Report not unethical, but still lacking

By Rob Elder

It keeps onhappening, all over California. Someone owns a choice piece of land. Someone else wants to put a big development on it. Together, they make their pitch to surrounding owners and residents.

But many people who would be affected are not invited to the meeting. The local newspaper is not notified.

Among those who do attend, reactions vary from delight to dismay. Some important questions are not answered. Afterwards, rumors fly, especially among members of a neighborhood e-mail group. A critic of the proposal sends the newspaper a sampling of those e-mail messages.

This is the first the newspaper has heard of the meeting. Scrambling on deadline, a reporter pieces together a hearsay account. She does not talk to the landowner or the developers or the homeowners' association that sponsored the meeting. Her Page 1 story gets many facts right. It also gets some wrong.

Then all hell breaks loose. The landowner's wife writes a furious letter to the paper, accusing the reporter of unethical behavior. Another letter, from the homeowners' association, claims the reporter would have been welcome at the meeting, which is news to the reporter.

As I said, this kind of thing happens all the time. It happened last month, where I live on the California coast. The reporter, clearly shaken by the letter from the landowner's wife, called me, asking if I thought she had behaved unethically. I said no. But, I said, I thought the paper should publish the letters. It did.

Now, since all this happened to real people, let's go back and plug in some names. The center of the controversy is The Sea Ranch Lodge, a 20-room hotel on Highway 1, two hours north of San Francisco. Over four decades, many honeymooners have stayed there. The hotel has seen better days, but it offers one of the most gorgeous ocean views in California. From a developer's viewpoint, the site is vastly under-utilized.

The person I am calling the landowner is John Power, who, with other members of his family, owns the Lodge. They say they are losing money on it.

The developers, Club Ventures International of Aspen, Co., have retained Lawrence Halprin, the landscape architect who drew the original plans for The Sea Ranch, the private residential community that abuts the Lodge and stretches 10 miles north along the coast.

They want to expand the Lodge into a much larger, more upscale operation, including a new hotel and full-sized vacation homes, in which fractions of ownership would be sold to members of a private club, something like time-share properties.

The meeting was sponsored by The Sea Ranch Association (TSRA), representing homeowners on The Sea Ranch, which began as a second-home development in the 1960s but now has a growing number of full-time residents. TSRA owns no part of the Lodge. The prevailing opinion is that it can influence, but not control, what is done with the Lodge property.

The newspaper is the Independent Coast Observer, a feisty, family-owned weekly in the village of Gualala, just north of The Sea Ranch.

I don't think anyone acted unethically here, but ideally, everyone would have acted differently. The Lodge owners, the developers and TSRA would have invited the ICO to attend the meeting. The newspaper would have gotten both sides of the story, and residents of Gualala would have learned, earlier and with less confusion, of plans that may reshape life on this whole stretch of coast. If you doubt that, go look at formerly remote parts of Hawaii where major destination resorts have been built.

This article appeared in the Contra Costa Times on Sunday, February 8, 2004.

Rob Elder is senior fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara. He lives on The Sea Ranch.