This green glory of cypress and chaparral, where hawks soar overhead and mountain lions run from ridge top to river, is ground zero in the battle for the town of Carmel Valley.

Here, on 81 acres between Carmel Middle School and the Carmel River, developers want to build Rancho Cañada Village, around 280 new houses and condo units, parks and open space.

“If we succeed, the Town Council will get the final say on this subdivision,” says Glenn Robinson, who opposes the Rancho Cañada Village. “It is becoming the corner-stone issue of this election. A no vote on Measure G is a yes vote on the Rancho Cañada subdivision.”

Robinson, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, has helped spearhead the incorporation effort for nearly a decade. Now that residents will finally get to vote on Measure G on the November ballot, Robinson’s running for a seat on the Town Council. (If the majority of voters say yes to incorporation, they’ll also elect a five-member body to govern the new town, which would open for business next July.)

He and other prominent incorporation supporters, including former county supervisor Karin Strasser Kauffman, and current left-of-center Supervisors Dave Potter and Jane Parker, see the battle as a fight over larger issues that have dominated debates in Carmel Valley, and the county, for the last 20 years. There’s a strong drive to develop, on one side, with big-moneyed builders and powerful land-use attorneys who pad the campaign war chests – and have the ears – of the Monterey County Board of Supervisors. The other side, Carmel Valley’s well-heeled environmental community, adept at stalling projects they don’t like with lawsuits, hopes Carmel Valley can serve as a model for “smart growth” that incorporates development when needed (and when there’s sufficient water and roadways), but also draws a firm line in the sand – or sage brush – against unchecked commercialism.

It’s a debate that’s being played out against an unusual economic and political backdrop, given the recession of 2008-09 and government meltdowns at the state level and in many local jurisdictions. Despite years of fiscal studies – all of which paint a rosy financial picture for the new town of Carmel Valley, including a robust cash reserve of almost $6 million over the first few years – it’s surprising to some that incorporation, whose potential costs, as hotly contested as everything else in the debate, is even on the ballot at all.

“I’m a businessman,” says Carmel Development Company President Alan Williams who, along with Clint Eastwood, makes up the Rancho Cañada Village development team. “The numbers, to me, just don’t add up.”

But for others, the time for a public vote is long overdue and the fiscal concerns overplayed. “It’s a very conservative budget, and still runs a surplus, even during down economies like we’re in,” asserts Larry Bacon, a professional investment advisor, registered Republican and candidate for the Town Council. Bacon worked with the Carmel Valley Forum and the county to craft a plan that the county would sign off on – negotiations that took both parties through four budget iterations. “The first budget was not very good, but the numbers now are very sound. All parties involved agree it would work.”

On Nov. 3, the 7,700 eligible voters of the proposed Carmel Valley township will decide for themselves.

The Green Team and The Developers have been locking horns for years, so the battle will likely be waged in the middle. As with health care and other hot-button political topics, success or failure may depend on how the debate is framed – and how well scare tactics work.

~ ~ ~~

Carmel Valley is a uniquely curious place, where bobcats coexist with BMWs. It’s part tree-dotted hills inhabited by horses, goats and golden eagles, and part suburbia, where only the affluent can afford to call a ranch house home. It’s a place that appeals to day visitors seeking the sun, and celebrities seeking the splendor. (Bob Dylan lived here with Joan Baez; Earth, Wind & Fire used to host famous parties at their mansion getaway; Andre Agassi married Brooke Shields at Stonepine, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch still owns a massive ranch just past the village.)

There’s only one main route in and out: Carmel Valley Road, which runs from Highway 1 and the bustling shopping centers at the mouth of the valley, east past golf courses, world-class resorts, rolling pastures and parks, and after about 12 miles reaches the Carmel Valley Village, a tiny hub where tasting rooms, galleries and restaurants share the road with the town park, the lumber yard, grocery store and cowboy bar. There’s a country feel throughout, and most Carmel Valley residents don’t mind that there’s no more dumping of old trucks in the riverbed (an attempt to shore it up and prevent flooding) – but they also don’t want to see the community lose its bucolic, rural-village charm.

So perhaps it’s fitting that the incorporation fight would take nine years to reach a vote, while most similar efforts reach resolution in about three. (Or maybe it’s simply indicative of land-use and water-policy power struggles in Monterey County, where a court-ordered, long-term water supply fix is almost 15 years overdue, and the General Plan Update, intended to be the county’s blueprint for growth through 2020, has gone through five re-writes since 2000 and won’t be finalized until 2010.)

It’s a long, expensive saga, littered with lawsuits and charges of political corruption. It also has a repetitive, Groundhog Day quality that’s enough to make all but the most casual spectators start banging their collective heads against the wall in frustration.

Early in 2000, a group of Carmel Valley residents looked (again) at incorporation – it was an idea that other locals had kicked around in the past – and raised money to pay for an independent analysis of a new town’s finances. When the study showed that a Town of Carmel Valley would be financially viable, the residents formed a nonprofit, called the Carmel Valley Forum, to move the petition for incorporation through the Local Agency Formation Commission’s (LAFCO) process.

First, the forum was tasked with collecting signatures from at least 25 percent of all registered Carmel Valley voters. They got 27 percent, or about 2,000 valid ones – at least 50 percent from mouth-of-the-valley neighborhoods. In 2003, the forum presented the signatures and the petition to LAFCO, and in 2005, after years of meetings and comprehensive studies, LAFCO boardmembers unanimously issued a finding that the proposed incorporation petition would not need a full-scale Environmental Impact Report (EIR). Things appeared to be going along swimmingly for the Forum. But then, the process headed south.

In October 2006, a new LAFCO board voted 5-2 to require several new studies – including the EIR – to be completed before the issue could be put on the ballot, and paid for by incorporation proponents. In doing so, commissioners reversed the unanimous earlier decision that such a report would be unnecessary – and they ignored an independent experts’ report, which said the same thing, and their own executive officer’s recommendation.

Commissioners did, however, pay close attention to attorney Tony Lombardo, who represents the anti-incorporation crowd, and who wrote, “an environmental impact report on the proposal to incorporate Carmel Valley must be prepared.” While his letters contained no explicit threat to sue, one did warn that allowing an incorporation vote would “likely violate state law,” and LAFCO boardmembers cited the threat of litigation as a reason to deny Carmel Valley residents a vote on the issue.

Lombardo’s got his own sordid back-story when it comes to Carmel Valley. (Lombardo did not return phone calls for this story.) His family owns the Rancho Cañada Village property, and he represents development projects like Carmel Valley Ranch, a 144-suite luxury resort in the hills near Mid-Valley, and the September Ranch subdivision. Both projects have been in and out of court for years, and evidence that Lombardo’s law firm has “ghostwritten” official county documents has tainted Carmel Valley Ranch and September Ranch. (About a decade ago, the Monterey County Superior Court ruled that the county planning department and water resource agency had allowed Lombardo & Gilles attorneys to ghostwrite hundreds of documents in dozens of different files, including some related to Carmel Valley Ranch.)

The routine goes something like this: Lombardo represents the big-money project applicants. Opponents argue the developments don’t have water rights; County Supervisors ignore the evidence and rubber-stamp the proposals without any environmental review. Then, typically, land-use watchdogs sue, a judge rules in the watchdogs’ favor, and a few years later, a new version of the same project emerges. (The September Ranch EIR – its third – recently became available for public comment.)

In March 2006, the forum filed a lawsuit.

Two years later (2008), a judge ruled that LAFCO wrongly stalled the incorporation process. “LAFCO abused its discretion when it decided that incorporation of the Town of Carmel Valley was (1) a project and (2) that an EIR was required,” concluded Monterey Superior Court Judge Lydia Villarreal in her May 7, 2008 decision.

Incorporation supporters expected the next move to be a slam-dunk: LAFCO would recommend the supervisors put the issue on the ballot and residents would finally vote. Only it wasn’t that simple.

In December 2008, LAFCO approved the incorporation proposal. Then another lawsuit stalled the process.

This January, local attorney Franklin J. Lunding and Planning 2020 Inc., a group he founded, sued Monterey County, the supervisors, and Carmel Valley Forum over the “revenue neutrality agreement” between Monterey County and the proposed town of Carmel Valley. (This agreement would require the new town to share new income it generates with the county so that the incorporation is “revenue neutral.”) Lunding has his own questionable ties to a southern California campaign contribution scandal, and incorporation supporters worry Lunding and his group are allegedly on the take from developers who don’t want to see Carmel Valley incorporate. (In an earlier Weekly interview, Lunding said the group had received money from Monterey County contributors, but he wouldn’t name them.)

Finally, county supervisors agreed to put the issue on the Nov. 3 ballot.

Back in May 2003, the Carmel Valley Forum agreed to pay LAFCO a $5,000 deposit plus “pass-through” costs for processing the application. At the time, LAFCO estimated these costs would run about $100,000. Carmel Valley Forum agreed to the price. To date, the group has paid $260,000 to pay for studies, LAFCO staff time and legal fees.

The supervisors also settled with Lunding out of court (Lunding has since filed another lawsuit) and as part of the agreement, Lunding got to bash incorporation efforts at the Sept. 1 Supes’ meeting.

This doesn’t sit well with incorporation supporters.

“Can you imagine, before a P.G. election, if the Pacific Grove City Council allowed [anti-establishment activist] David Dilworth to come blast [the mayor] and the city, all in an effort to affect the election that is going to be happening?” Robinson asks. “It’s shameful.”

~ ~ ~

The Carmel Valley Town Council race is a circus, with 15 candidates running for five seats – but about half say they don’t want the job, and don’t want to see the town incorporate. For some, it’s a matter of political ideology: Local realtor Lawrence Samuels and actor Savva Vassiliev, both running as part of the anti-incorporation slate, are Libertarians. Others, like Bob White, an 81-year-old former Monterey County treasurer-tax collector, and 18-year-old Jacob Odello, a recent Carmel High School graduate from a local family of wealthy landowners, say they don’t support incorporation, but will serve on the council if elected.

Some anti-town folk say they worry incorporation will ruin Carmel Valley’s rural character. It’s more likely, however, that the community’s existing governing body, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors, will.

“History has shown that the concerns of the community have been ignored,” Supervisor Dave Potter says.

This is why, ultimately, incorporation is about local control. Carmel Valley residents have one representative on the Board of Supervisors – Potter, who lives in Carmel, and who is routinely outvoted by the other elected officials when it comes to land-use policy decisions. There isn’t any extra water in Carmel Valley, which means most individuals can’t even get a permit to build a second bathroom. But when it comes to big-ticket development projects – like Carmel Valley Ranch, Rancho San Carlos, the Quail hotel expansion and Clint Eastwood’s Tehema – the supes eagerly have given the green light, usually by a 4-1 vote, with Potter dissenting.

“The community has come forward and spoken at supervisors’ meetings and not been heard – that’s a historical fact,” says Potter, who has endorsed Measure G. “I don’t think there’s anything [related to Carmel Valley development] that hasn’t had a 4-1 vote. I can’t think of a single one, which means, for 12 years, supervisors have just said, ‘Well, thanks for the testimony, but we don’t think that’s right.’ I don’t see that being the purpose of a public hearing.”

Jane Parker, the newest county supervisor, who generally votes with Potter on growth issues, is expected to be a second voice for pro-town Carmel Valley residents at the county level. But, if history is an indicator, this still gives the forces that would prefer to pave paradise a 3-2 majority.

“It’s clear that the people in Carmel Valley have been concerned for quite a number of years about how the decisions are made – at the county level – about growth and development in Carmel Valley,” Parker says. “Those concerns have grown to a level of frustration where many people in Carmel Valley feel that they need to have more control over their own decision-making, and that’s where the desire for incorporation – or at least to bring the question to the voters – comes into play.

“Is the frustration justified? Sometimes it can be a matter of opinion, ‘I like this decision,’ or ‘I didn’t like that decision.’ I would say there’s a clear justification for the residents’ concerns when there is an adopted local land-use plan, where the residents got together and said, ‘Here’s our vision, here’s our idea, here’s where we want things to happen and how,’ and then things that are not consistent with the spirit or the letter of that plan are then approved.”

And this, says former-supervisor-turned-Town-Council-candidate Karin Strasser Kauffman, is why she’s getting back into the political game.

“Looking at the critical point we’re at, it’s a pretty easy decision to run,” she says. “It’s about local control.”

Twenty-five years ago, the community drafted the Carmel Valley Master Plan, which places a “limit on development” in the area, until the long-dead Hatton Canyon Bypass was constructed. This land-use document essentially bans subdivisions and other traffic-intensive projects in the valley – and it is routinely ignored by the county.

“Our Master Plan [was drafted], 25 years ago. That was a really critical time when we were at a crossroads,” Strasser Kauffman says, “and that’s why I agreed to run for office. I was perfectly happy teaching.”

She ran, and won, and served on the Board of Supervisors from 1984 to 1993.

“And now, as then, we’re going to have to work to protect the rural character of our valley. It’s not a given. If we don’t, it’s going to become a nice crowded place to live with all the usual problems.”

So it’s showdown time in Carmel Valley. Will those in favor of local control win the shootout and bring local development and governance issues to a town council comprised of Carmel Valley residents? Or will voters fear the unknown and unintended consequences, and leave the decision-making to the supervisors in Salinas?

“I think it’s going to be extremely close,” Potter says. “And I don’t think prolonging the public’s ability to vote did anything other than further the public’s frustration.”