Pete Schabarum : The veteran county supervisor may be the San Gabriel Valley’s most powerful politician, and he’s used to getting results.

It was a close play at the plate. County Supervisor Pete Schabarum, titular leader of the Pete’s Posse softball team, was the base runner, galloping toward home. Margie Morales, a 50-year-old grandmother and the catcher for the County-USC Medical Center team, had the ball.

Schabarum did it the way Pete Rose probably would have done it. The bulky 190-pound base runner dived recklessly for home, flattening the 135-pound catcher like a truck plowing through a snowbank. There were hard feelings all around, with the roughed-up Morales calling Schabarum a “macho pig.” Schabarum, a former San Francisco 49ers halfback, brushed himself off and met the heated accusations in the unblinking winning-is-everything style of Charlie Hustle.

“That’s baseball,” he said.

According to some of his critics, the play at the plate last October on a South El Monte playing field reflects Schabarum’s freewheeling, ultra-competitive political style. The county supervisor, whose district includes most of the San Gabriel Valley east of Pasadena, plays to win, scrupulously observing the rules but showing little delicacy toward his adversaries, the critics say.

“He plays hardball,” says San Dimas Mayor Donald Haefer, whose city has been embroiled in a feud with the county over plans to commercialize Frank G. Bonelli County Park. “He plays a tough game. In other words, it’s ‘If you don’t do what I say, there are other things I can hit you with.’ ”

When Schabarum, a member of the Board of Supervisors since 1972, decides to throw his weight around, he generally gets results. Arguably the most powerful political figure in the San Gabriel Valley and certainly one of the most influential politicians in the county, this steadfast political and fiscal conservative has played a major part in the changes the area has undergone in the past 15 years.

The valley is studded with county facilities and public buildings that Schabarum has shepherded into his district. Once-barren fields and hills are covered with housing developments that this admittedly “pro-development” official has helped usher through the process of public land use review.

Through his powers as one of five county supervisors, including a major say in how the county’s $7.1-billion annual budget is doled out, and his influence on other boards and commissions, Schabarum has become the San Gabriel Valley elected official whose opinions carry the most weight on such bread-and-butter regional issues as garbage, mass transit and development.

Just in the past few weeks, for example, Schabarum has weighed in decisively on a pair of hot issues in his district, taking a stand against the proposed waste-to-energy plant at the Spadra Landfill in Pomona and endorsing a controversial revision of a plan to build commercial facilities at Bonelli Park. In both cases, the supervisor’s voice was seen by some as the deciding one, freeing other politicians and county officials to speak out against the incinerator proposal (which could be withdrawn Monday by the directors of the county Sanitation Districts) and establishing the park proposal as an official county plan.

Schabarum himself, a rugged-looking man of 58, with a granite profile and a reputation for bluntly speaking his mind, impatiently dismisses the notion that he can “bring together heaven and earth.”

“I’m just trying to do a job,” he says. “I have very little influence with the state Legislature in California or with a lot of special districts, where I’m either not on the board or I’m just one vote.”

Nevertheless, Schabarum doesn’t hesitate to use his clout to carry out his plans.

For example, when the City of San Dimas, whose boundaries stretch around the 1,976-acre Bonelli Park, resisted county plans last year to build a host of money-making tourist attractions in the park, Schabarum responded as testily as a grizzly bear rousted from his lair. First he threatened to have the park “de-annexed” from the city. Contending that the county park, which constitutes one-fifth of San Dimas’ land, was the subject of too many complaints from the city, Schabarum had his staff look into ways of somehow removing the park from the city limits.

Then a Schabarum aide allegedly warned city officials that the city’s opposition could have negative consequences. “He told us that projects near and dear to the city and requiring county funding might not get ready access and sympathy from the county,” said City Councilman Sandy McHenry.

McHenry added that he did not fault Schabarum and his staff for such an approach. “That’s sort of how the game is played,” he said. “I’d be surprised if it were otherwise. The difference between Pete and some others in political office is that he’ll tell you straight out how he feels about things.”

Nevertheless, the City of San Dimas was not pleased with the would-be park development, charging that the county plan, which included an amphitheater, an aerial tramway, “fishing village” shops and a lodge-and-chalet complex, would turn Bonelli Park into “a Disneyland amusement center.” (County parks officials last week unveiled scaled-down plans that would, at least for the present, eliminate many of the proposed amusements.)

“It used to be that, when the county wanted to do something in an incorporated city (such as San Dimas), they’d come to the city and talk about it,” said City Manager Bob Poff. “Maybe you don’t see that approach nowadays. Now, it’s ‘This is what we want to do, guys.’ It’s as if it’s their facility and they can do what they want with it.” Poff said Schabarum’s predecessor, the late Frank Bonelli, namesake of the park, had employed a more diplomatic approach.

Schabarum aide Ray Andersen, who has been working with the Bonelli Park advisory committee, dismissed as politically motivated the allegations that he used the threat of withholding county support for other projects to elicit support for park development.

“I can’t tell you that we’re interested in helping people that kick us in the head,” he said. “But it’s fair to say that some of the things these people are portraying to their constituents are just to get themselves some ink.”

Hardball? ‘You Bet’

But the supervisor himself freely acknowledges that he sometimes plays by some tough rules. Hardball? “You bet,” Schabarum said. “Bullying? That all depends on the eye of the beholder. But if there are a few councilmen around the valley who think they can really make points by taking the county to task or me personally, I’m not going to smile and say, ‘Nice work, young man.’ ”

Schabarum’s control of county funds and his influence over county policy in his district tend to make people wary of offending him. “You’re going to find it difficult getting anybody who still has to function in the 1st Supervisorial District to say anything bad about Pete Schabarum,” said one business leader from an incorporated city in the region. Like a number of politicians and civic leaders, the business leader would talk only on condition that his name not be disclosed.

But a growing number of Schabarum’s constituents are speaking out on what they perceive as the supervisor’s imperious style, particularly with regard to development.

Many in Schabarum’s district have taken a seat on the anti-growth train. Development is an especially hot issue in communities such as Diamond Bar and Hacienda Heights, where developers, drawn by open space and access to freeways, seem to be plunking down new multi-unit housing projects with the rapidity of children setting down pieces from a Monopoly game.

According to dissidents, Schabarum’s pro-development policies have helped to turn the once-bucolic unincorporated areas of the San Gabriel Valley into traffic-gorged communities with overcrowded schools and polluted air. They say that the county, under the sway of the supervisor, makes development decisions that favor developers who contribute large amounts of money to Schabarum’s campaign chest.

‘Eating Us Alive’

“We represent maybe 4% of Schabarum’s district,” said Paul Horcher, chairman of the Diamond Bar Municipal Advisory Council. “Our vote either way isn’t going to make or break anybody in the county. So we’re small fish, and the barracudas are eating us alive.”

Those active in campaigning against county garbage disposal policies often contend that Schabarum has failed to provide leadership in resisting the expansion of San Gabriel Valley landfills or the construction of proposed trash incinerators in the area.

“His standard ploy is ‘I haven’t made up my mind, and I won’t make up my mind until it’s before me for a decision,’ ” says Wil Baca of the Hacienda Heights Improvement Assn. “If you live in an unincorporated area, you have no one to carry the ball for you. All you have is someone who sits in judgment on the issues.”

For Schabarum proponents--and there are many of them in the San Gabriel Valley--this is all old hat.

“From what I’ve seen, he’s doing things that need to be done,” says San Dimas Councilman Curt Morris. “And he’s very up front about it.”

Hard Bargaining

What critics describe as out-of-control development is actually aiding the area, Schabarum’s defenders say. Through hard bargaining, they say, Schabarum often squeezes out extra benefits, such as parks or roads for the county, from developers.

“Since Proposition 13, the county hasn’t had a lot of money to do a lot of things,” conceded Dean Anderson, a member of the Rowland Heights Coordinating Council, whose community stands to get a Schabarum-negotiated road as part of a hillside development. “Developers do have money.”

Even those who have done battle with him say that Schabarum listens to his constituents when they raise enough of a ruckus. “You have to have a large number of people, and you have to be persistent,” says Sandy Grinkey, another civic leader from Rowland Heights. “The squeaky wheel definitely gets the grease.”

Schabarum himself professes to be, at heart, a slow-growth advocate who is at the mercy of historical trends. “If I had my way, I’d like to see the population as it was in 1947 in the San Gabriel Valley,” says Schabarum, who grew up in Covina. “It’s a shame to have all this growth. I would have hoped that it wouldn’t come to pass, but it is. And short of putting a wall around the borders of the state--including the border with Mexico--and invoking a very aggressive birth control program, I don’t see how we’re going to maintain a static population in the State of California.”

Defends Policy

The supervisor adds that his critics on garbage policy are “naysayers,” with little to offer in the way of solutions to the county’s imminent landfill crisis. “I’m one of only a few people in the county who have spent some time trying to find alternative solutions,” he said.

But Schabarum, who is known to have an easy familiarity with the minutiae of planning in his district, positively bristles at the charge that the county acts without consulting affected communities.

“As a general rule, we make an effort to deal one on one with each of those (development) projects,” says the supervisor, who has either run unopposed or won in a landslide since pulling out a squeaker in his first election in 1974. “Nothing is done around here sloppily.”

At the corner of Colima Road and Countrywood Avenue, in the unincorporated community of Hacienda Heights, sits a tight cluster of clapboard condominiums with shingle roofs. Next to it is an empty field, bulldozed flat and smooth, like a gap in a row of teeth. This is the future Pepperbrook Park. By next January, it will resound to the shouts of children playing soccer and football.

How the five-acre field, a stone’s throw from Colima Road, one of the community’s main streets, got to be a planned playing field and picnic ground rather than the shady glade that residents asked for is one small example of the way the county supervisor influences the terms of development in his bailiwick, according to some community members.

“The developer gets everything he wants and we get nothing,” summed up Carol Mauceri, zoning chairman for the Hacienda Heights Improvement Assn., which has been recognized by Schabarum’s staff as the community’s advisory committee on planned development. “That’s usually the way it works out.”

Until about two years ago, the site of the park and condominiums was just a corner property that was ripe for development, Mauceri says. That was when the Lusk Co., an Irvine developer that controlled the property, finally defeated community opposition to a proposed 163-unit condominium complex on the corner by turning over the adjacent land to the county for development as a park.

Schabarum himself hashed out the deal. “The supervisor had a number of us in to his office,” said Mauceri, whose organization had rejected the project as overly dense. At the meeting were community residents who had fought a two-year battle against the housing complex, arguing that Colima Road was already choked with traffic because too many homes had been packed into the area. Also attending were representatives of Lusk, a major Southern California developer and one of Schabarum’s top five contributors. The Lusk Family of Companies has contributed more than $24,000 to Schabarum’s campaign committee in the past six years.

Small Victory

Under Schabarum’s guidance, the company got the go-ahead for its condominiums and the county Department of Parks and Recreation set up a community committee to help design the brand-new piece of county parkland.

It was a small victory--the original condominium design had “virtually no greenbelt,” says Mauceri--and community members threw themselves energetically into the task of planning Pepperbrook Park. “We met a number of times and hammered out the type of park the community wanted,” Mauceri said. “It was supposed to be a passive park--something gently sloping, with nice trees and picnic tables. We wanted a place to take little children to play, to lie on the grass and look at the sky.”

But it soon became apparent that such an idyllic setting was not what the supervisor had in mind, Mauceri said. First, Schabarum’s staff “floated a trial balloon” that he was considering selling the parkland back to the developer, Mauceri said. “We jumped all over that,” she said. Then he sent word out that he wanted a playing field as the centerpiece of the park.

“The message we got was ‘The supervisor wants the field,’ ” Mauceri said.

Phil Hester, assistant director of the county parks agency, says the supervisor had proposed returning the open land to the developer in the mistaken belief that the community did not want a park. He acknowledges that the committee’s central concern seemed to be the amount of open space the park would contain. “There was concern that older kids would be hanging around,” he said.

But the county, nevertheless, opted for what Hester calls an “active-passive” park design, with a playing field. He added that there would be room for a “pick-up” soccer or football game, but not for league play.

‘Other Interests’

Schabarum’s staff do not substantially dispute Mauceri’s account, but they dismiss her as a complainer. “Mrs. Mauceri gripes about the fact that her point of view was not accepted in the design,” grumped Schabarum. “But the county has other interests besides her. We’ve got others to take into consideration, including youngsters in the community. Soccer is second only to softball in terms of popularity.”

The supervisor expresses frustration about suggestions that he is somehow influenced by campaign contributions, which he says are necessary because of “the high cost of putting on a campaign.”

“If the public has another way of carrying a message to the electorate during campaign time, I’d be pleased to be advised,” he said. “In the meantime, I’ll have to do the best I can.” He denied that he had ever been influenced in any decision by a contribution.

Civic leaders in the unincorporated communities of the San Gabriel Valley say that under Schabarum’s leadership they are often encouraged to participate, but that they ultimately have little say in the final result.

“I don’t think he (Schabarum) listens to us at all,” said Don Stokes, a member of the Diamond Bar Municipal Advisory Council, whose five members are elected as the voice of the community on matters before the Board of Supervisors.

Sees Role as Mediator

But Schabarum sees his role in the growth controversies in his district as that of a mediator between the legitimate concerns of his constituents and the rights of property owners. His attitude toward developers is not one of total laissez faire, he insists. “But short of a situation where there’s public acquisition of private property,” he says, “the owner of a piece of property is entitled to have his government allow him to have reasonable use of that property.”

His staff of nine aides, who serve as community liaisons, work to balance conflicting interests, he suggested. “I think you’ll find that the vast majority of these matters end up being resolved before they get to the Board of Supervisors,” Schabarum said. “That happens because this office does an awful lot of work with the communities and the applicants.”

Many civic leaders and homeowners remain unconvinced. Developers get the red-carpet treatment from Schabarum, they charge, while those of more modest means must organize in order to be listened to. “People have to get angry together in order to get any results,” complains Sandy Johnson, chairman of the Hacienda Heights Improvement Assn.

The Board of Supervisors meets every Tuesday morning in a cavernous room in the Hall of Administration on West Temple Street in downtown Los Angeles, about 30 miles from the eastern reaches of Schabarum’s district.

At one scantily attended recent meeting, the five supervisors handled an agenda of more than 150 items, most of them disposed of in a routine, monotonous fashion, with little or no discussion. These included contracts, executive orders, purchase orders and directives to the board’s chief administrative officer.

Schabarum, tanned and dapper in a tweed sports jacket, is a dominant figure throughout the hearing, crossing swords with people who have come to testify, trading barbs with fellow supervisors and expressing his opinions on an array of subjects. He needles the Los Angeles City Council for its “naivete” on the trash disposal issue (“Somebody must have really been smoking some funny stuff over in the council”), expresses deep reservations about plans to build a Metro Rail system in downtown Los Angeles and offers some fatherly advice to an elderly doctor who wants the board’s support for a research program.

The hot issue of the day is a proposal to use a World War II-era landing ship as a housing facility for homeless people. Though the proposal is not his own, Schabarum confidently dominates the discussion. Peering down at a representative of an advocacy group who wants the county to come up with another facility, Schabarum asks the man if he can identify a specific building that is available. “You could be out looking right now,” he says.

Threatens Ejection

He threatens to have a particularly obstreperous gadfly removed from the hearing room. “We don’t need him lecturing us with that peanut brain of his,” Schabarum growls.

Then he offers a spirited defense of the county’s role in providing succor to the indigent. “Over half of the people on relief in the State of California are in the County of Los Angeles,” he says. “That should tell the world something.”

The Board of Supervisors is obviously Schabarum’s element. The supervisor, a self-made millionaire with investments in real estate and stocks, obviously enjoys what he does. “I’m not here to make a living,” says Schabarum, who earns $81,505 as a supervisor. “I could do far better, thank you, if I were not in public service.”

The son of a stockbroker from Covina, Schabarum went from Covina High School to the University of California at Berkeley, establishing a name for himself along the way as a football star. But after a brief career with the 49ers, he began investing in the real estate market. Now he has extensive real estate holdings outside of the county, as well as investments in a variety of other enterprises.

Supervisorial Power

Though Schabarum sometimes talks wistfully about real estate deals he could be making if he weren’t in public office, it is unlikely that in non-public endeavors he could enjoy the power he exercises in the county. The Board of Supervisors controls a budget that is larger than the budgets of 40 states. It oversees 40 county departments, with about 74,000 employees, as well as special districts such as the Flood Control Districts and the Fire Control Districts.

The board has legislative and judicial functions, adopting county ordinances and rules and acting as an appeals board on land use matters from the Regional Planning Commission. And the supervisors appoint the members of all those county commissions and committees--91 of them.

Supervisory control over county funds can serve to get even incorporated cities into line behind county projects. “They can stop building your storm drains, stop road construction, stop all kinds of capital improvements that the county controls,” said West Covina Councilman Forrest Tennant, a frequent Schabarum adversary.

They can mire local redevelopment plans in court, too. If the board claims that such projects are absorbing too much property tax revenue, cutting too deeply into county revenues, the board can try to negotiate a better deal or initiate a lawsuit. According to one San Dimas official, when that city threatened to impose an amusement tax, which Schabarum adamantly opposed, on Raging Waters, the county “coincidentally” announced plans to challenge a planned expansion of the San Dimas redevelopment project.

Message Received

“The city decided not to impose the tax, and it was all worked out,” said the official, who asked that his name be withheld. “But a lot of people felt that the message was ‘If you’re not going to cooperate with us, don’t expect us to cooperate with you.’ ”

“The county has the resources to file suit, whether there’s merit or not, delaying the project,” says John Hemer, director of Housing and Redevelopment for Baldwin Park. “Of course, they have limited resources, and they can’t sue everybody. So when you’re negotiating with them, each knows the other has a dagger in his back pocket.”

Combine Schabarum’s supervisorial powers with his political influence (he is the senior member of a dominant three-man majority of conservative Republicans on the board) and his role in multijurisdictional agencies, such as the Local Agency Formation Commission and the Southern District Air Quality Management District, and you have a politician who can control the decisions on major issues, critics contend.

Take a thorny sanitation controversy that has engrossed San Gabriel Valley activists, local officials and the county for two years--a proposed trash incinerator at the Spadra landfill in Pomona, designed to burn 1,000 tons of trash a day.

Public Neutrality

Until last month, Schabarum had maintained public neutrality on the planned facility, which homeowners groups claim would pour unacceptable levels of carcinogens into the San Gabriel Valley air. His neutrality was not “fence-straddling,” as his critics claimed, but a public-spirited attempt to find solutions to the county’s trash crisis, he insisted.

Last month, however, Schabarum finally took a stand. It was a matter of considering his district’s historic role as a dumping ground for the rest of the county, he said. The San Gabriel Valley, he noted in an open letter to the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, has been the recipient of a disproportionate amount of the county’s trash. (By most estimates, the area produces about 23% of the county’s garbage, while its landfills take in 60%.) Trash managers should be devoting their resources to projects “which will enable each area of the county to manage their own wastes” rather than to a trash-to-energy plant in the San Gabriel Valley, Schabarum urged.

By most knowledgeable accounts, this was a lot more than just another politician staking out a position. The thumbs-down stand from the county supervisor--who is a member of both the Sanitation Districts administrative board and the South Coast Air Quality Management District board, the licensing agency for trash-to-energy plants such as the proposed Spadra facility--represented the coup de grace for the plan, some observers said.

“It’s not only the death of Spadra, but it totally destroys the notion that they can locate waste-to-energy projects anywhere in the county,” contended Baca of the Hacienda Heights Improvement Assn., who claims that it was actually Schabarum’s neutrality that had kept the Spadra project alive for more than a year.

Decisive Stand

At the very least, others said, Schabarum’s stand opened the doors to a growing flood of opposition from other members of the Sanitation Districts board, which includes 76 mayors as well as the five county supervisors. “Some of the directors had withheld their opposition out of deference to him,” said Duarte Mayor John Van Doren. “His stand will encourage others to reject Spadra.”

Schabarum often uses his clout to champion certain pet projects at the Board of Supervisors. As a leading advocate of the “privatization” of county services, for example, he has pushed for turning over Southern California Rapid Transit District bus service in his own district to private contractors. He has already gotten preliminary approval from the board and the consent of 26 incorporated cities for a separate San Gabriel Valley transportation district to be run by private bus operators.

“I’m convinced that, to a large part, the escalating costs (of RTD bus service) are labor costs,” Schabarum says. “In fact, I can prove it.” The transportation district, if it gets the approval of the Los Angeles County Transit Commission, will ultimately save the public money, he insists.

Saving the county money is apparently one of the things that makes Schabarum run. He is, he says, passionate about keeping the county budget lean. “I think the public is entitled to full value for each public dollar that’s spent,” he says.

But it is in the area of land use in unincorporated communities that Schabarum wields his greatest power, some civic leaders say. “Land use is the single most important power to have,” contends Mauceri. “From that flows everything else. You decide who’s going to make a buck.”

Executive Powers

Besides overseeing the county government, the Board of Supervisors serves, in effect, as the local government for unincorporated communities, which have no city councils of their own. As the 1st District supervisor, Schabarum is tacitly recognized by his fellow supervisors as the county executive for the San Gabriel Valley and the other communities he represents, observers say.

It’s a powerful prerogative, Schabarum acknowledges, particularly when it comes to decisions affecting new development. Asked if he is, in effect, judge, jury and executioner in communities such as Diamond Bar and Hacienda Heights, the supervisor said: “When it comes to land use, I am.”

The process of getting something built in an unincorporated community bristles with regulations. There are permit applications, environmental impact studies, conferences and public hearings. But the crucial hurdles are the Regional Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors, developers say.

A developer who wants to build an apartment complex or a mini-mall in an area zoned for two-family homes, for example, must first get the approval of the Regional Planning Commission--whose five members are each appointed by a supervisor--then get the nod from the Board of Supervisors itself.

Planning commissioners such as Lee Strong, Schabarum’s appointee and the current chairman of the commission, claim that they are totally independent of those who appointed them.

“Pete Schabarum has never attempted to influence any decision that’s come before the Planning Commission in the time I’ve been there,” Strong said. “If there are questions, I may discuss a matter with his staff or occasionally with him. But he’s never given me any directive as to how to vote.”

But critics of the system say there has never been a serious disagreement between the board and the commission. “Who are the planning commissioners?” demands Orris Abbott, a Rowland Heights resident who is fighting a proposed hillside housing development in his neighborhood. “They’re just people appointed by the supervisors. You might just as well hold your discussions with the five supervisors.”

Some of the county’s knottiest development controversies of recent years have focused on the rolling hills along the southern edge of the San Gabriel Valley. It is in these communities that frustration with the county system seems to run highest. What 15 years ago were rural communities crisscrossed with country roads have taken on a gritty urban look, their main streets choked with traffic.

One of the hottest controversies concerns a major housing development proposed for a green hill just south of Rowland Heights. Opponents have been fighting it for more than two years. So far, they have forced the developer, Shea Homes, to scale down plans and to push back ground breaking on the project. But they haven’t been able to halt it--largely because Pete Schabarum wants it, critics contend.

The key to the controversy is again a concession from the developer negotiated by the supervisor, according to critics. As it stands now, Shea will be allowed to build 730 homes on the hillside just south of town, on plots as small as 6,000 square feet. But the developer will also help the county pay for an extension of a major north-south thoroughfare. “Pete wants that road so bad he can taste it,” says one leader of the opposition who has dealt extensively with the supervisor.

Schabarum’s staff insist that the supervisor took great pains to ensure that community wishes would be taken into consideration. “If our goal was simply to ram the plan down their throats, we certainly went about it in a very silly way,” said Andersen. He said that Schabarum had ordered Shea to consult with the Rowland Heights Coordinating Council, the community’s advisory committee, and that the plan had been changed accordingly seven or eight times in two years. The developer’s initial plan was for more than 1,500 homes.

One-Sided Trade

But opponents of the project, who include hundreds of homeowners in the community, say that, from their perspective, the trade-off has been one-sided, favoring a developer who has contributed $13,050 to Schabarum in the past six years. The proposed road extension--a realigned Fullerton Road, swinging east into the now undeveloped hillside area--will primarily serve residents of Shea’s new development and of other potential housing tracts to the east, they say, while the community of rambling homes and spacious yards will have to absorb a development of small, urban-sized tracts.

“The poor county doesn’t have the money to pay for a road,” said Rowland Heights homeowner Orris Abbott sarcastically, “so we have to work a deal with a developer.”

There are comparable development controversies in Diamond Bar, which is in the throes of a building boom.

Diamond Bar’s population has more than doubled in the past 15 years, from 25,000 to more than 50,000, as sprawling tracts of brand-new single-family homes along the community’s ridges nudge recently completed apartment and condominium complexes. Hundreds of new homes and offices are scheduled to go up in the remaining open spaces.

“We’re growing so fast, we’re bursting at the seams,” says one civic leader.

Civic leaders, who recently instituted a drive to incorporate Diamond Bar, contend that they are often not involved in the planning process. Builders, armed with go-aheads from the county, have just shown up at empty lots next to Diamond Bar streets and started digging, complain members of the Municipal Advisory Council. “They just do what they want to do, without any input from us,” said council member Don Stokes, citing a 160-unit condominium project now under construction on Diamond Boulevard.

Schabarum insists that little is done in Diamond Bar without the imprimatur of the Municipal Advisory Council. “Ninety percent of the time we follow the MAC’s recommendations,” said Andersen.

But Horcher cites, among others, a multi-unit senior citizens development planned for condominium-glutted northern Diamond Bar and an office and industrial park near the entrance to the Pomona Freeway--both of which got approval from the Regional Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors despite council opposition. The office and industrial complex, the present site of the Ole’s headquarters building, represented Diamond Bar’s last shot at having its own retailing center, Horcher contended.

“It was the last big piece of commercial property in town,” he said.

Schabarum aide Andersen said the county elected to approve a savings and loan institution’s plan for the Ole’s site because it was not viable as a commercial site. “The MAC was just interested in commercial development there because they need sales tax revenue in order to become a city,” Andersen said. “But that’s not good planning. It doesn’t justify the use of the land.”

Civic leaders in Hacienda Heights tend to think of the development of their once-bucolic community in terms of a long succession of lost battles. “You sit out here and you get the feeling that you don’t have a strong voice in your own planning,” says Sandy Johnson, chairman of the Hacienda Heights Improvement Assn.

With the rush to development, the community’s population of about 60,000 has already reached the level targeted for the year 2000, as projected in the community’s general plan. That represents a 25% increase in less than 10 years. But the construction keeps going on, with the encouragement of the county, according to local dissidents.

Most recently, the Regional Planning Commission gave the go-ahead to a developer to build a 163-unit apartment development for senior citizens on Gale Avenue, near the 7th Avenue off-ramp of the Pomona Freeway, despite the opposition of both the improvement association and local homeowners. “It’s already an extremely heavily traveled street,” explains Mauceri.

Meanwhile, the traffic on the community’s main thoroughfares gets worse, residents complain. “On a Friday, it takes half an hour just to drive down Colima Boulevard from Azusa Avenue to Hacienda Boulevard (about two miles),” says Mauceri. “That’s incredible. And if there’s a traffic accident, forget the whole trip.”

Schabarum sometimes expresses Job-like frustration at the potshots he often takes from his constituents. “It’s safe to say that, for every controversial decision we make in the district, there’ll be someone making the allegation that I or a member of my family own a piece of the real estate involved,” he said. “It’s the kind of mentality that a lot of people have with regard to people in elected office.”

But even some community leaders and politicians who have locked horns with Schabarum praise him for his sincerity and his directness of expression. And some of his critics acknowledge that there’s a strain of aimless bellyaching to their criticisms.

“People talk of his maverick style,” says Duarte Mayor John Van Doren, who has heatedly debated sanitation policy with Schabarum. “I admire that. I really do. People criticize him for not being sensitive to the interests of the valley. But he seems to be saying, ‘If you don’t like what I’m doing, come and get me.’ For all the noise people make about the supervisor, nobody’s taking out papers.”