose long-term residency made them capable of challenging the city government's bureaucracy. That was at the root of Redevelopment, which would have literally forced the entire original population of Dana Point into selling their properties to the City, which was going to offer the properties to luxury developers. This plan got derailed by massive resistance on the part of the population; but it is not a dead plan.

The faces on the Dana Point City Council have changed, but the people who run the city have not changed. They set up a Master Plan, and when private property owners want to use their property in defiance of that Master Plan, the city bureaucracy goes after those people using public funds to finance their persecution. In the face of this powerful vigilante force, the majority of the original Dana Point inhabitants were forced to "re-locate" away from their hometown. And it is a shame too. Because the promise of a city government was the promise of local control, after years of control by the county, which sold out Dana Point years ago. Groups tried to get incorporation as late as 1977, when the city was not "built out." But there was too much money to be made, because the majority of the land was undeveloped. Only once the county had made all the money it could approving housing tracts on once vacant lands, did LAFCO approve the cityhood drive, after the potential for physically uniting the various parts of the city into a unified whole had been exhausted. (In the 1970s, four of the five county supervisors went to prison for corruption at the hands of real estate developers).

Now the mandarins of the city will toast themselves at a tax-funded "party," while the city itself defies state law, and provides NO SERVICES for the poorest citizens of Dana Point. There is no monument to war veterans, residents of Dana Point, who served in the many wars that have taken place in which Dana Point's children were sacrificed, as the city bureaucracy celebrates itself, at the expense of the people of Dana Point. A city is more than just an opportunity to do business. It is a place to live, to raise children, and to retire. And we can only hope that in the adolescence of the city, it shall perhaps come to grips with the maturity of its oldest residents, who were Dana Pointers long before there ever was a City of Dana Point.

Written exclusively for Dana Point On-Line by the Central News Service

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