BYRON DE ARAKAL -- Between The Lines

FROM SOMEWHERE IN NEWPORT BEACH -- The situation here in this

once-tranquil seaside hamlet is unraveling with some dispatch, though for

now I am safe. But only for now, as it’s quite murky as to who holds

power.

Our party waited out the pitch black and frigid cold of night holed up

in a windowless storage room at a popular local eatery called Original

Pizza, just off McFadden Square. It’s proprietor, a friend and

well-connected chap named Robert Kalatschan, assured us we’d be safe from

the anti-development warlords and their marauding band of petulant

followers.

Kalatschan -- a streetwise merchant -- warned us, however, that it was

dangerous now for journalists to travel without escort. He advised us

that our safety was only assured provided we proclaim the names Bren,

Koll and Sutherland as infidels on occasions when confronted by aging

torchbearers with the word “Greenlight” stenciled to their foreheads.

We made it here by sheer luck and a little blackmail. We were spirited

to our location in the trunk of an automobile owned by Bob Caustin, a

grenade thrower in the local environmental movement. Caustin at first

refused to accommodate our need to reach the battle zone. But when we

confronted him with infrared satellite imagery that clearly showed him

hosing down his driveway in the dead of night -- and informing him that

we would have no qualms turning it over to the Santa Ana Regional Water

Quality Board -- he relented.

Caustin wasn’t our first choice. Our original plan was to reach the

front lines of the Greenlight Revolution undetected by stowing away in

the carriage of Allan Beek, a top general of the anti-development

insurgents. But intelligence reports revealed his 1961 VW bug to be too

small for our party and ill-suited for the cratered streets of the Balboa

Peninsula. Nonetheless, we are here.

The Greenlight Revolution has entered a new and ominous phase. And the

battlefront has shifted to the peninsula, where heavy gunfire has broken

out between the city’s elected leaders and the moujahedeen of the

Greenlight movement over a 147-room resort called Marinapark near the

city’s historic American Legion outpost. The shape and intensity of this

battle is the freshest evidence yet that the once peaceful activism of

the Greenlight Revolution is quickly escalating into a coup d’etat

against the city’s power structure.

Sutherland Talla Hospitality Co. -- whose ambassador, Stephen

Sutherland, has been engaged in extended shuttle diplomacy in search of

detente over the Marinapark development -- took casualties during a

friendly fire incident before the City Council last week. Some of

Sutherland’s council allies -- on the record supporting the Marinapark

resort as a “gem” -- nonetheless beat a hasty retreat under a withering

fusilladeof criticism from the Greenlight revolutionaries. Sutherland

barely won permission from the ruling body to begin studying the

project’s environmental effects, but in the victory had to feel like a

leper at a handshaking convention.

Though the vote was largely symbolic, the capitulation of the

project’s council supporters seems to have emboldened even the moderate

Greenlight soldiers -- who had been rumored to be seeking a development

project they could get behind -- to wrest away the city’s development

powers.

The evidence of this surfaced Saturday, when Phil Arst, head of the

Greenlight Information Ministry, issued a statement calling on the city

to place a moratorium on all development projects while the city’s

general plan is being reviewed and updated.

Not coincidentally, the Greenlight movement is pummeling the city’s

left flank with claims that its revolutionaries are in danger of being

underrepresented on the committee charged with retooling the general

plan. Arst’s call for a development moratorium -- an undeniable flexing

of the Greenlight movement’s momentum -- is said to be a clear frontal

assault to buy time as it girds to grab more power in shaping the city’s

future.

At this stage, it’s clear the City Council is running scared of the

rebellion. The Greenlight movement -- exceptionally efficient at

mobilizing ground troops -- has sewn political terror among the seats of

power in City Hall.

The momentum won’t change until the council fields a fresh young army

of constituents willing to back, fight and vote for a vision of Newport

Beach that they want, said one observer in our party.

“This should be a war of the next generation versus the last

generation,” he said. “When you’re fighting to shape the future of a

city, you don’t turn over all the power to the folks who won’t be there.”

* Byron de Arakal is a writer and communications consultant. He lives

in Costa Mesa. Readers can reach him with news tips and comments via

e-mail ato7 [email protected] .