JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

Since the Koll Center expansion was shot down by local voters last

week, I have been reading with a growing sense of wonder the complaints,

recriminations and sour grapes from the people who were pushing it. They

obviously need to place blame, but in their search for the guilty, they

have looked everywhere but the most obvious place: in the mirror.

Instead, we have such draconian statements as this one from Richard

Luehrs, president of the Newport Harbor Area Chamber of Commerce: “I

think this sends a clear message that Newport Beach is not open to

further development.”

Or this one from Tim Strader, president of Koll Center developer

Starpointe Ventures: “The fact that only a small percent of the

registered voters decided to vote is further proof that planning issues

should not be decided by popularity contests.”

Before they lay their defeat off on an unsophisticated citizenry that

doesn’t understand where its best interests lie, they should get some

back copies of the Pilot and read the letters on the Koll issue. Koll

supporters clearly didn’t learn anything from these letters before the

election. Maybe in retrospect, they might usefully consider the

possibility that this election’s only clear message was that insulting

the intelligence of the voting public isn’t the way to get ahead with

development projects.

The catalyst of the screw up was a Koll-sponsored organization either

conceived by a saboteur of the Koll Center or someone who never took

Psychology 101 in high school. It was called the Greenlight

Implementation Committee, apparently on the premise that a guileless

public would believe that Greenlight was really supporting the Koll

Center. If any of the $170,000 we are told Koll spent on the election

campaign went to public relations consultants, they should return the

money and get into some other line of work. For the price of a cup of

coffee, I would have told the Koll people that this committee was a

terrible idea.

So would the dozens of Pilot letter writers who cited the committee as

a large factor in their opposition to the Koll expansion. Four examples

will illustrate:

“We were shocked and very disappointed to see that Koll and its

project supporters had resorted to semantic deceit. Usurping the term

Greenlight for themselves appears to be a deliberate attempt to confuse

the voters”;

“I just want to express my deep frustration and horror with the

tactics of the Greenlight Implementation Committee that has adopted the

name of the organization trying to minimize growth in our lovely city”;

“There is just no defense or excuse that can justify this plot to

confuse voters”;

“I was going to vote ‘yes’ on this Koll project because I thought

maybe it was the stretching of Greenlight. But after looking at these

deceptive underhanded lies, I’m voting against it. I wonder how many

votes Tim Strader has cost himself by his undermining of the public

trust?”

The kind of juvenile ploy represented by the Greenlight Implementation

Committee says two things to the people who are debating how to vote: (1)

the case for the project in question is not strong enough to stand on its

own legs, and (2) the voters are dumb enough to buy into this scam.

Neither is very helpful to the developer.

Nor was the disappearance of Koll consultant Scott Hart from a public

informational meeting in Corona del Mar before the question-and-answer

session, leaving the field to the Greenlight representative who didn’t

cut out. Or the bylined piece by Tim Strader in the Pilot in which he

warned -- apparently with a straight face -- that voters should not be

“fooled by political rhetoric and misinformation.”

The lesson to be learned from the Koll vote is not so much that

Newport Beach has shut the door to future development as that developers

who are contemptuous of the people opposing their projects, especially to

the point of insulting their intelligence with silly and deceptive

tactics, are probably going to lose any project put to a vote. And

deserve to lose.

Greenlight is going to be around for a while, along with the strong

and legitimate feelings that brought it about in the first place -- and

which are very much present in other local communities that lack a

Greenlight. Developers who have done some fine work in this community in

the past are going to be around for a while too.

No purpose is served by regarding all developers as greedy exploiters,

out to make big bucks at the expense of the public. Or to regard the

citizenry that supported Greenlight as made up of human fossils trying to

hang onto the fantasy of a past that is no longer relevant or in our best

interests today. Both attitudes make it more difficult to look with

reasonable objectivity at a project under consideration.

Making it even more difficult -- maybe impossible -- are mindless

travesties such as the Greenlight Implementation Committee, which should

be a case history in every manual for developers on how not to win an

election.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.