This sparsely populated stretch of the California coast has a particular beauty, more subtle than the precipitous grandeur of Big Sur farther north. Fall rains have coaxed green from the rolling hills, which cascade inland like swells of a rising tide. Vistas of open land, sea, or sky unfold in all directions. This rare blend of splendor and solitude, McConnell says, is what induced her and her husband to ditch Los Angeles about five years ago and move to the small coastal town of Cambria several miles south of the point.
The same panorama beckoned William Randolph Hearst earlier in the century, when he chose a hill overlooking San Simeon to build his famed castle, an opulent testament to the late publishing magnate's wealth and power. The castle is barely visible from Highway 1, peering down from its distant, tree-lined perch. But it's been an object of awe since Orson Welles made the movie Citizen Kane, immortalizing not just Hearst's megalomania, but also the obscenely extravagant enclave of privilege Hearst imported to this lonely stretch of unspoiled coast.
Now war has come to Xanadu, and the battleground surrounds McConnell as she stands at the point, her back to the trees.
Although the castle was donated to the state for use as a park after Hearst's death, the New York-based Hearst Corp. still owns San Simeon Point, and most everything around it. Some 77,000 acres of rolling hills and coastline -- including about 20 miles of oceanfront -- comprise the Hearst Ranch, and that's just what is left of the even larger holdings amassed by William Randolph's father in the 1800s.
The ranch has remained largely untouched since Hearst died 46 years ago, save for the cattle grazing and the tourists lining up to ride buses to the castle.
Area ranchers, townsfolk, and environmentalists consider the ranch an anchor for one of the last, vast unspoiled stretches of the state's coastline, a place where elephant seals sun on the rocks, monarch butterflies tarry during their annual migrations, and threatened strains of trout and frogs inhabit the streams.
But Hearst Corp. executives and family heirs think the land is due for some dressing up. On the ocean side of Highway 1, near the bluffs overlooking the sea, they envision a five-star hotel and a golf course worthy of professional tournament play. A quaint little inn will be tucked down by the water, right next to San Simeon Point. Farther inland, on the east side of the highway, they're thinking of putting another hotel, some cabins, stables, and horse trails. There will also have to be restaurants, campgrounds, and souvenir shops, plus housing for the workers who will be needed to staff the place.
Altogether, the "Hearst Ranch Resorts" would consume only a fraction of the company's extensive land holdings. But the idea has spawned the most intense battle in years over the future of California's cherished coastline.
The multibillion-dollar, privately held media company -- which owns television stations, cable channels, magazines, and newspapers, including the San Francisco Examiner -- is determined to get into the resort business. And Hearst appears willing to spend what it takes and sue whom it must to get the dirt flying.
Set against the company is a confederation of ranchers, local activists, and environmental groups who argue that the Hearst proposal flies in the face of state laws and regulations designed to protect the coast. If built on the scale Hearst is proposing, they say, the resort will wipe out wildlife habitat, strain already scarce water supplies, and overwhelm the schools, roads, and police and fire services in the rural area.
Perhaps worse, they say, one large project such as Hearst's will act like a dynamite charge -- blowing local land prices sky high in a flurry of speculation. Eventually, they fear, ranchers will be priced off the land and the area will cease to be cattle country. "If Hearst wins, it's going to be a field day for developers," says Mark Massara, a San Francisco attorney who monitors the coast for the national office of the Sierra Club. A Hearst victory, Massara says, would mark a "complete betrayal" of the coastal protections that California voters demanded when they approved Proposition 20 in 1972.
The ballot initiative reflected voters' belief that the California coastline should be managed as a whole, not carved up piecemeal into tourist traps, resorts, and private playgrounds for wealthy landowners. Private property rights of coastal landowners are not absolute, and under California law must be balanced against preservation of a unique public resource.
The California Coastal Commission was created to oversee development along the shoreline. Before it allows construction, the commission is supposed to weigh a developer's wishes against the public's interests. Shoreline must remain open to the public. Sensitive wildlife habitats must be protected. Scenic beauty must be maintained, and farmers and ranchers should not be driven from their land. Coastal regulations specifically require that new projects be built close to existing development, prohibiting developers from "leapfrogging" hotels and buildings out into untouched sections of coastline.
The rules, in short, are supposed to prevent developers from picking a scenic stretch of coast, revving up the bulldozers, and building anything they want. Which is exactly what opponents say Hearst is trying to do.
Hearst has already won approval for its plan from the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors, but only after a lawsuit, and a controversial election in which a pro-Hearst candidate received thousands of dollars in contributions from developers -- including two members of the Hearst family -- in his successful bid to oust a longtime incumbent who opposed the plan.
The matter has now passed to the Coastal Commission, which is considering the master land-use plan already approved by the county supervisors. Thousands of coastal residents and environmental activists are expected to turn out for a mid-January public hearing that the commission has scheduled in San Luis Obispo.
But the battle has been fully engaged for months. Hearst is flooding San Luis Obispo County with four-color brochures and promotional videotapes touting the riches sure to flow for all if the resort is built, and underscoring its corporate commitment to environmental responsibility. The company has sent county voters a mass mailing containing not one, but two, postage-paid postcards pre-printed with statements of support for the project. Citizens are being asked to sign the cards and mail them back to a San Luis Obispo law office that Hearst is using as its local beachhead during the campaign.
Hearst is buying chunks of time on San Luis Obispo cable channels, and plans soon to begin airing a half-hour special extolling the virtues of Hearst and its resort plan.
Certain of being outspent, resort opponents have banded together into a group calling itself the North Coast Alliance, and have put out a call for help from environmental organizations across the country. The national Sierra Club has jumped into the fray, and San Francisco-based Patagonia is making its stores available for evening slide shows to enlist opposition to the plan. Environmental groups from across California and the nation have issued alerts to their members, urging them to write letters to the commission weighing in on the issue.
In San Luis Obispo County, local activists are setting up card tables at farmers markets to pass out fliers, and waging their battle one phone call at a time.
"The stakes are very high, and this is a really important battle," says Pat Veesart, chairman of the Sierra Club's Santa Lucia chapter. "It's hard for us to know what Hearst is really doing [since] they're a private company and they don't have to disclose anything about themselves."
To date, Veesart says, the Alliance has raised about $12,000 to fund its campaign against the resort. "I would suspect Hearst spent more than that on their first mailing," he says.
Jay Rockey, one of the Los Angeles attorneys representing Hearst during the development fight, says he's unsure how much money the company is spending. But Rockey argues that the giant Hearst Corp. is the one being picked on, forced to defend itself against a gaggle of overzealous, misguided environmentalists who do not appreciate the company's commitment to protect the coastline.
"We have been reluctant to become engaged in this battle of public opinion, but we've been drawn into it because of the gross misrepresentations of fact that Mark Massara, the Sierra Club, and a small band of local antagonists have been spreading," Rockey says. "The opposition has to lie and has to misrepresent the facts, or else they wouldn't have any support.
"Now that they've spread so much misinformation around the county, we have to get involved," Rockey says. "It's very unfortunate they feel they have to lie to get support."
By his reading of the coastal regulations, Rockey says, the Hearst plan is in full compliance with the law, both spirit and letter. "It is consistent with the Coastal Act," he says. "The purpose of the Coastal Act is to bring people to the coast, not to prevent development."
Seated around Betty Fiscalini's kitchen table are seven of the "liars" Jay Rockey is incensed about, a cross section of the North Coast Alliance including ranchers, coastal residents, and environmental activists. Among the group are Kat McConnell, a former contract screenwriter who has abandoned her career to battle Hearst, and Bill Allen, a quiet man in a crisp shirt and bluejeans who has been named president of the Alliance.
Pushing aside a plate of Oreos and chocolate chip cookies, they spread out maps and charts showing what Hearst is planning just a few miles up the coast from the Fiscalini ranch.
They don't like what they see. Altogether, Hearst is proposing 650 hotel rooms, the golf course, stables, stores, restaurants, and campgrounds scattered about four different locations on both sides of Highway 1. The idea is to construct a "destination" resort, a place where tourists and visitors will stop, stay for a night or two, play golf, and spend money, instead of just spending the day at Hearst Castle and then leaving the area.
If built, the resort will need anywhere from 600 to 1,000 employees to keep it operating, depending on the season. Those people will need to be housed. They will need groceries, doctors, and social services. Their kids will need to go to school. Only about 200 people now live in San Simeon Acres, a strip of modest hotels along the highway that is the closest thing to a town near the ranch. A few miles farther south, the town of Cambria has only about 5,600 residents.
The Hearst resort plan, its foes say, is just too big for the area, and it will be plopped down in the middle of the ranch, far from any existing development. It is exactly the kind of project that the state's coastal preservation act is supposed to prevent, they say.
Betty Fiscalini's husband, Louis, was born on the family ranch 77 years ago. His forebears started buying land in the area in 1873, and the Fiscalinis have been here, raising cattle, ever since. "This is mostly family-owned farms and ranches," says Betty's son, David Fiscalini. Coastal laws, he says, are supposed to protect agricultural land, not make it disappear.
Hearst says in its literature that only a small portion of the ranch will be removed from agriculture. The rest will remain a working cattle operation, and Hearst is promising that it will remain so forever on. There will be no other resorts in the future.
But David Fiscalini and Jon Pedotti, another local rancher, say that argument misses the point. One development like Hearst Ranch Resorts will surely entice other developers to scout out land in the area, hoping they can piggyback on Hearst's success. Already, the ranchers say, some parcels in the area have been selling for as much as $1,500 an acre. "You'll never pay for that in 30 years if you keep the land in agriculture," Pedotti says. Instead, land around the Hearst Ranch will become too expensive for owners to cover the mortgage and taxes by raising cows. Slowly, the land will be sold out, subdivided, and developed.
"Whenever you do something like this it becomes easier to do it again," says David Fiscalini. "What Hearst wants to do is going to open the floodgates for land speculation. All of a sudden, you can put anything anywhere."
The Hearst Ranch Resorts, in fact, will force more development to house and care for all the workers who will be needed, opponents says.
Hearst maintains that its development will provide $13 million of annual payroll and pump $3 million a year into county tax coffers. But projections made last year by the county's Department of Planning and Building say the costs of upgrading schools, fire and police protection, and other services will far outstrip that tax revenue. In the worst-case scenario, the financial projections suggest it will take at least a decade for area governments to collect more in taxes than they will be forced to spend upgrading services. "It will be economically devastating to the county," claims Shirley Bianchi, who chairs the county's Planning Commission and is aghast at the sheer size of what Hearst proposes to undertake.
But general angst over the loss of their tranquil, rural lifestyle is not the only fear eating away at Hearst's opponents. There are also serious questions about what the resort would do to the area's unique environment, issues that have attracted attention from far beyond the local ranchers and landholders.
Paramount among the environmental concerns is water, which is hard to come by on this stretch of coast. San Simeon Acres, the closest town to the Hearst Ranch, has been under a building moratorium and varying degrees of water conservation measures for more than a decade as it desperately casts about for new water supplies, says Forrest Warren, general manager and secretary of the four-person San Simeon Community Services District. "All these basins along the coast are short of water," Warren says. "I don't see an end in sight."
Bill Bianchi, who lives with his wife, Shirley, on long-held family land near the Hearst Ranch, is a retired soil physicist who spent his life studying the way water moves underground. Bianchi, who opposes the resort, blames the water shortages on Franciscan melange, a jumble of rocks and contorted layers of soil that underlies much of the coastal area. Formed by the gnashing of two tectonic plates, the melange doesn't hold much ground water, Bianchi explains.
In many parts of the area, wells are just a waste of money, he says. Most water must come from springs or streams, which run dry in long, hot summers. Even the Hearst Castle has to truck in water during some dry summers to keep up the landscaping and flower gardens.
When heavy rains do come in the fall or winter, Bianchi notes, the water tends to rush downhill quickly to the ocean before it can be of much use. "There is little storage in these creeks," Bianchi says. "But you'd have to blow away all the environmental laws before you could build a reservoir here."
Hearst plans to draw the water it needs from Arroyo de la Cruz, a stream that is wholly contained on the Hearst Ranch several miles north of the proposed resort sites. Hearst attorney Jay Rockey says the Arroyo has a 41-square-mile watershed and is virtually untapped now. Studies conducted for Hearst, he says, show that there is plentiful water to provide for the resort.
But the county's environmental impact report says that Arroyo de la Cruz cannot safely yield enough water to even keep up the golf course, much less provide for guests in 650 hotel rooms. The Arroyo's use will also be limited because it is home to threatened steelhead trout, and any development plan will have to leave enough water in the stream to keep the fish alive.
Rockey says the fish will be protected. It's a condition of the state water permit Hearst obtained 13 years ago to draw from Arroyo de la Cruz. "We have some very stringent conditions on our water permit that were imposed specifically to protect the steelhead trout," he says.
But opponents say they don't trust Hearst's projections on the water available from the Arroyo. They believe that Hearst will either have to build a desalination plant or run a big pipeline from some distant water source to its resort. Either option is fraught with environmental risks, opponents say.
More controversial than water supply is the impact the resort will have on San Simeon Point, an oasis of trees, wildlife, and beauty that is not just treasured by local residents, but also is rich in artifacts and relics from the Chumash Indians who lived and conducted ceremonies there for hundreds of years.
Originally, Hearst had proposed building right out onto the point, dislodging the Indian artifacts and cutting down some of the aged forest so its hotel could be placed where guests would have the best view of the ocean. Faced down by fierce opposition, Hearst has revised its plan, and now envisions building the hotel -- and some number of casitas -- up to the base of the point, leaving the actual land spit untouched.
The golf course will lie along the coast north of the hotel.
Environmentalist Geof Land says moving the hotel provides only nominal protection for the point itself. The hotel will still be nestled right against sensitive habitat -- including the trees where migrating monarchs nest -- and thousands of guests will be tromping about on trails. "If [the hotel] isn't on the point, it's certainly strangling the point," Land says.
Hearst counters that it has conducted extensive studies of the point to ensure that it will be protected. The corporation has repeatedly pledged that the point development -- indeed, the whole resort plan -- will enthusiastically embrace all environmental regulations to protect the coastal habitat.
But Shirley Bianchi has been dealing with the Hearst Corp. for so many years that she's not willing to accept blanket statements of good faith.
The 68-year-old rancher and Planning Commission chair, in fact, has grown so incensed at Hearst that she is planning to run in the next election for the county Board of Supervisors.
Like many opponents, Bianchi charges that Hearst is trying to win approval for its resort before working out all the gritty details that could allay -- or confirm -- the fears of residents. The coastal-use plan approved by the current Board of Supervisors and forwarded to the Coastal Commission does not lay out Hearst's plans in detail. It merely endorses the general concept of allowing Hearst to build in the areas specified.
But the devil is in the details, Bianchi says, and she possesses little faith in Hearst's execution of its plan. "The community has been lied to so many times by the corporation that they could look us in the eye and tell us the gospel truth and we wouldn't believe them," Bianchi says.
Bianchi claims the company has misled residents about the water supply, the impact the resort will have on the local economy, and the true extent of what its plans will do to the wildlife and archaeology of San Simeon Point.
Even if the Coastal Commission approves the plan, Hearst will someday have to return to the county Board of Supervisors to obtain its actual building permits. Bianchi hopes to be on the board when that happens. "I'm not anti-growth," she says. "What I am is pro-agricultural. Growth belongs in the communities, not on open agricultural land."
The Hearst Corp.'s desire to plunge into the resort business is hardly new. In the early 1960s -- just a few years after the castle opened as a state-run park -- the company came forward with incredibly grand plans for its coastal property. According to newspaper clips, old planning documents, and the memories of longtime residents, Hearst proposed building an entire city in and around San Simeon. As envisioned back then, the town would have had as many as 65,000 residents, a college, and an airport built from the ranch's private airstrip.
The plan never made it far, and in hindsight it seems quaintly delusional -- no one would argue now that a project of that scale would be economically feasible, or good for the coast. It certainly would never pass muster under environmental regulations set up during the past 30 years.
Still, William Randolph Hearst built a media empire on deluded ambition, quite successfully, beginning when he took over the San Francisco Examiner in 1887. The corporation Hearst begat, of course, is now a media monolith, owning 12 daily newspapers and 16 national magazines including Esquire, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Popular Mechanics, and Redbook. Alone or in partnership, Hearst also has a hand in 17 television stations across the country, as well as cable channels such as A&E, the History Channel, Lifetime Television, and ESPN.
Earlier this month, Forbes magazine ranked Hearst 47th among the top 500 privately held companies in the country with an estimated $2.8 billion in annual revenue. The firm, whose stock is held primarily by Hearst heirs and executives, employs an estimated 14,000 people in more than 100 separate businesses.
Though its weekday circulation has dwindled to about 121,000 -- unremarkable for a major metro daily -- the Examiner remains a sentimental keepsake for Hearst. San Francisco's afternoon newspaper charts a liberal course on its editorial pages, and has a news reporter assigned to cover the environment, but the paper has yet to publish either opinion pieces or news stories on its parent company's controversial plans to develop San Simeon.
The Hearst Foundations maintains an office in San Francisco, and descendants of William Randolph still live in the area. But the bulk of the corporation's business interests in California are real estate. Its national media holdings, though, still make for plentiful money and influence. The company appears willing to bring both to bear on its efforts to finally break ground at San Simeon. Hearst has retained lawyers in San Luis Obispo and Los Angeles to fight for its development, and has made a point of hosting local and state officials at ranch tours and barbecues, including members of the Coastal Commission. Gov. Pete Wilson, Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante, and Senate President pro tem Bill Lockyer each have four appointees on the commission.
The efforts paid off most handsomely last November, when campaign contributions from two Hearst family members and other would-be coastal developers helped shift the balance of power on the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors by financing the election of pro-Hearst candidate Mike Ryan.
In the November election, Ryan spent a whopping $117,000 -- or about $14 for each vote he received -- to narrowly defeat eight-year incumbent David Blakely. Ryan's win tipped the board to a 3-2 majority more favorable to development in the county. Blakely, who lost by just 388 votes out of more than 18,000 cast, claims that Ryan's campaign was largely funded by developers who wanted Blakely off the board. "The money poured in the last week or two of the campaign," Blakely says.
Ryan doesn't dispute Blakely's claim, but maintains that the myriad developers contributing to his campaign had legitimate business interests in the county and were perfectly entitled to give him money. Among the contributors were Phoebe Hearst Cooke of San Francisco -- a granddaughter whose inheritance from the Hearst fortune has been estimated at $700 million -- and her husband, Amory Cooke. The couple gave Ryan $2,099.
After Ryan won the election, but before he was sworn into office, the Board of Supervisors adopted a coastal plan that would have placed severe restrictions on the Hearst Resorts development. Hearst sued the county, claiming it was being unfairly treated by the board.
As soon as Ryan took office, he asked the board to reconsider the plan; Ryan provided the swing vote that gave Hearst back most of what it wanted, and the corporation dropped its legal challenge. The post-Ryan plan is the one now before the Coastal Commission.
The machinations left both sides crying foul. Ryan claims the old board tried to pre-empt voters by passing a more restrictive plan before he could be sworn in. Resort foes claim Ryan had no right to go back and revise the plan that had already been approved by the old board.
Resort opponents found themselves on the losing end of hardball politics, and they didn't like the experience.
"The process by which the Hearst Corporation has pushed this plan through has alienated an enormous number of people in the county," says environmentalist Land. "It has really undermined the integrity of the county's planning process and raised serious doubts about the viability of the county's political system."
Hearst attorney Rockey, however, says the resort opponents are sore losers. "[They] lost at the Board of Supervisors level," Rockey says. "They're not willing to accept a loss, and they're unwilling to compromise."
Resort challengers also blame Hearst for trying to silence one of the most qualified and credible critics of its plan. The county's own senior planner, John Hofschroer, has talked freely with newspaper reporters and citizens in the past, questioning aspects of the resort and its impact on the county.
But lately, Hofschroer has ceased to publicly comment on the proposal. Contacted by SF Weekly, Hofschroer said he cannot speak for the county on issues concerning the resort, and has been told to refer all questions to his boss.
Rockey says Hearst did not ask that Hofschroer be gagged, although it did make its displeasure known. "We commented that we thought it was very strange -- after the Board of Supervisors acted -- for a county employee to come out and second-guess the Board of Supervisors," Rockey says.
Given Hearst's persistence and bank book, resort foes concede there is little chance they will be able to stop the resort plan completely. All they are hoping is that they can convince the Coastal Commission to scale it down.
"All we're asking is that the Coastal Commission and our county look more closely at the true impacts of the proposed Hearst development before granting any entitlements," says Land. "We're potentially approaching massive development without knowing what its impacts are."
At the end of Citizen Kane, smoke wafts from Xanadu as workers feed a raging fire with the relics of Kane's life. Onto the pyre they nonchalantly toss Rosebud, the sled from Kane's boyhood, never realizing they are destroying the answer to the mystery of Kane's dying word. In the movie, at least, Kane's obsessive lust to shape the world to his liking dissipates after his death.
But at the real Xanadu, William Randolph Hearst's legacy of power and influence appears destined to live on. What the Hearst Corp. wants, it will most likely get, in some form. Those on both sides of the battle agree that Hearst's name alone is enough to vault their fight to national prominence. "I believe if you didn't have the name Hearst in it, it wouldn't be nearly a fight," says county Supervisor Mike Ryan.
It shouldn't be surprising that the company Hearst created is intent on bending the state's coastal preservation laws to its own ends. If he were still alive, Hearst might have done the bending himself. But would Hearst have gone to so much trouble, exercised so much influence, just to be able to stare down from his hilltop Xanadu at a bunch of golfers?
