Clint Eastwood, his Pebble Beach golf course for millionaires and the tale of the Monterey pine

Andrew Gumbel, The Independent, 8 July 2000

What Clint Eastwood wants, Clint Eastwood gets. That much is undisputed around Carmel, the affluent California coastal town 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 have passed into his hands with remarkable ease over the years, without the wrangling over planning, water rights and protection of rare trees and grasses that habitually greets any other applicant.

Mr Eastwood’s friends say he is simply a savvy businessman with the right mixture of civic generosity and entrepreneurial flair to impress the county council, assorted planning commissions and state regulators who might otherwise stand in his way.

But his critics say he has simply used his celebrity and the charisma that comes with it, to railroad 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.

Now he is embarking on his most ambitious project, a massive expansion of the Pebble Beach resort - site of the recent US Open golf championship - which he bought with a consortium of high-profile partners (golfing legend Arnold Palmer and former US baseball commissioner Peter Uberroth among them) just last year.

The plan is to build an eighth 18-hole golf course, with clubhouse and other facilities, about 160 hotel rooms and several dozen new houses. All of which sounds fine in principle, except that the 5,000-acre resort is 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.

But there is no obvious source for the extra water that will be needed, the plan appears to threaten a fragile wetland habitat nominally protected by state law and the private estate already beleaguered by traffic jams and inadequate emergency procedures for fires and earthquakes faces more strain.

Similar plans proposed for Pebble Beach over the past 20 years have been stalled or defeated. But Mr Eastwood and his friends have now come up with a new tactic.

Rather than wait for their proposal to clear the interminable planning and environmental protection hurdles, they drew up a county-wide referendum proposal that, if passed, would in effect throw out all planning rules for Pebble Beach and give them free rein to develop the resort however they wish.

They have not consulted or even told the residents, many of them affluent and retired, who don’t want more tourists spoiling their tranquillity and their golf games. 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 environment-friendly mainly on the basis 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 up to $3 per signature).

Since few people have the time to read and digest the 9,000-word referendum proposal, most are swallowing the attractive-sounding proposition and signing. If the requisite 9,000 signatures are collected by mid-August, the proposition can either be put to a full popular vote in November or can be enacted immediately by the supervisors - although either way there is likely to be a fierce court battle over the legality of tossing Pebble Beach’s planning rules into the rubbish bin.

The manoeuvring has made the otherwise genteel residents of Pebble Beach’s hillside mansions hopping mad. “It’s below the belt, and shows blatant disregard for the people who actually live here,” says Ted Hunter, the 80-year-old coordinator of a group calling itself Concerned Residents.

He believed his group and other residents’ associations were being consulted every step of the way, only to learn about the new fast-track plan from the television in early June. He still has not had a chance to demand an explanation.

Janice O’Brien, a forest preservation activist who has lived in Pebble Beach since the 1970s, says: “This is the triumph of greed, pure and simple. The more they cut down the forest, the more they destroy the goose that lays the golden eggs. Everything that is special about this place will disappear. Who needs an eighth golf course anyway?”

Mr Eastwood’s opponents have little chance of winning this one. Many of them are retired, with limited resources and little possibility of generating much political heat “People tend to be very beguiled by celebrity” Ms O’Brien added. “Mr Eastwood is a local icon.”

The 69-year-old actor has been pulling the same publicity coup for years. Once, in the mid-1980s, local authorities dared to oppose his plans and they ended up paying 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 couldn’t, he became so enraged he ran for mayor, swept into office and fired the town planning commission.

Mr Eastwood’s two-year stint as mayor is remembered locally as a triumph for civic good sense when in truth he made it much easier for developers to do what they wanted.

In the intervening 12 years, Mr Eastwood has played elaborate games with highly complex land deals, portraying a some as gifts to the community when in many cases he either profited directly or enjoyed massive tax breaks.

When he built his exclusive Tehama golf course in the hills above Carmel Valley three years ago, he won his water permit doing little more than shaking hands and signing autographs in the state capital, Sacramento. When a neighbouring farmer refused to sell him a chunk of land so he could run a drainage pipe in a line down the hill, Mr Eastwood’s friends on the county board of supervisors simply had the land condemned and seized it on his behalf.

The golf course, open only to Mr Eastwood’s closest friends and associates, with membership at $135,000 per head, consumes as much water as 300 houses. In the valley below, residents are on rationing because of local shortages and a temporary summer drought. “There’ve been various efforts to sue him,” said Corky Matthews, a particularly vocal environmentalist who lives a few miles from the Tehama course.

“But in a court of law, if Eastwood is on one side he usually manages to win. He has limitless resources and excellent lawyers.”

She has petitioned officials all the way up the state hierarchy to try to protect the habitat and stop rampant growth. “He has a lot of friends in high places,’ she added. “They all just roll over for Clint.”