Blue Water Bottle Sculpture at the Tip of Iceberg of Controversy

At an event called “,” the Ecology Center will remove the blue plastic water bottle sculpture from the historic, city-owned Congdon house on Alipaz Street on Saturday. 

The removal of the controversial sculpture, however, will do little to satisfy detractors of the center who accuse it of a myriad of charges from minor municipal code violations and poor stewardship of city property to backdoor dealings and the conflict of interest of San Juan Capistrano city officials. The city, for its part, has done little to smooth ruffled feathers.

The Ecology Center is a nonprofit organization that educates people about green living and environmental sustainability. Programs include organic gardens where children can grow and eat their own salad, and a Waste Lab, where waste products are turned into usable ones. 

The Ecology Center is funded by private and corporate donations and catches a break on its rental of the Congdon house. 

You Can’t Choose Your Neighbors

At the center of the Ecology Center controversy is neighbor and former City Council candidate Clint Worthington. Worthington lives in a gated community a tenth of a mile north of the center.

Worthington has long been troubled by the amount of rent the Ecology Center pays for the Congdon house—rent, in his opinion, so low as to amount to a taxpayer subsidy of the center. It is this complaint that has gained the most traction with others in the community. 

tell of resentment in the community to what Worthington and others see as favored treatment of the Ecology Center by the city. 

Two years ago, San Juan Capistrano's granted a license to the Ecology Center to operate at the Congdon house. Under its current agreement, renegotiated in October 2010, the center pays $100 per month rent to the city, a rate that will increase annually to a cap of $1,000 a month in four years' time. 

Some in the community call for the city to charge the center the market rate for rent of the Congdon house, rent of as much as $1.35 a square foot,  according to one commenter with the user name socalfam.  That amount would double the $1,000 a month rent the Ecology Center will pay at the peak of its agreement with the city.

Worthington’s conflict with the center reached a head last April, when the Ecology Center put on an Earth Day celebration that included a bluegrass band. Then-Mayor Lon Uso, as well as City Council members Laura Freese and Mark Neilson and city staffers, attended the event. 

Worthington was having a family get-together that same afternoon. He heard the music and complained to the Ecology Center, demanding the music be turned off. 

The Ecology Center agreed to turn the music down but refused to silence the band.

Not satisfied, Worthington called the sheriff. Deputies responded but determined that the music coming form the Ecology Center did not create a public nuisance and refused to take action against the center.

Worthington, believing the Congdon house to be a city park (municipal code prohibits amplified music in city parks without a permit), called code enforcement the next week. 

He also noticed and reported what he took to be other municipal code violations at the Ecology Center property: the installation of a sign without prior city approval and which was not in compliance with city guidelines—the sign had blue lettering; the guidelines call for earth tones.

He found that the Ecology Center painted on a storm drain, was keeping chickens on the farm and had erected a greenhouse display not mentioned in its conditional-use permit—the written agreement between the city and the center. And it installed that big blue bottle sculpture.

The city quietly removed the sign. It repainted the storm drain. It made the center apply for and then denied the temporary-use permit for the water bottle sculpture. While all this was happening, it seemed to Clint Worthington as if nothing was happening.

“Every time a complaint was made—and there were many, citing the specific city municipal code violations—it fell on deaf ears,” Worthington said in an e-mail to San Juan Capistrano Patch.  “I tried to meet with [Development Director] Grant Taylor of the city’s planning department, and in his e-mail he refused to meet with me.”

His complaints, he said, went unacknowledged. With a little digging, he felt he had found out why.

Worthington’s political rival, Council member Laura Freese, was on the Ecology Center’s board of directors; so was a city staffer and a city contractor. Historic-preservation manager Teri Delcamp and another rival, Council member Lon Uso, were members of the center. Surely that was a conflict of interest, he thought.

Worthington, as well as residents Kim McCarthy and Orrie Brown, wrote letters to the city complaining about the low rent charged to the Ecology Center.  They complained about the alleged municipal code violations they felt the city had not addressed, the chickens on the property, the geodesic dome greenhouse and the big blue water bottle sculpture. 

In the letters they said that they felt the Ecology Center did not fit with the historical integrity of the Congdon house. Mostly, however, they complained about the rent the Ecology Center pays, reiterating the charge that the city was subsidizing the center.

Agreeing to Disagree

The city acquired the Congdon house in 1990 as part of a larger purchase of farmland. The house is the oldest wood-frame structure in the city. Its restoration was completed in 2001.

According to building department records, the city restored the Congdon house for “potential use as an interpretive center” focusing on the city’s agricultural past. 

The city, said Delcamp, wants to ensure that the city’s historic buildings are used in ways that “maintain their historic character ... for current and future generations.”

The Planning Commission, she said, deemed the Ecology Center consistent with that goal and recommended that the City Council approve a licensing agreement leasing the Congdon house to the center. 

The Ecology Center’s original agreement approved by the City Council had a license fee of $680 per year. That agreement expired in August 2010. A new agreement was drawn up at that time.

“In conjunction with the City Council’s trend toward trying to recover city costs, [city] staff recommended an annual fee of $4,500 which represented the city’s budgeted costs for the Congdon House in the prior year,” Delcamp said in an e-mail response to San Juan Capistrano Patch.

The City Council approved the agreement for a five-year term beginning Oct. 19, 2010. Over the term of the agreement, the rent the Ecology Center will pay averages $6,240 a year, Delcamp said. In this arrangement, the city will collect $1,740 more per year in rent than it budgeted as expenses on the Congdon house.

The agreement gives the Ecology Center certain rights to use the property. For example, the city considers the April 2010 Earth Day event that triggered Worthington’s campaign against the center as “ancillary to and within the use [of the property]” approved by the city.

In investigating the event, Delcamp said, code enforcement found that “the event did not cause excessive noise, dust, vibration, light or create a public nuisance.” Like the sheriff, city staffers took no action against the center.

Furthermore, the Congdon house property, according to the city, is zoned for agriculture, not open space, so restrictions on music in city parks do not apply.

In addition, the geodesic dome greenhouse, Delcamp said, “received administrative approval from the Development Services Department.”  Because it is an agricultural structure, it doesn’t require building permits.

San Juan Capistrano City Attorney Omar Sandoval does not see the conflict of interest between city officials and the Ecology Center that Worthington alleges. 

“The Ecology Center is a nonprofit organization,” he said. “Unless its members or board [of directors] who are also city officials or employees derive income from their membership, no legal conflict arises.”

He said it is no different than the Chamber of Commerce.  Over the years,  many City Council members and city staffers have also been members of the chamber. 

“Maybe there is a perception of conflict,” he said.  “There’s legal conflict of interest, and there’s perception.  The law doesn’t deal with perception; that’s a political issue.” 

Worthington, he said, should take his beef to the City Council.

“It’s all political.  I don’t get involved in politics.”

Outside of the Ecology Center, Worthington was speaking with a reporter when Vikki Marks, operations manager of the Ecology Center, came out to speak with him.

Worthington vented his frustrations, reminding Marks about the unpermitted sign and the painted storm drain.  “That’s graffiti,” he said. “We have a graffiti problem in the city. How is this any different than that?”

Marks admitted that she hadn’t looked at it that way before.

“We are a young organization; we’ve made some mistakes,” she told him.  “We can do things better.  You’ll see, we’ll do things better.”

Juggy, the blue water bottle sculpture, is coming down.

Worthington asked her about the rent, calling it a taxpayer subsidy.

“We’ll never agree on everything,” she said.

“We’ll just have to agree,” they said in unison, “to disagree.”