———–Click Photo to Enlarge Lori———

San Clemente real estate is somewhat impacted by quality of life factors including clogged roads and traffic backups that steal time from commuters.

Lori Donchak, our newest city councilperson, s doing a volunteer study of how other cities handle traffic issues, form committees, solve congestion problems and so on. Lori was a strategic planner and top level marketing researcher for more than 20 years in a past life, giving guidance to major firms including Quaker Oats and the American Heart Association.

Her goal is to determine if San Clemente should reestablish a former traffic commission panel that once existed, but got absorbed into a Planning Commission function as an economy measure some time ago.

Once input starts coming in from the Lori Donchak study, she says a task force consisting of two council members and two planning commissioners may begin to assess and solve city traffic problems.

She added that focus groups may be used to probe community attitudes about traffic and measure the local pulse on how traffic relates to quality of life in San Clemente.

She intends making a presentation to the city council in August, covering the best solutions other cities, of the several dozen cities she will study, have found.

Areas she’d focus on first would include snarls by the high school, the new outlet mall, Confordia school and more.

Such a project would normally cost in the double digited many thousands of dollars. But Lori is doing it pro bono, so we should all thank her now and especially a few years from now when her work saves us tons of time getting around our fair town of San Clemente.

Mayor Stephanie Dorey (L) and Realtor Debbie Ferrari during a San Clemente Street fair.

WE WILL GREATLY MISS STEPHANIE DOREY

She, age 64, passed away Friday from malignant melanoma.

This is only Monday and I guarantee you, the accolades for Stephanie Dorey are just beginning. If there was a mayor who was actually BELOVED by a community, it was Stephanie.

Twas she who led the fight to “Derail the Trail, a city-proposed paved coastal trail that she and her grass-roots group saw as being incongruous considering the home town ambiance of our valuable beaches. She and her group won, and on an environmental platform, this ex-teacher got herself elected to city council on an environmental platform.

She also led the fight to squelch the state-sponsored plan to allow a double set of train tracks just above the beach. She won again, and helped create a San Clemente Watershed Task Force.

She even got our voters to pay a “clean ocean fee”to help reduce urban runoff. She got us to stop smoking on the beach and to restrict the use of styrofoam.

Her husband John, is a most stalwart man who was always at her side, providing support right to the end. I can only imagine his sorrow at the loss of such a splendid woman.

John asks that in lieu of flowers, we make donations to the San Clemente Watershed Task Force, one of Stephanie’s favorite projects.

Debbie

Last night at the fabulous Chamber of Commerce mixer held at the elegant Pacific Coast National Bank on Calle Amanacer in San Clemente, we met the delightful April Driggers, Account Executive of the San Clemente Sun Post Newspaper.

She has only been there about a month and she was aware of the big MLS ad that I run every Tuesday in the “Business Cards” ad section.

Soon, we will be running a new series of ads that are soooo remarkable that we can’t really say right now what they are. But they will be so unique among Realtor ads that the whole town will be talking about these real estate-related ads when they begin to run, once a week or maybe a little more often.

Meanwhile, my “If Donald Trump listens to Debbie, shouldn’t you too?” Realtor ad keeps running in the San Clemente Journal and is also in the San Clemente Chamber of Commerce’s 2007 Community Directory that goes to thousands of homes in the area.

If you want to contact April to have her place ads for you in the San Clemente Sun Post newspaper, here is her contact information:

April Driggers
Account Executive
The Orange County Register, OC Post,
The Sun Post News, OC HOME Magazine,
Coast KIDS Magazine, Squeeze OC Magazine
(949) 454-7396
(949) 351-0817 (cell)
(949) 454-7388 (fax)
adriggers@ocregister.com
Assistant - Pat Stone
pstone@ocregister.com
949-465-5411

Every time I walk out on the wide, San Clemente pier, about 1,400 feet long, I marvel at how that sturdy wood structure could withstand constant ocean buffeting. There it perches on long “telephone poles” driven down, I suppose, to bedrock, and barely sways even during a storm.

You see fishermen on it all the time, but I only saw several who had actually caught fish. But that could be because I’m a late riser and never see fisherman early in the AM when fish are the biggest feeders.

I love July 4th, in San Clemente, because you can reserve a table right on the pier, have dinner, drinks and watch the fireworks taking place just a few hundred feet away towards the end of the pier.

Or, if you can get invited, you can spend a more cozy, private-party social evening up at the Casa Romantica, home of San Clemente’s founder, Ole Hanson, back in the twenties, before everything hit the fan in the crash of 1929.

There at the Casa, you overlook the entire pier basin, but especially the pier and the ensuing fireworks with perhaps a better perspective and less neck strain than from being right on the pier.

Yes, nearby Dana Point has its lovely harbor, and restaurants with fabulous harbor and coastal views like the Chart House and Cannon’s (where I proposed to Debbie at a Window Table),

but the harbor is sooooo commercial, with fiberglass, canvas, and concrete all over the place. While our San Clemente pier, is real honest creaky wood…a real joy to behold and walk upon. —Bill