King Creon: there had to be one man who said yes. Somebody had to agree to captain the ship. She had sprung a hundred leaks; she was loaded to the waterline with crime, ignorance, poverty … No is one of your man-made words. Can you imagine a world in which the trees say no to the sap? … Animals are good, simple, tough. They move in droves, nudging one another onwards, all traveling the same road…

Antigone: Animals, eh, Creon! What a king you could be if only men were animals!

Bert Stites is getting angry. You can tell he’s getting angry because he doesn’t look angry. But his finely sculpted hair, somewhere between a flat top and a pompadour, has gone iron stiff. His jaw doesn’t move. For the moment, he has turned into a statue, tilting slightly to one side. Around him, the councilmen and the crowd are a blur of heated emotion. But Stites has gone into his distant stare. He’s getting ready to explode.

As mayor of Imperial Beach, Stites says he is trying to lead his community into the corporate age, out of an era of what he considers decay. Stites says he is sick of getting up each morning for six years to face the never-ending threat of municipal bankruptcy, the lack of services, the lack of growth. A town exists on two sources of revenue, he says, property tax and business tax, and in I.B. property tax is always going up while business tax is, at best, dormant. The way Stiles sees it, the corporations are going to be marching into the city one of these days anyway, so why not prepare for the invasion and make the best deal possible. A sort of Vichy government.

Three years ago, Stites and the City Council majority voted to form a Development Agency to prepare the beachfront property and the areas adjacent to the beachfront for massive development by big investors. The primary tool the city needed was eminent domain, the ability to buy up private property – even forcing people, directly or indirectly, from their homes – in order to make room for massive private development. This night (December 7) is supposed to be the final vote on eminent domain.

A good solution for the common good, Stites thought. Reasonable, modern, practical. But now he is looking out over a lot of angry citizens. On each side of him the councilmen are throwing wicked glances at each other or rolling their eyes for theatrical effect. While outside the packed City Council room lingers a whole horde of what Stites likes to call “the flea-bitten bum winos, the trash, the hippie element, the bugs-and-bunny bunch (environmentalists)” They’re out there all right, but not all of them are counterculture folks. There are senior citizens, middle-class homeowners, potential politicians. They’re out there in the cold, slapping their arms. A lot of them have homes in the condemnation area, and they’re desperately afraid of losing them. A few are land speculators and absentee-landlords worried about losing money.

Jim Whitaker, 69, who was lived in Imperial Beach since 1958, says, “If this goes through I’ve got a cloud on my property.” Even though the ordinance calls for “participatory agreements.” Under which homeowners, as long as they continue to live in their homes, can avoid having them condemned. Whitaker says, “Who’s going to want to stay in the neighborhood when highrises start going up all around us? The way it works, even if I want to sell my home the only buyers who will be interested will be the city or a big developer.”

A middle-aged homeowner, Leslie Probleck, lives just outside the development area. As yet, her home is not being threatened by condemnation, but she’s out there in the cold with the protesters. “If they can do it on the beachfront, they’ll do it to me sooner or later.”

One of the leaders of the formal protest group, the Citizens Action Group of Imperial Beach, Chris Barret, calls eminent domain “a police action.” He insists the city councilmen have set the stage by “refusing dozens of permits to small developers. They’re waiting for one big corporation to completely re-do the beachfront.” The group is milling. The leaders race back and forth with whispered messages. As a Channel 39 television crew rushes past them into the doorway, one of the protesters takes a reporter aside. “They’ve planted spies back here,” he hisses. “Look, most of us here tonight love I.B. And what we love about it is it’s still a small town. We love it because it isn’t La Jolla. Or Chula Vista. Money isn’t everything.”

The way the protesters see it, “They’re destroying a town in order to save it.”

But the protesters aren’t the only ones ready to drop Stites off the end of the I.B. pier. Councilman Elvin Ogle and Henry McCarty, and the as-yet unseen development interests, are looking at Stites with a mixture or horror and disappointment because they had hoped he would be a good spokesman for their interests. But he bumbles. He gets emotional and angry and flustered and passionate and profane, instead of using the cool, clipped, precise economic eloquence of the briefcase set. Right now, in fact, Stites is fouling up the works by picking nits from an amendment to the development ordinance. Instead of just greasing the wheels and sliding the amendment through, he’s locked into some kind of concern over military families not having their houses taken away if they get orders from the Navy to ship out. Stites, fiercely patriotic, isn’t about to see our fighting men treated the same as some of the “vermin types on the beachfront” he wants the wording of the amendment to be exact. Down the bench from Stites, City Attorney Clifton Reed, who is also city attorney for Chula Vista, just wants the amendment, vague as it is, passed, done with. Reed, the technician, who pulls the microphone to himself instead of leaning into the microphone, is looking at the ceiling. Stites is forcing the technicality when it could all be so smooth; this going to mean the final approval of eminent domain will be delayed another week. There have now been weeks of this bickering, and even Reed, whose cool is as finely tuned as a Porsche engine, is beginning to sputter.

Councilman Errol Bennett, who until recently some citizens have thought to be something of a marshmallow, now opposes eminent domain. He takes the microphone and stares at Stites, who has barely moved.

“Does this mean we’re going to have a special meeting next week just to consider this technicality and nothing else?” he asks.

Stites seems to nod. Bennett, unsatisfied, asks again. Stites suddenly erupts. This whole thing is making him feel like a cheap sandwich spread. “I said YES!”

“I didn’t hear you,” says Bennett.

At the end of the bench, Brian Bilbray, the youngest of the councilmen, feigns boredom. He slouches. The meeting breaks up in a scattering of unresolved energy. Everyone moves away from the mayor.

Just as the meeting breaks up, one of the policemen asked by Stites to guard the meeting (Stites also requested the presence of plainclothes policemen) comes over to a group of protesters huddled over a portable tape recorder. The recorder is blaring out Stite’s voice, and the protesters are listening to it with glee. The policeman asks the group to move; the noise is too loud, so they move and gather around the tape recorder again. “Listen to this,” someone says. “It’s a meeting of the Development Agency the other night.” (The Development Agency is actually the City Council, sitting in separate session. The main topic of conversation at this taped meeting had been an editorial aired by Channel 39. The editorial had said, in part: “The area in question is composed mainly of well-kept single-family residences. The residents are very much upset at the prospect of seeing their houses condemned. The Imperial Beach City Council says that these homes don’t bring in enough tax dollars to maintain city services. But if the homes are replaced with apartments and commercial businesses, then the city’s tax base would go up. 39 Alive feels that this effort to destroy a nice residential neighborhood is an abuse of both the city’s power of eminent domain and of the intent of redevelopment… 39 Alive’s research indicates that only one of the five council members lives in the proposed redevelopment zone, and secondly, large Nevada real estate development concerns are supporting the condemnation effort…”

That was the bombshell. LARGE NEVADA REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT CONCERNS. They might as well have said Stites, Ogle, and McCarty, if not others, were members of the Mafia, Nazi war criminals, axe-murders, or worse.

So now, the protesters are listening to the mayor’s voice crackling from the tape recorder, answering the charges. “One of the things I keep getting hit with by that station – they keep pounding and pounding at this – is the Nevada developers. I’m sick and tired of it. I don’t know anything about it.” The charge was vague and unsubstantiated, Stites said. So if Channel 39 wasn’t going to find out the facts, he was. Stites turned to the councilmen and the city attorney and announced he was going to go around the table and ask each councilman point blank if he knew anything about any Nevada developers. “I’m just asking because if anybody’s holding back I want to know about it.” One after another, the city councilmen denied any contact with any Nevada developers. They went so far as to minimalize any contact they’d made with any developers anywhere, either in San Diego County or out of the state. No developers, according to the councilmen, were all that hungry to rush into Imperial Beach. McCarty was indignant. “It’s the veiled threat that bothers me. This is a smokescreen by some people to gain their own ends.” Ogle said, “Apparently they got this supposed information from some city official.”

“That’s what I understand,” said Stites. “That’s why I’m polling all you city officials.” The mayor then turned to the last councilman, Bilbray, 24, who had won a stunning election to City Council with one of those now-institutionalized political walking tours. Bilbray, who lives in the condemnation district, is the cocky, brash young turk who likes to grandstand for crowd approval, and he sometimes switch-hits on issues in order to get it. He is also one of the two councilmen opposing eminent domain.

Bilbray cleared his throat, then said straight out, “Well, I’ve talked to my brother about this, who is a Las Vegas attorney and I suppose some of his clients are developers…” There was a hush, then a mass of confused voices on the tape. (Bruce Gray, Channel 39’s editorial director, later said that Bilbray had indeed been the rather inadvertent source of the information about Nevada developers, but he said there was another, as-yet unrevealed, mystery source.

But now, the citizens of Imperial Beach are going home. They’re fanning out toward their cars in the dark. A conservative-looking couple who came to protest eminent domain, walk arm in arm across the wet grass. One of the protest organizers, wearing a bright STOP EMINENT DOMAIN T-shirt, beard, stocking cap pulled down over his ears, gives the couple a sort of power salute and calls out to them with bravado, “Remember, we’re all in this together.” They look at him, a little embarrassed to be caught on the same side of an issue with such an outrageous character, and they keep going.

Imperial Beach is a town of 23,000 at the most extreme southwest point of the United States. It is lodged between Tijuana, Chula Vista and San Diego. The Coronado Islands loom up out of the ocean not far away, and Navy helicopters usually hover over the city, taking off and landing like huge, smoky, roaring black gnats. The Navy still uses the deserted helicopter field in I.B. for practice, but most of the Navy population and the resultant revenue have gone elsewhere. The helicopters buzz around the usually sleepy, and somewhat weedy, little town, spraying pollutants behind them. Mayor Stites says he has to wash the pollution off his lawn and trees every week to keep them from dying. Recently he inserted himself into San Diego’s controversy over where to construct a new Balboa Naval Hospital. While the San Diego Union, the County Supervisors, San Diego City Council, the Navy, and local representatives to Congress were arguing furiously over which piece of expensive land would be the site of the new hospital, Stites quietly suggested they move the project down to I.B. and build it on land already owned by the Navy: the old helicopter field, with ready-built slabs of concrete for parking and officers barracks for hospital staff. Since, Stites insisted, most of the Navy population lives south of downtown San Diego and since I.B. needs the business more than any other area of the county, why not take advantage of all that unused, free land, and “get those damn helicopters out of here.”

If you bring up his idea to the politicians who are going to decide where the hospital goes, they either deny that they’ve heard anything about Stites’ proposal, or they start laughing uncontrollably.

As it is, the Navy is talking about putting a garbage dump on that land.

Jonathan Gage was, until recently, editor of the Imperial Beach Reminder. He now works outside I.B. and is as objective an observer as you’ll find. “That kind of reaction is in the tradition of how Imperial Beach has been treated all along. The other municipalities are looking out for their own skins. They don’t often care what happens down in I.B. which has always gotten the short end of the stick.”

In the beginning, Imperial Beach grew very slowly. During the twenties, water was a problem and electricity was rare. Merchandise was brought into the area by train or horses, and train service was interrupted by devastating floods in 1916. The Otay Dam broke that year and a 25-foot wall of water rolled down Otay Valley, washing away homes, livestock and people as it filled with silt the natural 25-foot bay channel that linked I.B. to San Diego. It has not been dredged since.

Then, in 1927, the whole Tia Juana River watershed was flooded again. High tides cut off the ribbon of road that followed the Silver Strand to Coronado, a roadway bracketed on both sides by water. People couldn’t get to Palm City, Coronado, or Chula Vista for days. All the southwest valley to the hills was standing in water – several blocks of I.B. were under nine feet of water. People in boats finally made contact with I.B. and kerosene was delivered to some stranded families by guy lines stretched across the water.

It’s been like that for Imperial Beach.

During the Depression there came a new flood migrants from the dust bowl, John Steinbeck’s refugees from Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas and Colorado, working people who sought jobs in the government defense programs in and around San Diego. Real homes were too expensive, so the people lived in trailers, tents, and shacks. Some built shacks out of airplane packing crates. And when Ream Field, the Amphibious Base in Coronado, and the Imperial Beach Radio Station were built, the refuges decided to settle permanently.

After the war it took two years of fund-raising to buy a fire truck. The citizens finally found a used one for $750, but there was no place to house the truck.

The Amphibious Base, just up the coast, donated a Quonset hut, but the Highway Department refused to give I.B. a permit to transport the hut down the Silver Strand because it was too tall for the highway. So the good citizens of I.B. circumvented the rules, and by moonlight one night they sneaked the hut down the Silver Strand. The town made do that way for many years, with or without San Diego’s approval.

Today, says Gage, I.B. has the highest property tax rate in the county, the lowest increase in assessed valuation, and much of the land is controlled by the Navy. There is a high rate of unemployment, some poverty, much crime, and a psychological legacy of disasters. I.B. has always brought up the end of the line when County favors were passed out. Biker gangs have even singled out I.B. to pick on: Hells Angels, Mongols, and the Axemen have terrorized the town from time to time, riding up and down the old, fragile pier that perches on the water like an insecure water spider.

To top it all off, there is a gigantic, cement flood control channel pointed like the barrel of a gun from Tijuana right toward Imperial Beach. Part of a 1967 Border Area Plan, the channel stops, completed only on the Mexican side of the border. The U.S. side of the channel was opposed by environmentalists and by Mayor Wilson who was discouraging residential growth. The channel, he said, would invite development of the Tia Juana River Valley. He supported instead a series of “dissipator-dikes,” and since the channel passed within the southern boundaries of the city, Mayor Wilson got his way. And by that time, Mexico had finished its section of the channel.

Gage says San Diego has been basically insensitive to the people of Imperial Beach. “The environmentalists wanted to protect the sloughs, marshes and wildlife, and their reasoning was powerful, but many of them live in La Jolla and Point Loma and don’t live in a town with the particular problems of Imperial Beach.”

On the other hand, Gage describes the good side of Imperial Beach. “The town is not yet urbanized. The people are warm and earthy and will touch you. They’re honest and straightforward and haven’t yet been caught up in the big metropolitan rush. Bert Stites, for instance, knows everybody in his town. He’s the archetypal small town mayor. He’s always peppering his speech with scatological references and he says more off-the-record statements than any politician I’ve ever met.”

In many ways, says Gage, Bert Stites epitomizes Imperial Beach. If you want to know what is happening to the small town in America, watch Bert Stites. Catch him before he is swept aside by the very tide he has invited to town.

Mayor Stites ushered a boy scout out of his office. The boy had come to get the mayor’s approval for a citizenship merit badge. “That boy wrote a damn college thesis. Now that’s citizenship,” He sits down.

Most towns either progress or decay. I grew up in one of the few towns that did neither,” says Stites. “Montrose, Colorado was a little cattle and livestock community. It had a population of 5000 for 5000 years. I’ve hunted deer and elk and bear and coyotes, you name it. I’ve had a shot at it. I’m a cowboy. I herded cattle. If my wife would let me, I’d go back there today.”

When Stites graduated from high school in WWII he served in the Navy on two sub-tenders and a submarine, which later was sold to the Gillette Razor Co. for scrap. “I haven’t shaved with a Gillette since.”

After the war, he married and went to work in St. Paul, Minnesota in a Bell Telephone factory making telephones. “Boy, that wasn’t my cup of tea. Thing I couldn’t stand was I couldn’t see any way I could ever get ahead. Just you and that stinking machine. So I enrolled in Denver University and became a teacher. First job was in a dying coal mining town. They wouldn’t pay us anything; damned near starved. I’d heard that teacher salaries were bigger out here, so I came west.”

He got a job in Coronado and has taught there ever since. He teaches third grade. He says the thing he most likes about his pupils is that when they hug him, they don’t want anything. At least not yet. Adults aren’t like that when you’re mayor, he says. A critic says Stites taught eighth-graders for a short while, but “almost went bananas because he couldn’t order them around like he could third graders.”

“My dad was quite a guy,” says Stites. “Out in the machine shed, over his work bench, he had a sign that said, ‘The man who pleases everybody is a failure.’ I used to ask him what that meant and he’d always tell me I’d find out when I grew up. Well, I didn’t understand that until I was mayor. A few months after I took office, my best friend told me I was the most worthless mayor this town ever had – said I hadn’t done anything. I thought about it and decided, by God, he’s right. So I set out to save this town from bankruptcy. New York isn’t the only city to face bankruptcy. If you’re a small town they just kiss you off. If we go bankrupt we’ll be swallowed up by San Diego, and if these dummies who oppose the development plan think I’m not accessible, just wait till they try to get in to see Pete Wilson.

Now the mayor’s face suddenly looks childlike.

“You know, it’s like being between a rock and a hard spot. It’s like the Ma and Pa grocery stores – they’re gone. My dad was a small rancher and I’m sure he wouldn’t survive around here. He’d get bought up by somebody. I keep thinking I’ll throw it all in and go someplace else, but where would I go? Even Montrose is changing now. A person can’t escape it. Unless you want to be a hermit, and I’ll bet even the hermits are being bought out.”

So the battle line is drawn. On one side are the people like Bert Stites who believe that the only way to save the small town is to sell it, perhaps slowly at first, but ultimately to outside interests, big corporations. The people like Stites hope to organize and plan for the invasion now, in order to have a degree of control over what is built, rather than see their town turn into a haphazard conglomerate of competing giants.

On the other side of the line is a mixture of idealists, conservatives and humanists who want life to remain within human proportion. Whether this mixture can maintain a solid front is yet to be seen.

“One of them is Sid Robbins,” says Gage, “whose outlandish dream is to build a three-tiered contraption along the beachfront. The top tier would be a highway connected to the San Diego freeway system, the middle tier for overnight camping and the bottom tier for a boardwalk with boutiques and stores. Now how long can those views stay aligned with those of an environmentalist?

But the leaders of the Citizens Action Group are getting more articulate every day. They’ve hired a lawyer and have asked a state senator to reintroduce a resolution that would make each city’s development agency subject to referendum, perhaps retroactively. (During the last legislative sessions the resolution was turned back, just as it’s to be signed by the governor, because of a single typographical error.)The Coastal Commission has yet to commit itself, one way or the other. The protesters are recruiting thousands of citizens behind their banner, appealing to their fears no matter how much Stites, Ogle, and McCarty insist that eminent domain will be used sparingly and judiciously – that this ordinance is only a foot in the door. They’re getting an injunction ready if the ordinance finally passes this week, as it probably will. Some of the organizers are planning protests in the streets.

Joe Bangett, a bearded Vietnam veteran can talk long into the night about the kind of community he imagines. “We’re finally standing up for ourselves because we’re seeing the American Dream destroyed. We don’t want to end up servants to a new corporate class. We want some kind of local economy. An Indian came to one of the council meetings a few weeks ago. He turned to me and said, ‘Eh, this eminent domain. Now you know how we felt.’”

Bangett hasn’t been this excited about an issue since the Vietnam protests.

The alternative dream has yet to be fully articulated, but one thing stands out: the protesters believe deeply that the only way any of us are going to survive with any sanity in a spreading urban environment is to protect these little towns within the cities.

“What I wonder about,” says Gage a little sadly, “is democracy. The way the economic system works favoring corporate investments over the community and small businessmen, there really is only one practical option for Imperial Beach. Corporate development.”