Photo by Craig Carlson

Council meeting hall, Imperial Beach. “Those city council meetings were unbelievable. There were hundreds of screaming people.”

Late last week, the San Diego County Grand Jury nodded paternally toward the citizens of Imperial Beach, patted them on their heads like good dogs, and told them to heel. Jurors found no substance to persistent rumors of political corruption and recommended no further inquiry. Many of its substantive recommendations already had been implemented by city leaders prior to the report’s issuance on Thursday — the second grand jury inquiry into Imperial Beach in fifteen months.

Imperial Beach has the lowest tax base of any city in the county. It employs fewer people than any city in the county.

So what, according to two grand juries, is wrong with Imperial Beach? The latest report was a fraternal twin to its predecessor, released in the summer of 1987. The more recent report reiterates much of what was said in the first document —I.B. is poor, undeveloped, surrounded by parks, and politically volatile. Both grand juries assumed that changing those circumstances is desirable. While acknowledging that I.B. t4is a pleasant town with one of the few remaining underdeveloped beaches in California,” last week’s grand jury report also recommended to the citizens that they abandon their silly allegiance to private property and create a redevelopment agency — something I.B. voters already have twice rejected.

How two consecutive grand juries decided to deride a small South Bay beach town when there was no merit to any serious charge of wrongdoing against it is an interesting study. But it is not a study in criminal justice or public oversight. It is, instead, a study in politics. The grand juries’ reports ended up making political recommendations based on popular social theories, not in uncovering crime or malfeasance.

John Mahoney is more likely to cite Aristotle’s Politics than the California Government Code.

Last year the 1986-87 grand jury began the assault. It took the City of Imperial Beach into its Star Chamber and worked it over. When the grand jury finished roughing up the city, I.B. staggered out with a black eye, several gashes on its forehead, a swollen lip, and a bloody nose. The inquisitors pointed to the belittled, battle-worn

Although its assault on the character of I.B. was thorough, the grand jury was unable to deliver a death blow. In the end, the panel of citizen investigators produced a seventeen-page report that did little more than hold the city up for public ridicule. In every instance in which allegations of criminal wrongdoing were asserted, the jury concluded there was insufficient evidence to support the charge. That technicality, however, did not give the members of the grand jury pause. Even though the allegations already had been found untrue by the district attorney, the grand jury decided in its report to repeat them. Its suggestion of criminality was accomplished simultaneously with its acknowledgement that there was no factual basis for the conclusion.

What the jury found were “perceptions” of conspiracy, collusion, secret meetings, and influence peddling. Had it known more about the people of I.B., the grand jury would not have found distrust of government so irregular. The truth is, the grand jury didn’t like I.B. That prejudice was exposed in a five-page prologue to the report in which Imperial Beach was bashed for being Imperial Beach. The city has no marina. It has no land in use by heavy industry. Most of the people who live in I.B. are renters. It has the lowest tax base of any city in the county. It employs fewer people than any city in the county. It has set aside thirty-three percent of its total land area for parks and recreation, the highest of any city in the county. Since its incorporation thirty-two years ago, “no commercial structure of significant size has been built on its undeveloped beaches.”

Shame, shame, shame. The grand jury called these facts about I.B. “deficiencies,” which, it insisted, could have been corrected had the city’s voters only approved a sweeping 1985 redevelopment proposal called the Seacoast District Specific Plan. (Last week’s report called the same facts “negatives” and also recommended implementation by redevelopment of the Seacoast plan.) The city, under the auspices of a redevelopment agency, would have changed the face of a ten-block, thirty-three-acre area on either side of Seacoast Drive, the city’s main north-south thoroughfare along the beach. Among the specifics called for were construction of a high-rise landmark resort hotel on the beachfront of between 250 and 450 rooms, realignment of Seacoast Drive to make room for the mammoth hotel, a public plaza with cafés and specialty retail shops catering to tourists; and a series of mixed commercial/residential buildings featuring expensive condos on top and artsy-fartsy little shops below. The plan also provided for a beachfront park, bikeways, and boardwalks — all suitable for showing off the latest in fashionable beachwear.

This massive social engineering, according to the grand jury, was a good idea, regardless of the foolish vote of the people. The transformation of I.B.’s beachfront from cheap and ordinary to expensive and elegant would generate new revenue by increasing the city’s tax base. But the grand jury took little notice of the biggest impediment to redevelopment: the people already living on the beach.

The city’s own planning consultants recognized the problem from the outset. “Multiple-family and single-family uses are scattered throughout the area and comprise over half of the developable land,” they noted in an early draft. “Except for recently constructed residential condominium projects, the area is typified by 1940s and 1950s construction and is maintained in varying degrees of quality. No recent commercial construction has occurred, and the image of the area, as well as its location, have not been conducive to commercial development. However, its location at the beach and natural environmental amenities offer great potential for tourist commercial development.” All they needed to do was get their hands on the land.

If the grand jury was correct, it was the people of I.B. who failed their government and who voted against their own self-interest. Behind it all, hinted the grand jury, were two beachfront landowners, one who simply did not want his living room converted into a hotel lobby and the other who had his own plans for an eighty-six-room motel at the other end of the beach. These landowners supposedly whipped the tiny electorate into a frenzy of fear over the issue of eminent domain, the legal theory that empowers government to confiscate private property “for just compensation” and put it to better use. The hidden agenda, suggested the grand jury, was the bankrolling of political campaigns toward election of a new city council majority that would let these landowners have their way with the beachfront.

In fact, said the grand jury’s report, eminent domain helps redevelopment agencies run smoothly. Opponents of redevelopment, with ulterior motives, had long used the issue as “a scare tactic” by which to “frighten voters,” the panel concluded. The jury apparently was referring to an odd consistency in an otherwise inconsistent municipal voting record — the voters of Imperial Beach have twice rejected redevelopment in a ten-year period.

The grand jury made much of the feet that the planning that went into the redevelopment proposal took place over three years, cost I.B. taxpayers more than half a million dollars, involved fourteen different consulting firms, and included scores of public workshops in which hundreds of I.B. residents participated. Said the grand jury: “The city and the community worked hand-in-hand.” The Seacoast District Specific Plan was, as far as the grand jury was concerned, a model of responsible government. But what the grand jury ignored in its assessment was crucial: there was a difference between citizen contribution and the final plan. The grand jury was correct to note the high degree of public participation in the process, but it failed to check the process for substance.

For example, most workshop participants did not object to a hotel, but they wanted it to be “family-oriented” and designed in such a way that it would not block views of the beach, which would be a pretty neat trick for a 450-room high-rise. They wanted to preserve the city’s youth hostel. They wanted an RV park. They wanted a small budget hotel somewhere on the beach. They wanted a drug store, a dry cleaner, a laundry, a barbershop, a movie theater, a bait shop, a fishing area, a boat-launching facility, and a lot of open space.

A March 1984 news account of one community workshop held in conjunction with development of the Seacoast plan noted that workshop participants “fevered minimal development... and urged the [preservation] of open space along the beach.” The same month, consultant Jim Bums reported to the city that participants expressed “concern that plant materials and trees become very important parts of the environment, much more than they are at present. If an architectural image has yet to emerge, a yearning for a greatly enhanced natural environment certainly has.”

The fact is that the redevelopment plan upset voters for more reasons than just eminent domain. As much as the grand jury may have favored the gentrification of I.B.’s ocean front, many of the people who lived there opposed it. It is clear that the final plan failed to incorporate the thrust of the ideas put forward by residents during the highly touted workshops. What is not clear is whether the fifty-five percent of I.B. voters who rejected establishment of a redevelopment agency did so because they had visions of a government wrecking ball crashing into their homes.

The grand jury refused to consider the possibility of legitimate philosophical objections to eminent domain, adopting instead the conventional wisdom that the condemnation power is a desirable tool of government in a world in which everyone wants to live in places like Marina del Rey. It could only have made this mistake by ignoring the demographics of I.B. It apparently never occurred to grand jury members that the rejection of redevelopment was an expression of the popular will in a city that is mainly populated not by well-paid urban professionals but by sailors and construction workers, waitresses and nurses’ aides.

Of the 15,449 persons over eighteen counted in the last census as living in I.B., nearly thirty percent had not completed high school. Fewer than seven percent had college degrees. The median household income reported in the 1980 Census reflects the typical station in life of I.B. residents. It was just under $13,000 — and that was in a population pool in which nearly half of the households had two working members. In a city of 22,689 (the population has since swelled to 25,138), just 2000 persons reported yearly incomes of more than $20,000. Only sixteen had incomes of more than $75,000 a year. Of the entire population, reported the 1980 census, nearly seventeen percent of the residents of I.B. survived on incomes that were below the federal poverty level.

I.B. is also politically aberrant, when compared to most other San Diego County cities. The registrar of voters reports that as of August 2, nearly forty-three percent of I.B.’s voters were registered Democrats, about three percentage points higher than Republicans. I.B.’s electorate — the same one the grand jury said was spooked into saying no to redevelopment — voted with a majority of Americans in the last three presidential elections.

Had the Seacoast Plan become a reality, I.B. would have altered course from its long history as the rara avis among Southern California beach towns. Once known as South San Diego Beach, the area changed names in the late 1800s, when a real-estate speculator bought a large piece of property for subdivision into a resort area for residents of the Imperial Valley, the parched inhabitants of El Centro and Brawley, Calexico, and Plaster City. The first pier built in I.B., erected in 1909, was designed to generate electricity from ocean waves via a contraption at its end known as the Edwards Wave Motor. It didn’t work and was subsequently dismantled. About the same time, I.B. decided it wanted a trolley — but not the ugly, overhead, electrical lines required to power one. Instead, the town installed a battery-powered trolley car, which was in service for about six years. The oddball residents of I.B. didn’t get around to creating their own city until 1956, and then only after excising Nestor from their plans. Nestor and Palm City, now parts of the city of San Diego, didn’t want to be part of the new city of Imperial Beach, and I.B. ended up squeezed into a 4.4-square-mile area, surrounded by other cities on three sides and the Pacific Ocean to its west.

Worried about the possibility of high-density development in the form of high-rise construction, the city has banned erection of any structure more than three stories tall.

When people who live on or near the beach today are asked about redevelopment, it is not eminent domain they talk about. They talk instead about redevelopment as an attempt to destroy a way of life. “It wouldn’t fit in with the atmosphere here,” says Jan Hopkins, co-owner of a tiny restaurant on Seacoast Drive called My Little Café. “It would change the atmosphere entirely, and that’s the reason we all live down here because of the atmosphere. Changing it would make it like every other beach area in Southern California, and we don’t want it. What they wanted to do was run the people who live here now out. Well, a lot of people have lived here all their lives, and they love it here the way it is. I.B. is the last little beach town in Southern California. People here feel real free to be the way they are, even some who just can’t quite get the hang of society.”

The grand jury’s 1987 report on I.B. might just as well have been written by the defeated proponents of redevelopment, who were stung by their repudiation at the polls. It was a last-ditch effort to discredit the opposition and regain power. Among the instigators of the investigation was a distressed, pro-redevelopment councilman who later launched an ill-fated recall attempt against the new, anti-redevelopment majority elected in 1986. Another figure who approached the grand jury was a city official who had been canned by the new majority after the new regime took power. These two men theorized that those who opposed redevelopment were backed by the two property owners in exchange for promises that once redevelopment was out of the way, the property owners could substitute their own development plans and thereby reap great financial rewards. The grand jury erred yet again by embracing that theory. It has been nearly three years since the redevelopment plan was rejected, and neither man has built so much as a new storage shed. The one who wanted to build the small hotel has since purchased an existing beachfront motel and begun refurbishing it.

Tania Wisbar: “I am very sorry I got involved. It has been emotionally and psychologically destructive."

Photo by Craig Carlson

Tania Wisbar, editor of the monthly Imperial Beach Times, remembers the redevelopment battle with clear distaste. Although she had dabbled in I.B. politics earlier, the fight over the future of the city’s beachfront reduced her to permanent cynicism. Halting redevelopment was the impetus for founding the newspaper and the political issue that got her husband, John Mahoney, elected to the city council in 1986.

Wisbar and Mahoney first met in 1978 during a four-week summer course at UCSD. Mahoney, then vice president for academic affairs at William Paterson College, a state-supported school in New Jersey, was teaching a section of “The History of Social and Educational Change.” Wisbar owned and operated a Los Angeles-based school for the mentally retarded and was taking the course in conjunction with her career. Mahoney and Wisbar, both of whom were married to other people at the time, met that summer at UCSD. There ensued a dizzying romance. It was that love affair that first brought Mahoney and Wisbar to I.B.

Aware of the developing love affair, a friend offered the couple use of a modest beachfront apartment in I.B. while out of town for a week. “I said, ‘Where in the world is Imperial Beach?’ ” says Wisbar. “And she said, ‘Oh, you’ll just love it. It’s a really funky little place.’ ”

When the summer course was over, Mahoney flew back to New Jersey to resume his administrative job at the college. But he regularly flew back and forth between Newark and Los Angeles to be with Wisbar. Finally, he invited her to New Jersey. “It was dreadful,” she recalls. “I told him, ‘You can have New Jersey, or you can have me in California, but I’m not going to live here.” Faced with that ultimatum, Mahoney resigned his college post and moved to Los Angeles.

While divorce actions were pending, the couple decided they needed a weekend sanctuary. “I said, ‘Remember that little weird place called Imperial Beach?’ ” says Wisbar. “ ‘Let’s go back down there.’ ” By 1980 the couple had taken up regular residence in I.B. When Wisbar decided to open up a residential school for fourteen developmentally disabled adults in Ramona in 1982, the couple decided to make the move to I.B. permanent. “We were in love, and that would probably make any place look nice,” says Wisbar of her first impressions of I.B. “One thing that was very striking was that nobody ever bothered you. You could be absolutely yourself. But of course, we junked the whole thing up by getting involved with the city.”

Prior to meeting Mahoney, Wisbar, forty-eight, made a career in education of her own. She received a degree in theater from Mills College in Oakland, then later a master’s in speech pathology from Cal State Northridge. She holds a Ph.D. in education from Walden College, which she describes as a nontraditional experimental school not associated with any undergraduate institution. In addition to the Ramona school, Wisbar today also owns a day clinic located in East Los Angeles devoted to the education of the retarded. She and Mahoney married in 1980.

Wisbar says the couple made the move to I.B. to complete a series of changes that had just occurred in their lives. It was in I.B. where they planned to reflect and to write. Among other things, she says, Mahoney writes poetry and she writes plays and film scripts. The couple’s involvement in I.B. politics was completely unplanned — and almost a coincidence. It occurred in 1982 when their landlady, who was also a dispatcher for the I.B. police department, telephoned to ask for help. The city was considering abolition of the police department. Would Mahoney be a spokesman for the side that wanted to keep the police?

“We were too new to see there was a long-standing dislike for the police department,” says Wisbar. “And we still don’t know if they were valid complaints.” Nonetheless, Mahoney did become a spokesman for keeping the police department, campaigning around the city, speaking to civic clubs, and aligning himself with a group called the

Committee of 300, a business group that gathered signatures for a petition to force the issue onto the ballot. That initiative drive was successful, even though it required citizens to agree to impose a new tax on themselves. However, after the election, opponents claimed it failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority required for the adoption of new taxes, and the taxing measure died on the vine. A short time later, the city signed a contract with the sheriffs department for police protection.

That first brush with the volatile world of I.B. politics should I have served as a warning to Wisbar of what was to come, but it did not. She remembers her first impressions of political life in Imperial Beach. “Those city council meetings were unbelievable,” she says. “I had never seen anything like it. There were hundreds of screaming people.”

That was in March of 1982. The city, like many similarly situated small towns, was faltering under the financial pressures created by the adoption in 1978 of Proposition 13, which reduced property-tax revenues statewide. Fearing bankruptcy, municipal leaders decided to cut city staff drastically, reducing the town’s payroll from seventy-nine to twenty-eight in a space of months. Not only was the police department eliminated, the city also contracted out other services, such as garbage collection, street upkeep, and landscape maintenance. Mahoney today believes those measures were unnecessary, arguing that the cost of the contracts is about the same as the cost of maintaining a city-run staff. Since 1982, I.B.’s leaders have added back twenty-one positions, and tentative consideration is being given to the re-establishment of the I.B.P.D.

It was a series of repeated warnings of imminent municipal insolvency, however, that may have been the real tactic used to frighten citizens in the redevelopment battle. Residents were told that the only way to save the city was to generate new revenue via tax-increment financing, the redevelopment economic fix. Voters, however, had been hearing such warnings for years. “They’ve been broke ever since I’ve lived here,” says one longtime resident. “That was nothing new.”

As the campaign to save the city’s financial fanny through redevelopment gained impetus in 1983-1984, Wisbar and Mahoney were consumed by the vortex of I.B. politics. They had followed development of the Seacoast District Specific Plan carefully, attending several of the workshops. Wisbar says the entire procedure was a sham. “We have all been through ‘process,’ ” she says. “We know what ‘process’ is.’’ It is true, she says, that planners had citizens draw dreams of a future I.B. beachfront on butcher paper, after showing them slides of the Taj Mahal and gardens in Spain. But she says there was never any intention of actually designing a plan based on citizen participation. The citizens of I.B., claims Wisbar, were being “processed” to approve a plan already thought out in the minds of the planners.

In April of 1985, the city council posted an agenda that included approval of a redevelopment agency for implementation of the Seacoast District Specific Plan. “Well, that did it, as far as the establishment of a newspaper,” says Wisbar. She and Mahoney had considered publishing a local paper two years earlier, but the illness and subsequent death of her mother disrupted the plan. “The other shoe dropped. We knew exactly what the other newspapers were going to do, and they subsequently did it. They endorsed the plan. They didn’t see any problems with eminent domain. But they saw an awful lot of problems with the fact that people in Imperial Beach didn’t know how to think. Obviously, if you could think, you could see how wonderful all of this was going to be for you. Don’t you want to be upscale? Don’t you want to look like Del Mar?”

The first issue of the Imperial Beach Times appeared the same month. It was an eight-page tabloid financed entirely out of the couple’s own pockets, with no outside advertising. Among the stories were accounts of an April 23, 1985 public hearing regarding establishment of the redevelopment agency, noting that the city council refused to allow opponents to broach the subject of eminent domain. “With rare exception,” said the Times, “almost all those who had filed earlier to address the council spoke against the establishment of a redevelopment agency and in favor of property owners’ rights to either stay in their own homes or build on their own properties.” There was also a lengthy article extolling the improvements made to a small, existing beachfront hotel; a restaurant review; a brief on an upcoming dance sponsored by the Imperial Beach Women’s Club; and a story about the history of the Imperial Beach Community Clinic. Wisbar says that in the ensuing months, the newspaper sometimes became quite strident about the redevelopment issue.

“I look back at some of that, and I'm not very proud of it,” she admits.

In November of 1986, Mahoney, who had run unsuccessfully in 1984, again sought a seat on the city council. The campaign broke down along predictable lines: those who favored redevelopment and those who opposed it. The Times, whose publisher at the time was Mahoney, endorsed him and a slate of two other candidates — one for mayor and one for city council. The trio was also backed by beachfront landowners opposed to eminent domain. Each of the three candidates endorsed by the Times also pledged never to use the city’s power of condemnation. It was that connection — people opposed to eminent domain supporting candidates opposed to eminent domain — that caused the grand jury to suggest the possibility of wrongdoing.

The trio was elected, forming an anti-redevelopment majority on the city council. The new regime moved swiftly. It fired the city attorney within three months. The planning director lost his job within a year, taking with him the entire city planning staff, which resigned. In March of 1988, the finance director was dismissed. The city manager was fired three months later. While the firings were in progress, a fourth anti-eminent domain councilman was elected, also with the backing of beachfront property owners. The council halted work associated with implementation of the Seacoast District Specific Plan, turning its attention instead to rebuilding the municipal pier, which had been destroyed in 1983 winter storms. The pier had never been part of the redevelopment plans, critics claim, because guests in a $200-a- night resort hotel might object to fish heads washing ashore from fishing off the pier.

Wisbar says the political mud-slinging that began after the November 1986 election (of which the grand jury probe was a part) transmuted hope to despair. “When John was elected, everything was fine for about two weeks,” she says.

“And then it was over. Whatever the notion was of accomplishing goals or actually being of service to the community, two weeks later, it was all over. The idea was that he was going to sacrifice the whole city to one man who owned property on the beach.”

Within four months of Mahoney’s election, says Wisbar, an attempt was launched to recall him, but it never got off the ground (Mahoney opponents were unable to generate sufficient public support for the idea, mainly because people were tired of fighting and worried about the city’s tarnished image). There followed an investigation by the district attorney, which cleared him and his newly elected colleagues of criminal wrongdoing, and the grand jury’s investigation, which found insufficient evidence to support charges of criminal misconduct. He has been beset by a string of allegations from those who wanted redevelopment — that he improperly charged a vacation to the taxpayers, that he has violated city and coastal commission codes in improving his beachfront home, that he is linked to the Mafia. All of the accusations, says Wisbar, are part of the game of I B. politics, a game she says she is ready to quit when Mahoney’s term expires in 1990. “Will he run again?” she asks. “Maybe — maybe if he’s married to somebody else, somebody who thinks all of this is real humorous.” Wisbar says her experience with I.B. politics has left her full of regret. “I am very sorry [I got involved],” she says. “It has been emotionally and psychologically destructive. What do you want me to say, that I’m ready to pack my bags? Well, I think about that quite often. I think I feel more isolated than I ever have in my lifetime. And that’s the sad, final product of my involvement.”

John Mahoney is as unlikely an elected official as you will find anywhere in San Diego County. He is more likely to cite Aristotle’s Politics than the California Government Code when explaining his positions. He believes that police officers should be required to read Dante as part of their law-enforcement training. (It would humanize them.) He is fascinated by Dutch theologians and, although divorced and a longtime church radical, still considers himself a good Catholic.

The son of a Michigan newspaper publisher, Mahoney, fifty-eight, spent eight years studying for the priesthood at a Detroit seminary. He left the seminary, he says, because “I had other lives to live.” Ultimately, he obtained a Ph.D. in medieval studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then began a long career in college teaching and administration, primarily at Jesuit institutions.

That career put him in the middle of the July 1967 Detroit riots, the campus radicalism of the Vietnam War era, and the great Catholic turmoil following the church modernization ordered by the Vatican Council. At the time, Mahoney was dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Detroit.

His experience there, he says, prepared him for Imperial Beach politics. “What I thought I was doing was reforming religion ” he says. “But I got brickbatted from every which way. There was an argument going on all the time.... I became used to having things said about me in print and in public. So while the substance now may be a little bit different, I’m used to it. I don’t really get riled very much.”

That preparation, plus a personal political philosophy that recognizes the public’s “right to harass,” makes Mahoney’s turbulent political life bearable, he claims. “It really bothers me most because it bothers Tania. But I swear, I go home and make myself a gin and tonic at night and forget it ’til the next day.”

Despite the constant upheavals and recriminations he has experienced because of his public life, Mahoney calls Imperial Beach “a grand place,” grand, he says, because of its culture and turbulent politics. “It’s a town ready for a town meeting if the matter calls for it,” he says. “It welcomes eccentrics. It is a comfort to people who don’t have very much but don’t feel discriminated against or out of place. It has an absence of social pretense. It has zero pretenses.” The series of firings that occurred when the new majority took power in 1986 was not a consequence of any political conspiracy, he says. Instead, it was a house-cleaning that had been long overdue. “What we inherited was a rotten staff,” says Mahoney. “The city attorney was no good. We had backed up litigation, and our legal problems were legendary. There were lawsuits which were not answered, settlements which were not accepted, initiations which were not made. The planning director was marching to a different drum. He was pro-redevelopment, and he just wouldn't change his mind. He tried to throw fork balls right by us before we knew where the bathrooms were.” The city manager, whose authority had been undermined by bickering department heads during the redevelopment conundrum, was given plenty of time “to move things forward after being freed of [those] political pressures," says Mahoney.

When the city manager proved unable to put the city on the course directed by the new council majority, he was canned. The finance director was fired, says Mahoney, for making risky investments with city money. During the former finance director’s tenure, the City of Imperial Beach lost $195,000 and stands to lose another $100,000 if it loses pending court battles over the matter.

Mahoney says his willingness to explore alternative development plans (long before he was elected to the city council) with beachfront property owners resulted in an undeserved firestorm of criticism and to false allegations of influence peddling. The truth, he says, is that his philosophy of government demands that all voices be heard. “The ultimate liberal position in United States history is primitive capitalism," he says. “You have to listen to all people — to let them into the process."

“Getting people into the process" is a political tradition in Imperial Beach, which helps explain its turbulent political life. The people of I.B. do not submit easily to the yoke of authority. Last year when sheriffs deputies were ticketing people for walking their dogs on the Coronado side of the imaginary line that separates the I.B. oceanfront from the Coronado ocean front, townspeople revolted, spontaneously organizing under the banner of “Don’t Mess With My Dog!”

It was Coronado, not I.B., that had the anti-dog ordinance. The deputies were paid to serve and protect the people of I.B., not enforce Coronado laws. Twenty angry constituents reacted by packing the city council chambers with spaniels and poodles, shepherds and terriers, Chihuahuas and collies. The five members of the council got the message. They instructed the city manager to tell the sheriffs department to knock it off.

In late July, the sheriffs vice squad raided Palm Avenue Books, a twenty-four-hour adult book store and sex-film arcade. Two customers were arrested for lewd conduct, and a store clerk was cited for operating a movie arcade without a permit. But when the city attorney told the council last month that the city would be a litigant in any ensuing court battles over the bookstore bust, the council decided to drop the charges against the store. The city had not directed the sheriffs department to conduct the raid. The city had fought and lost a similar 1982 battle with the same store, and the city attorney advised council members that there were tough First Amendment issues at stake. “It always frightens me how easily we can lapse into potential fascism,’’ says Mahoney of the decision, noting the importance of distinguishing morality from ethics. “I don’t like the dirty bookstore either, but I’m not willing to be a fascist about it.” Nor were his colleagues on the council.

Over Labor Day weekend, when hair-cracking Santa Ana winds drove temperatures even at the beach above 100 degrees, sheriff s deputies attempted to arrest two men for drinking alcohol on a public street just off the beach. (It is legal to drink on the beach in I.B., except between 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m.) The deputies quickly found themselves surrounded by an angry mob of about 200 people protesting the arrests. The crowd hurled bottles and cans at the deputies and shouted obscenities. The explosion of public outrage at the agents of social control was quelled only when reinforcements from the San Diego Police Department and the California Highway Patrol responded to radio calls for help.

But the city’s reputation as a roughneck, biker town is no longer deserved. Its last homicide was two years ago. The majority of crimes on the police blotter are burglaries and auto thefts, not rapes and murders. A sheriff’s department summary of I.B. crime for July and August notes a total of forty-four felony arrests. Vice squad undercover checks of nine bars turned up no evidence of criminal activity. Of the four drug busts in the city over those sixty days, the most serious turned up thirty grams of methamphetamine and $1215 in cash.

The days of the bikers have long passed. There is still one bar popular with biker types, but rarely are there ever more than three or four motorcycles parked out front at a time. Residents, aware of the reputation, joke about it. They discuss whether the tattoo count is up or down on the beach this summer.

I.B. is an untidy but peaceful community. Its residential streets may not be as well lighted as elsewhere in the county, and the cars parked in the front yards of its old homes built on small lots may be more often protected by primer paint than a car cover, but the city is comfortable and spacious. There may be no marina, but there is a vast estuary offering sanctuary to endangered species and a panoramic view of Tijuana, three miles to the south. Chances are you won’t find a restaurant that comes highly recommended by a food critic. But you will find bartenders who relieve your indigestion by massaging your hand and waitresses who specialize in therapeutic massage and metaphysics. And dining out does not mean dressing up. You can enjoy your meal in shorts, a T-shirt, and flip-flops. I.B. is an odd little living room of a town, a place to come home to and relax. It is Budweiser and beer belly, as opposed to white wine and svelte.

And it is youthful, with a median age of twenty-four.

“I have lived here for fifteen years,” says Corky, a waiter at My Little Cafe.' “When people ask me where I am from and I tell them, ‘Imperial Beach,’ they say, ‘I.B.? I.B.? Ooooh.’ They call it Venereal Beach, Biker Beach. Those people just can’t see the beauty here, and if they don’t want to come here, then I say good.”