Snakewall Owner Is Snakebit by Del Mar Politics

Millionaire James Smith is taking down the “For Sale” signs around his Snakewall property in Del Mar. He has not received even a nibble, although he cut the price of the city’s last large coastal estate by 40%, to $5.3 million.

“Who’d want to buy it with all these notices of violation and lawsuits running around?” Smith said. “It would take someone like me who could see through all this stuff. And I’ve found there aren’t very many Smiths like me around any more.”

Some Del Mar residents say the eccentric Smith never had his heart in assimilating into the Del Mar lifestyle. Others say he has marched to the wrong drummer in this upscale seaside city.

But Smith thinks his problem stems from the city’s desire to acquire what is his--the Snakewall.

A net of lawsuits ties Smith to his hometown of 20 years. He has filed lawsuits against the community, its city officials and some of its residents in his efforts to do something, anything, with his property. And, in most cases, the targets of his suits have sued back. Smith figures that he has spent at least half a million dollars on lawyers and legal costs.

According to Smith, “The city is trying to steal my property.”

Del Mar has placed restrictive zoning and environmental guidelines on Smith’s 20-acre estate, has merged the 20-lot subdivision existing on the Snakewall property since 1913 into one large 20-acre lot, and, when Smith sought to build a hotel on his property, city officials refused to cooperate.

And the city’s most recent action against the acerbic Smith, 58, has stymied him from selling his estate lot by lot or as a whole.

The Snakewall estate runs along the highest ridge in Del Mar and down steep slopes to the San Dieguito Lagoon. The view from the top is a 360-degree panorama of surf, Torrey pines, hazy river valley and busy Interstate 5.

A thick concrete wall, 10 feet high in places, curves around the estate, following the contours of the hillside and giving the property its name. In the center of the wooded hillside is a stately home with 2-foot-thick cement walls and cement roofing shaped and painted to resemble less durable red tiles.

The 7,000-square-foot residence, the former servants’ quarters of a bygone owner, contains seven bedrooms, 4 1/2 baths, a separate guest house and a garage capable of housing three stretch limousines. The main house, built by cement company baron Coy Burnett, burned down after a victory party celebrating the end of World War II.

For Smith, the remaining structure is just about big enough to hold the stacks of legal papers and evidence that has accumulated over the years of fighting City Hall.

Before Smith bought the property in 1977, the Snakewall estate had become much like a public park for Del Mar. Youngsters scaled the high cement wall to play among the pine trees, free from parental spying. And, each Fourth of July, families from up and down the coast invaded the hillside with blankets and party coolers to claim the best seats in town for the annual fireworks’ display at the Del Mar Fairgrounds below.

But Smith, a private person who believes in private property rights, soon put a stop to all that. His live-in security guard and fierce-looking Doberman pinschers emphasized the “No Trespassing” message on discreetly posted signs. And Smith had the hillside to himself.

Smith, who made his money in the import-export business and a dozen other enterprises, moved to Del Mar in 1972, living first in a home fronting the beach, where his two Doberman pinschers were not welcome. In fact, a deputy sheriff once informed Smith that, if either dog were spotted on the beach again, it would be shot.

“We have to have laws, I realize,” Smith said. “But this city has too damn many of them.” He sold his beachfront home five years later and was preparing to move back to his home state of Missouri when he discovered the Snakewall.

In Smith fashion, he closed escrow on the hillside estate in less than a week from the time he happened by the arching gate and formidable walls that protect the property. He paid $805,000 for it, then spent $250,000 restoring and modernizing the former servants’ quarters to his liking and settled in for a long stay.

“I knew about the merger before I bought the place,” Smith said of the city’s action in 1977 merging the 20 subdivided Snakewall lots into one 20-acre lot. “I read the document. It was just one page. And I knew that it wasn’t worth the paper it was written on,” he said.

Five years later, in 1982, state court rulings confirmed his assessment of the lot merger, and Smith asked Del Mar officials to rescind their earlier action.

Why did the city merge the 20 Snakewall lots into one? “To stop development of the property,” Smith said. “It was before I bought it, but another builder had bought the property and even put stakes on the lot lines. He was ready to start building when he found out about the merger. He didn’t have the time and money to fight the city on it. So the deal went sour.”

During “the Nancy Hoover era,” as Smith has christened the 1970s period when the former Del Mar mayor tried to freeze the city at status quo to preserve its village ambience, Smith’s presence in Del Mar politics was minimal.

Not until the early 1980s, when Nancy Hoover had gone on to fame and failure as a principal in J. David (Jerry) Dominelli’s financial pyramid scheme, did Smith become involved in marathon Monday-night council meetings for which the city is famous.

Tom Pearson, a former mayor and one of the more successful development consultants in Del Mar, recalls that the city “treated Jim Smith very poorly” in the early ‘80s in its effort to prevent development of the Snakewall property by offering to buy the estate if the price was right.

An appraiser, jointly hired by Smith and the city and informed by the city of the many development restrictions on the Snakewall estate, valued it at $1.75 million, which Smith considered much too low and the city considered a bargain. Smith then hired another appraiser, who came back with a $4-million estimate, which Smith considered too low and raised to $5.3 million.

After almost two years of negotiations, talks collapsed between Smith and the city. Smith demanded that Del Mar rescind its merger of the Snakewall lots so that he could develop the property.

In 1985, after the lot merger was finally rescinded, Smith came back to Del Mar city officials, asking that they “work in harmony” with him to build a 500-room, “five-star, world-class hotel” which would bring the city more than $1 million a year in revenues and would preserve most of the Snakewall estate in its more-or-less natural state.

But to his offer, Smith added a threat: If the hotel proposal was rejected, the property would be sold off as residential building sites.

Although the faces on the City Council had changed from “the Nancy Hoover era,” the sentiment against any massive commercial development within the mostly residential community remained. The council turned down Smith’s offer to finance two city elections to determine local opinion on the hotel proposal.

So Smith used the $10,000 that the two elections would have cost him and “went direct to the people” by successfully circulating initiative petitions for an election on rezoning of the Snakewall property to allow his planned resort complex.

Despite his pledge that each Del Mar voter would receive a lifetime membership to the resort, plus half-price food, drinks and rooms, the vote went against his project by a resounding 5-1 margin.

Smith then dropped his hotel plans and his good-guy image. He began to advertise the Snakewall’s 20 lots as residential building sites.

“By then, I’d had enough of City Hall,” Smith said, “and I told buyers that all I was doing was selling the lots, that they had to go to the city and get their own building permits.”

Snakewall lots began selling in 1987 at prices that local brokers said were reasonable. The prime hilltop site was priced at $800,000; five other ocean view lots at $500,000 each; four Zapo Street lots at $300,000; six lower lots at $400,000 and the existing Smith home and four lots at $2.1 million, for a total of $9 million.

By late last year, Smith had sold 10 of the 20 lots, and three homes had gone up on Snakewall property. It appeared as if his investment “was finally paying off,” Smith said, “until the roof caved in on me. Everything came down on me in September.”

Smith’s wife, Joyce, recently recalled those pre-September days with nostalgia.

“It was exciting when we sold a lot. Often Jim and I would take the buyers out to dinner to celebrate. Sometimes we’d get together with a group of them and listen to their plans. It was a dream that turned into a nightmare,” she said.

The nightmare became real when the Del Mar City Council passed a “notice of violation” against Smith, contending that he had violated state law by illegally retaining street and alley rights of way when he sold the Snakewall lots. Smith’s oral and paper filibusters against the city’s passage of the violation notice were in vain.

The effect of the city’s action was to make several of the already-sold Snakewall lots illegal, so the new owners could not obtain building permits. The buyers turned their anger first at the city and then on Smith. The lawsuits mounted.

Del Mar city officials cannot comment on this latest hurdle placed in Smith’s path because of the snarl of lawsuits that have been filed by almost everyone involved. One councilwoman, who asked that her name not be used, said, “Jim Smith has buried us in paper. He’s like a madman who can’t seem to face reality.”

Smith admits to being mad at the city and at its succession of city attorneys who, he believes, have pulled every legal maneuver possible to keep him from selling his property in the hopes of having the city buy it back at a bargain price.

Smith’s anger erupted at a City Council meeting last December when he brought 13 of his supporters and signed them up as speakers so that he could add their speaking time to his own “and set the record straight.”

When then-Mayor Jan McMillan rapped her gavel and informed Smith his time had expired, Smith went right on talking until a Sheriff’s Department officer in the audience politely escorted him out.

“I was wrong. I pushed my time,” Smith admitted about the incident, “but I thought what I had to put on the public record was more important than Jan McMillan’s orders.”

Smith also vented his wrath at city Planning Director James Sandoval, charging that “the most major endeavor of the city of Del Mar, its elected representatives, staff, advisers and consultants is taking away private property rights from its residents without just compensation.”

In summing up his current situation, the stubborn Smith comes close to admitting defeat.

He is caught up in a cobweb of lawsuits, no longer receiving income from the unhappy purchasers of undevelopable Snakewall lots and unable to sell the remaining 13 acres of the Snakewall, even at a bargain price. He has withdrawn the estate from the market.

As the legal fees over the latest round of lawsuits and countersuits mount to nearly $100,000, Smith has begun filing his lawsuits himself, partly as an economy move, and partly, “because I’ve gotten pretty good at this myself.”

Development consultant Pearson believes that Smith could have avoided his current predicament by some reasoned planning. Pearson has steered a number of ticklish developments through the Del Mar City Council and thinks Smith could have done the same with determination, compromise and a dash of creative genius.

“I suggested to him once that he consider a specific plan approach,” Pearson said. “But he told me that he didn’t want to bother with going through the system.”

Smith “is a victim of the elitist system this city worships,” one of his supporters said. “He’s just never learned to play the game.”

“No, and I never will,” Smith said. “They think that with this latest trouble I will cave in, but Jim Smith is a Missourian and you know what that means. You will have to kill him before he caves in.”

Former Del Mar councilwoman and mayor Brooke Eisenberg has no quarrel with Smith, although she has voted against most of the proposals he has made to the city.

“Del Mar is a town of mavericks. You would think he’d fit right in,” she said.

“I’m tired of fighting City Hall,” a discouraged Smith said in a recent interview. “I need a trip around the world,” he said, praising the restorative virtues of a jet getaway, if even for only a few days.

Or maybe he’ll buy the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas. It’s in bankruptcy and could be had for about $80 million.

“I’ve been trying to get out of this town ever since I came here,” Smith said. “Maybe this time I’ll make it.”