After drawing neighborhood complaints last fall, South OC Cars and Coffee, a popular car show based in San Clemente, today faces a pivotal public hearing to determine the fate of the event.
The car show draws in thousands of cars each week to the Outlets in San Clemente, providing a space for people to congregate and share their cars every Saturday morning.
“The support has been overwhelming,” said show organizer Simon Wehr, commenting that his Facebook page has received, “over 600,000 views of our posts, over 2,000 interactions, and around 5,000 signatures on our petition.”
[Read: Meet The People Behind America’s Biggest Weekly Car Show]
However, the show has recently drawn more attention than usual with issues surrounding noise pollution and resident safety regarding speeding through local neighborhoods.
As people exit the show, people also gather on the sides of freeways watching cars exit – something that also draws complaints from local residents.
Show organizers pay a lot of attention to having volunteers police the event at the San Clemente outlets. Yet issues still seem to arise as people drive through the surrounding neighborhoods.
“We are not trying to take away Cars and Coffee — we are trying to control what happens when they exit Cars and Coffee,” said San Clemente resident Denise Zivolich during the October city council meeting.
[Read: South Orange County’s Largest Car Show Draws Resident Complaints]
“I invited the council to come to my house on a Saturday morning for coffee, and we would listen to mini NASCAR,” said resident Jodi DiLascio who said she lives near the Outlets in a previous meeting.
These kinds of complaints were considered at the Oct. 21city council meeting, when residents spoke out and supporters of the car show came in defense of the event.
The issue was left unresolved and has returned today where the terms of the show’s conditional use permit are expected to be reevaluated.
To see the agenda for tonight’s hearing, click here. And to watch the deliberations, tune into the city’s Youtube channel.
Ultimately, controversy revolves around enforcement, and where the money for the enforcement is to come from.
“I don’t think we should end Cars for Coffee,” said San Clemente’s current mayor Rick Loeffler in October, “but we should figure out a way to get the enforcement. How do we pay for it?”
The question is who’s responsible for their actions after they leave the car show.
“As one of the Council Members said to me last week, not only is it not our responsibility to control the crowds once they leave the property, we have no authority to do so. That is up to the Sheriff.” said Wehr.
He added that making the show less than weekly could even be worse because large numbers of people would still show up.
At the October meeting San Clemente Police Captain Justin Chevalier said keeping officers tied down at neighborhoods surrounding the show would put city hall in a bad spot because they would be unable to respond to other calls.
The most current city staff report outlines several avenues that the council members may choose to go down, consisting of several possible modifications to Cars and Coffee’s permit;
Those include options like a private contract with the San Clemente Police Services, which is the county Sheriff’s department, installing automatic license plate readers, reducing the frequency of events to less than weekly, installing signs prohibiting unsafe activity such as climbing on overpasses, requiring participants and spectators for each event to register or the prohibition altogether of motorcycles from the events.