Rebel With a Cause Rattles City Hall

As each of his City Council colleagues took a swipe at his plan this month to ban noisy leaf blower machines in Costa Mesa, an impatient Dave Wheeler smirked, his dark eyes slowly moving back and forth like the eyes of a Felix-the-Cat wall clock.

“I’ll be back in six months to tell you it’s not working,” Wheeler warned the four council members, referring to the council’s decision to shelve his proposal and allow the 4,000-member Southern California Gardeners’ Federation to voluntarily muffle the loud machines.

A Determined Presence

It wasn’t a crushing defeat, but to Wheeler, a new and determined presence on the local political scene, it was just another example of knocking his head against bureaucratic walls and of city officials choosing the rights of business over citizen concerns.

“The good old boys have been running the city for their own purposes for too long,” Wheeler said. “They view me as the leader of the threat to business-as-usual. And they’re right. I am. They don’t want the boat rocked. I’m rocking the boat.”

It has been just 14 months since Dave Wheeler, a 30-year-old former UC Irvine campus radical and candy machine mechanic, was elected to the Costa Mesa City Council, and in that time, he has earned a reputation as a the council’s resident iconoclast.

Wheeler aggravates many Costa Mesa developers and businessmen with his anti-growth stands. And he disgusts his more conservative colleagues, who frequently pass him notes during council meetings admonishing him to stop making faces at builders and to tone down his trial-lawyer style of grilling city bureaucrats.

To his admirers, however, Wheeler is a breath of fresh air in Orange County, a political original whose freewheeling style and independence are needed at a time when this suburban town of 86,000 is at a crossroads, bursting with urban possibilities.

Magnet for High-Rise

In the last year alone, Costa Mesa officials have processed $290 million worth of private development, including a 3,000-seat Performing Arts Center and the expansion of a 2.9-million-square-foot regional shopping mall. Once a sleepy bedroom community nestled against the borders of Santa Ana and exclusive Newport Beach, Costa Mesa has become a magnet for modern high-rise buildings, hotels and restaurants, many with striking architectural designs.

For some, including Wheeler, these dramatic changes are unwelcome.

‘A Fraternal Order’

“There has developed over the years a fraternal order involving the corporate community, city staff, developers and council members,” said Larry Agran, an Irvine city councilman who shares Wheeler’s cautious philosophy about the unbridled development of southern Orange County.

“It has been so cozy, each one scratching the other’s back, but the question has not been asked often enough, ‘Is all of this serving the broad public interest?’ I give a lot of credit to people like Dave Wheeler who are willing to ask the tough questions.

“Clearly,” added Agran, “That is going to make a lot of people uncomfortable.”

The bulk of Wheeler’s disagreements with the council have arisen when builders and developers have come before the city seeking permission to build new projects or expand existing businesses or real estate holdings.

Wheeler, an attorney who was elected in November, 1984, by a grass-roots coalition that wants to retain the city’s quiet, residential character, has stubbornly voted against virtually all of these requests.

“There is a land-use decision at almost every single council meeting that can negatively impact the people of the city in terms of traffic, pollution, crowding and noise,” Wheeler said. “Orange County is going to grow. There’s just no way to stop that. The question is how much and how fast are we going to allow our little segment to grow? And I say a helluva lot slower than in the past.”

Not surprisingly, Wheeler’s election has irked Costa Mesa’s builders.

“He’s very confrontational and he’s made some very irresponsible statements over a period of time, whether it’s regarding our business with the city or other things,” said George Argyros, president of Arnel Development Co. and owner of the Seattle Mariners baseball team.

‘Rather a Tragedy’

“We just try and avoid him,” Argyros added. “It’s rather a tragedy in many respects.”

Adds Donn Hall, who is perhaps Wheeler’s biggest critic on the City Council, “I guess the thing that ruffles most people (about Wheeler) is his rather antagonistic method of courtroom cross-examination. Everybody seems to be an adversary. It would probably take a psychiatrist to analyze why he does these things--insecurity, a persecution complex, it’s in there somewhere.”

Clashes over a city’s future landscape are not unusual in Costa Mesa or any other Orange County community. But the tensions generated by Wheeler’s manner have created rifts between him and his colleagues.

During a council meeting last October, for example, Wheeler got into a heated exchange with representatives from C.J. Segerstrom & Sons Co. and the Arnel Development Co. over mysterious cracks that have begun to appear in more than 100 homes located near their construction projects.

At one point in the discussion, Norma Hertzog, Costa Mesa’s mayor and a 12-year council veteran, turned to Wheeler and said, “How rude!” in response to one of his comments.

“The assumption that people are guilty is a real concern to me,” Hertzog said in a subsequent interview. “We give them (the developers) the respect that they deserve, and if all the conditions are placed on their project, there is very little (a developer) can get away with.”

Unlike some of Wheeler’s critics, however, Hertzog concedes that he contributes to the council debate, even if she doesn’t appreciate his style.

“He’s bright and there are times when he has some very good ideas,” Hertzog said.

“I think that unless he learns to become a team player and be responsive to the total council it will be difficult for him to accomplish any goals. He refuses to go through the process.”

Douglas Clark, Costa Mesa’s director for development services and a 14-year City Hall veteran, said that with Wheeler on the council, “I had to be more prepared than I used to be. Before (Wheeler) things were a little more routine, development proposals that came in didn’t get that much scrutiny.

Biggest Supporter

“I found the cross-examination fun, challenging. I didn’t know what to expect,” added Clark, who is leaving his job this week to become the city manager of Larkspur in Northern California.

Wheeler’s biggest supporter on the council is Mary Hornbuckle, who was elected by the same grass-roots coalition and who often finds herself with Wheeler on the losing side of key development votes.

“It’s never dull with Dave around,” Hornbuckle mused. “He’s a very intelligent man; he certainly does his homework and is on top of the issues.”

While Hornbuckle admits to having passed her share of notes to Wheeler asking him to cool his heels during council sessions, she, like fellow Councilwoman Arlene Schafer, is more tolerant of his manner. “I think there are people in the community who rather enjoy seeing someone tweak the nose of government and big developers,” Hornbuckle, 43, said. “Probably some find his behavior endearing if not humorous. It’s not my style.”

“I have to feel a little sorry for him sometimes. Having been a campus radical, more or less growing up when anti-establishment theory was big, it must be tough to be part of the establishment right now. It must produce mixed feelings at best.”

The son of an Illinois factory worker, William David Wheeler excelled in school and was courted by the prestigious University High School, affiliated with the University of Illinois. But he ended up attending the neighborhood high school in Champaign instead because his parents, he says, did not want him to grow up to be “an egg head.”

“They wanted me to stay in the public school system and grow up to be a real-life kid,” Wheeler explained with a shrug. “There was always a real distinction in my family between educated idiots and people with common sense.”

“We wanted him to make a good living,” explained Wheeler’s father, Bill Wheeler, who worked his way up from janitor to plant superintendent at a division of Kraft Foods before he was forced to retire on a medical disability.

“And along the way he was always to taught to do things middle- and lower-class people had to do. He’s the kind of fella that can tear an engine out and fix it. How many lawyers you know can do that?”

Know to Stir Things Up

While the idea to run for public office did not occur to him until his 20s, Wheeler was known to stir things up long before then.

“I guess my first political foray was over the open lunch issue in high school,” Wheeler said. “They used to lock us up in the lunch room like some kind of animals. And a lot of other schools would allow you to go outside, so I started a petition. Then I marched about 100 angry students on the school board meeting and made a bunch of demands.” He won.

Wheeler’s political activism--and individuality--blossomed further at UCI where he majored in political science.

In 1977, when most of his peers running for student body president were clean cut, their statements filled with safe, political jargon, Wheeler, long-haired and mustached, seemed like a throwback to the ‘60s.

His platform as the write-in candidate began like this: “I stand for some things UCI lacks enough of: (1) drugs, (2) sex and (3) activism.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” he said, when asked about the 1977 statement that helped get him elected.

Today, Wheeler’s hair is short, his mustache trimmed, and with his heavy, dark-framed glasses he could pass for a young Groucho Marx. He owns three suits and usually wears the same stained red tie to City Council and court appearances. Otherwise, at home or at his office, it’s blue jeans and a T-shirt.

Although he has a fashionable professional address in Newport Beach and an active caseload, Wheeler says he earned less than $20,000 in 1985 from his private law practice. He says he often has to scrape together his share of the $820 monthly rent for the two-bedroom apartment he shares with his roommate, a law clerk who is waiting to take the bar exam.

“I have a bad habit of not writing down people’s bills,” said Wheeler, who practices personal injury and family law. “I get carried away and put too much work into somebody’s case and then I don’t charge them.”

14-Hour Days

As both a part-time councilman and lawyer, Wheeler puts in 14-hour days, chain smoking his way through them.

He enjoys going on ride-alongs with the police, paramedics and sewer workers to get a feel for city issues. His idea of a good time last New Year’s Eve, for example, was prowling the streets for drunk drivers with Costa Mesa police until 5 a.m.

Wheeler first ran for City Council in 1982 and lost. He tried again in 1984, but this time--with the backing of neighborhood groups and Mesa Action, a political action committee--Wheeler won one three of the seats up for grabs, placing second in a field of 11 candidates with 13,487 votes.

Since his election, he has been vocal on many issues, among them child care and excessive noise from the outdoor Pacific Amphitheatre. Wheeler has also repeatedly proposed, so far unsuccessfully, a property tax cut for Costa Mesa homeowners.

These positions have earned Wheeler high marks from a host of Costa Mesa homeowner association presidents and many citizens. However, he has also earned his share of enemies.

Just months after his election in November, 1984, a man who would not identify himself approached local reporters with what he said was “dirt” on Wheeler.

The man gave the reporters a Manila folder that contained, among other things: a flyer that was circulated by a group called the Young Conservative Action Fund during Wheeler’s 1984 campaign showing a long-haired Wheeler sitting near a man identified as Black Panther Party Leader Bob Duran; some torn up $2 race track betting stubs, and two tax documents, one indicating Wheeler underpaid $2,016 in 1983 federal taxes, the other showing he had subsequently paid them.

‘Dirty Tricks’

“It’s no secret that there are people out there that will do anything and spend any amount of money to knock me off the council,” he said, adding “That does not intimidate me.

“What can you do about it? Dirty tricks are not uncommon in Orange County politics.” Wheeler’s sometimes combative manner and inexperience as a public official, however, have been at the root of some of the controversy that surrounds him.

Although he insists that he did not do anything improper, Wheeler was formally reprimanded by the council last March after he allegedly impersonated a police officer during a freeway incident.

According to a police report, Wheeler flashed his City Council badge and tried to pull over a motorist who, Wheeler maintained, had cut him off and made an obscene gesture.

The other driver, Costa Mesa resident Raymond Smith, refused to pull over and drove home with Wheeler in angry pursuit. Smith ran into his apartment and called for police, explaining that a man was at his door yelling he was a police officer.

Costa Mesa Officers arrived, said they detected alcohol on Wheeler’s breath and drove him home. Smith never pressed charges.

Wheeler concedes that he doesn’t have the temperament to be a conventional politician and is not interested in higher office.

“You have to toe a middle ground, and I have a real problem doing that,” he said. “The voters will just have to take me or leave me, warts and all.”