Celebratory Party Being Planned for Later in May
It was May 4, 1976, and thousands of OB residents, property owners and business owners took part in a day-long election to select the very first Ocean Beach Planning Board. It was the first time a community democratically elected their volunteer citizen planning committee in San Diego history.
Fifty years later, we celebrate this victory for the OB Planning Board is still alive and kicking. And now there are over 40 other community planning boards across the city.
Here’s the history of the moment 5 decades ago.
Working with the San Diego County Registrar of Voters and the League of Women Voters, Ocean Beach was divided into 7 voting districts, and on May 4th, there were one to two voting sites per district, mainly in front of markets. The balloting took place all day – and at the appointed hour, ballot boxes were taken to the OB Recreation Center for counting, with everything monitored by the League of Women Voters.
When the votes came in, it was apparent that the election and its turnout had been astounding. Thousands had voted. All told, nearly 4500 ballots were cast in this special election. With a community population of 13,000, the eligibility rolls included 6,100 registered voters, 2,100 property owners (1,100 inside the plan area and 1,000 outside the area), and 600 business license holders.
Here are the voting totals by most of the districts:
- District 1: 851 ballots were cast.
- District 2: 1,108 voted;
- District 3 had 755 votes.
- District 4: 1,085 voted in District 4 – the business district
- District 5 had the lowest turnout – with 696 votes.
These were stunning numbers. And the big news of the day was that candidates from the very grassroots network, the Community Planning Group had captured eight of the 14 seats on the Board, a clear majority.
Some of those elected had been involved since the beginning in the battle for OB’s community plan. They included a mix of Town Council types, counter-cultural radicals, anarchists, a “socialist”, professionals and small merchants. The sweep by the planning group candidates was empowering and historic; a small neighborhood organization had grown to be the majority on the first planning board democratically elected in the city’s history. After the first Board was sworn in, the members selected a woman activist as its first general chairperson, Maryann Zounes, and then got down to the business of figuring out to how to proceed, how to operate. That Board and those that followed over the five decades since provide the modern history of development in Ocean Beach.
A number of OB groups, like the Rag, the OB Historical Society, the OBPB and the OBCF, will host a celebration party later this month. Stay tuned.
My how things have changed.