PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

Surprise, Long Beach: We’re the nation’s next Irvine!

By Brandon Miller

Tarin Olson says she has a hangover. But—slouched in a wingback chair in the meticulous living room of her Belmont Heights home, Restoration Hardware meets HGTV—she displays none of the signs of a long night of serious drinking, no flecks of foam on her perfect lips, no puke in her perfect hair, none of the photo-sensitivity or hyperacusis that attend hardcore drinking. So maybe not a hangover, but whatever you call the pain that follows yet another beating in a series of severe beatings—the heartache that comes with having her ass handed to her the night before, in the latest battle over the future of Long Beach.

On Thurs., April 12, at the Bayshore Library, Olson sat among maybe 50 people listening to city officials bang the drum for a super-sophisticated chain-store settlement in what is now The Marketplace, at the corner of Pacific Coast Highway and Second Street. Officials won’t say precisely what we’ll see in that bland colony, and the relative backwardness of their library presentation (end-of-the-century PowerPoint), its vagueness, its lack of precision, really upsets Olson. The officials—or, rather, the appointed members of the Wetlands Advisory Committee (about which more in a moment)—say this beige excrescence will be a Gateway to Long Beach. But activists (Olson) say the Gateway says nothing about Long Beach, about their Long Beach, but says everything you need to know about a City Council animated by developer cash, one that approves real estate projects in the blind hope they’ll generate the kind of tax revenue needed to build a first-class city. Instead, Olson says, they’re turning her city into something like Irvine.

The meeting, in a Bayshore Library classroom (no refreshments), was the Wetlands Advisory Committee’s attempt at what WAC member Colleen Bentley calls a “listening tour.” After months of secret meetings—meetings closed, that is, to the very public this WAC is supposed to serve—the WAC is now sweeping through the community in search of “insight,” “input,” “feedback,” the whole lexicon designed to indicate openness to public participation in what’s an absolutely Soviet-style campaign that will end in the construction of this project no matter what.

The meeting did not go well for Olson; the rigorous pounding she took accounts for her present hangover.

At 6:30 p.m., Rick Turrentine rose. In a weird attempt to insulate the Gateway project from the chaos of popular participation, Councilman Gary DeLong appointed every one of the nine WAC members, including the positively prehistoric-looking Turrentine. Turrentine got just 120 seconds into his pitch when Olson, without rising from her seat in the middle of the room, cut him off.

“I’m concerned that not enough people were involved in creating this draft,” she said. “Where are the teachers, and the nurses, and the other community members?”

The real answer is that there weren’t any, that the WAC comprises people selected by just one councilmember—DeLong—and that most of the appointees have some connection to big development firms. That group met in private, only occasionally inviting select community members to speak to the Star Chamber. The WAC completed its draft in private, and solicited public comment (the listening tour) only after it had reached conclusions that now seem—never mind the lexicon—solid, fixed, immovable, resolved, finished, closed to consideration.

But Turrentine said nothing like that. “I’ll give a partial answer and then I’ll proceed,” he said. “I am a professor, and have taught for 13 years.” He recited something like his resume—where he taught and what he taught there—and concluded, “So that covers that. Now let’s go on.”

No, Olson said. Let’s not. “This is a very key point,” she said, meaning the almost perfect absence of citizens in the creation of the Gateway Project.

“We’re going on,” Turrentine says, and as Olson tried to explain what she sees as the virtue of democracy, Turrentine—who called Olson “Miss”—insisted, “We’re going on. We’re going on. We’re going on.”

Thus silenced, Olson became irritable—audibly sighing, cartoonishly rolling her eyes and shaking her head. When Turrentine announced that the commission had decided to extend building heights from a modest 35 feet to relatively ginormous 65 feet, she laughed loudly. She might have snorted.

During a short recess, Turrentine approached a friend, leaned over and said not quite under his breath, “She was ridiculous.”

To understand what makes Olson run, what makes her seem ridiculous to a guy like Turrentine, what drove her into previous battles with some of these same developers and city officials, you have to know something about Irvine—or what Olson means when she uses the word Irvine. In the Olsonian vernacular, “Irvine” is placeless, inorganic. Cookie-cutter, she says, soulless, without character. Worse: it’s growing, spreading across Southern California and now rolling through her own beloved Long Beach, like homogenizing shock waves through the landscape.

“Long Beach is the last coastal city around here that feels like a community, where everyone is friendly with each other and the architecture has stayed small-scale and unobtrusive,” she says. “If we’re not careful, this city will look like Irvine.”

She hates what Irvine represents, says that’s what got her out of this very armchair and into last summer’s campaign to stop the building of a Home Depot. In August, DeLong proposed the construction of the super-duper home-improvement big-box retailer north of Second Street on Studebaker, the first of its kind in the Orange and Los Angeles counties coastal zone. Worried about the impact on nearby wetlands, Olson organized the signature-gathering campaign for a movement that included homeowners associations, environmental activists, and two former coastal commissioners. It was a history-making fight, and Olson lost. In October, the City Council approved the Home Depot.

And Olson wept. Literally.

Tarin Olson is an activist’s activist. Her biggest problem, she says, is that people are apathetic, and if not apathetic, busy. “Most people just don’t care,” she says. “And if they do, they can’t make it to these meetings. They have families or jobs, or both.”

“Sometimes Tarin’s strengths are her weaknesses,” says long-time friend Sandi Van Horne. “She really thinks you can make a difference. But you have to have tough skin, or you will be destroyed.”

And so she dreams about Long Beach, and her dream does not include Home Depot. Nothing personal, she says: she shops at Home Depot, just doesn’t think her city needs one in the wetlands area, and certainly not right next to the sign that might say “Welcome to Long Beach.”

“If Home Depot moves in, I will move out,” she says.

Olson’s threat to move might be welcomed as one less car on the road. Officials say they have no precise numbers on traffic generated by the Gateway Project; DeLong himself says, “You can’t build if you can’t mitigate traffic.” Activists predict gridlock—48,000 additional cars on PCH each day, they say.

“I think she feels very strongly about her position,” DeLong says of Olson. And he’s nice that way: after the Battle of Home Depot, Olson launched a campaign to recall DeLong. That, too, failed. “At the end of the day,” he continues, her passion is “what I think democracy is all about.”

And that too is nice. But we can all hope that he’s wrong. Because democracy isn’t about strong feelings. It’s about being able to do something constructive with that feeling—through the government that is supposed to be yours. And so when DeLong says democracy is about passionate feeling and that what he really resents about Olson is that she’s part of “the same group of five or six people [who] go to every meeting and are the loudest,” you get this sick feeling in your stomach. Because what he’s ignoring in that moment is the fact that he created a committee of just nine appointees and then insulated their conversations about our city from the public that will have to live with them.

And then you consider that what’s really bugging Tarin Olson isn’t just what her city will look like (Irvine), but how her city will get there.