Caruso
The Backstory
A billionaire shopping mall developer based in Los Angeles,
Rick Caruso planned to build a luxury retail center on land bordering
Carlsbad’s Agua Hedionda Lagoon, one of the city’s three scenic coastal inlets.
The undeveloped land was home to a sprawling strawberry field leased by a local
farmer who also ran a popular roadside stand selling strawberries and sweet
corn to tourists and residents. Many locals believed the land was protected,
destined to remain in its rustic state.
Before August of 2015, only Carlsbad City Council members
knew of Caruso’s plans. He had privately lobbied them and provided VIP tours of
his upscale developments in Southern California. These secretive meetings
violated California’s strict open-meeting laws, which require city council
deliberations to be conducted in public.
When Caruso unveiled his proposal, he expected widespread
support. Instead, the community was divided. While some welcomed the idea of
upscale development, many feared it would destroy one of Carlsbad’s great
natural treasures. The City Council approved the plan within weeks of the
announcement. Making matters worse, the approval bypassed the normal approval
process for development projects. The approval sparked outrage. The Buena Vista
meeting, held the first Saturday after the announcement, launched the Let
the People Vote initiative to force the city to schedule a voter referendum
on the project.
The successful Let the People Vote initiative resulted in a
referendum election called Measure A held in February 2016. The election
overturned the Council’s decision. Voters in Carlsbad overruled the City
Council and denied Caruso the right to build the project. It was close, fifty
two percent of the voters voted against the project.
For convenience, I will often purposely refer to the two
projects together as the "the Measure A fight."
The Backlash
Carlsbad City Council meetings had long been quiet, polite
affairs. Collegiality was the norm, not the exception. This civility was the
product of decades of Republican control. Only rarely in Carlsbad’s history had
even a single Democrat served on the Council. With a few notable exceptions, it
was a body comprised of men—most of them members of the same Rotary lunch
club. They were business leaders and
local patriarchs. They were city fathers in a very literal sense.
Before Caruso, even controversial decisions stirred little
public emotion. Aside from the occasional letter to the editor in the local
newspaper, Carlsbad politics avoided protest culture altogether. Council
meetings were procedural, lightly attended, and reliably unremarkable.
That changed almost overnight.
Caruso’s project—and the Council’s rush to approve
it—transformed those quiet meetings into flashpoints of outrage. Attendance
soared. For the first time, folding chairs and outdoor monitors were set up in
the courtyard outside the council chamber to accommodate overflow crowds.
Inside, the air was often thick with tension.
Angry voters lined up to speak during the public comment
periods—even at meetings where the project wasn’t on the agenda. Measure A
activists helped drive turnout and keep public anger at a boil. Speaker after
speaker launched personal attacks on Council members, including Mayor Matt
Hall, the project’s most vocal proponent.
The accusations were sometimes wild. Hall was repeatedly
accused—without evidence—of having an illegal and corrupt relationship with
Caruso. And while Caruso himself almost never attended, he became the symbolic
villain of every meeting. He was considered a carpetbagger from Los Angeles who
wanted to transform Carlsbad from a low-key beach town into a resort playground
of hotels and shops most residents couldn’t afford.
The old rules of decorum began to fall apart. For the first
time in living memory, Carlsbad politics became theater—and the City Council
chamber, a stage.
The Meltdown
The wildest City Council meeting came just days after the
defeat of Measure A.
Everyone was still raw. Emotions hadn’t cooled, but the
momentum was shifting. The packed City Council chamber had the air of a
courtroom at the end of a trial no one had won.
Mayor Hall tried to maintain control, but the room had
developed its own rules. He warned the crowd repeatedly not to clap during or
after public comments. That only encouraged the anti-Caruso crowd, who began
snapping their fingers instead — a quieter defiance that pissed the mayor off.
At one point, overwhelmed by the noise and the tension, Hall called a recess
and walked off the dais, leaving the Council meeting to sit in awkward silence
for five full minutes.
The Council meeting lasted for hours. There were the usual
angry speeches, the trembling voices, constant distracting comments yelled from
the audience. And then, near the end, something strange happened.
Matt Hall gave a sullen soliloquy ending with, "If
apologizing 1000 times would heal Carlsbad I would do it."
Hienrich, a vocal Measure A volunteer who taught at a local
high school, had just approached the podium, called as the next public speaker.
Before being recognized by Hall, he leaned into the microphone and said,
"But you didn't actually apologize."
After some hoots and more finger snapping and a brief
stunned silence, Hall apologized. In fact, he uttered "I apologize"
three times.
The high school teacher said, “Okay” amid scattered
applause.
Someone yelled something about a town hall. But the energy
had shifted. It no longer felt like a movement. It felt like a curtain call.
By the next meeting, the folding chairs were gone. No
overflow crowd. No finger snapping. Only a few scattered regulars and the City
Council's own custom Rules of Order remained.
The video of the meeting had disappeared from the Carlsbad
City Council Web page.
For a while, it seemed the drama had left the building. At
least, until it was brought back by a scandal involving a Carlsbad City Council
incumbent running for reelection and the Carlsbad Police Department.
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