on the cover / By Hank Sims

Campbell’s Account

Are the Fortuna mayor’s undisclosed checks from Pacific Lumber a problem?

(Sept. 20, 2007)  If Fortuna ever builds a big box mega-mall, it’s likely that Clif Clendenen would be one of the prime beneficiaries. The lanky 54-year-old is the owner and operator of Clendenen’s Cider Works, a fruit stand and orchard that has been in his family for over 100 years. The Cider Works is located directly across 12th Street from the old Pacific Lumber mill, a 75-acre site that has been vacant for two years. There’s easy access to 12th Street from the freeway. If a major retail center were to draw thousands of cars per day into the neighborhood, more than a few of them would probably make an extra stop at Clendenen’s for some fresh produce.

But Clendenen — a farmer and businessman who is just as happy talking about smart growth and urban planning — is a vocal skeptic of big box development. Like many people, he cherishes Fortuna’s “Friendly City” image. He fears that massive retail development could damage the city’s small-town appeal. And he worries that city government could be throwing away a chance to do something extraordinary with the abandoned Pacific Lumber mill.

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“I really think we should do this as a community,” Clendenen said last week, taking a break from his duties at the Cider Works. “Let’s come up with a really good community plan. And let’s not do it with a guy on a backhoe sitting behind us.”

A couple of weeks ago, as part of its drive to update its general plan, the city of Fortuna released three sketches for what might become of the old Pacific Lumber mill and the neighborhood surrounding it — what the city is now calling “the Mill District.” In two of the three sketches, the site would be anchored by large-format shopping centers — either factory outlets or big box retail stores like Wal-Mart. The latter is the type of development favored by Sacramento-area developer Fred Katz, who has been actively eyeing the site for some time.

The fact that the sketch plans were weighted toward regional retail centers came as something of a surprise to Clendenen, in a way. He noted that the city’s own consultants had considered a regional shopping center to be the “least realistic” option for the future of the town, and the least likely way to provide quality jobs for residents. But at the same time, it wasn’t all that surprising, Clendenen said. He’d long had the impression that the city was tending toward big box, no matter what its consultants thought.

“The process always seemed like it was a little odd,” Clendenen said. “They had this proposal from Fred Katz, and that was always hanging over things. The push seems to be toward the Katz project, and the blinders are on to head that way.”

This raises some questions. It would be a rare Fortunan who didn’t know that their mayor, John Campbell, has strong ties to Pacific Lumber. Campbell served as senior management at the company since the ancient timber company’s takeover by the Texas-based Maxxam Corp. in 1986, quickly rising to become the company’s chief executive officer and later the chairman of its board of directors. He was the face of Pacific Lumber through the turbulent 1990s, a decade that began with Redwood Summer, a season of large-scale protests against industrial logging on the North Coast, and ended with the Headwaters Forest Agreement, a public buyout of the company’s largest remaining virgin stand of old-growth redwood.

Until recently, though, few people knew that Campbell has an active, ongoing contractual relationship with Pacific Lumber, which declared bankruptcy in January of this year. Until recently, few people knew that Pacific Lumber agreed to sell the old Fortuna mill to mall developer Fred Katz as far back as 2003, and that Katz and Pacific Lumber together had settled on a plan that would put a big box store on the site, with the city of Fortuna footing much of the bill.

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