Courtesy of the San Clemente Times:

Meet Jerry Collamer and Ed Schlegel, Central figures in the

“Save Trestles, Stop the Toll Road” battle.

By San Clemente Times

The two men, both now 67 years old, talk about the genesis of their grassroots anti-Toll Road movement like a pair of frat boys remembering the good old days around the keg. And well they should, given the success to date their efforts have yielded in derailing (for now) a billion dollar toll road project that would have snaked its way down 16 miles from Santa Margarita through a state park and watershed before merging with the Interstate 5 just short of the coastline and the fabled Trestles surf beaches.

Jerry Collamer and Ed Schlegel—a former advertising executive and a retired fireman and both surfers—are the men initially responsible for galvanizing the surf community around the notion that the proposed Transportation Corridors Agency 241 Foothill South toll road extension. Both admit today that it was the inclusion of Trestles in their battle cry—“Save Trestles, Stop the Toll Road,” that ultimately provided the lightning bolt of energy they were so desperately looking for in their fight against the Toll Road.

“We needed a spiritual place to coalesce around…and Trestles came to mind,” said Collamer, who moved to San Clemente with his wife in 1998.

“Trestles worked because it was the period on the sentence. Eddie and I and 20 other people worked for a year trying to come up with some way to bring public awareness to the water shed and the whole thing.” Schlegel, who retired from the Orange County Fire Authority in 2000, gave hikes to help raise awareness.

“Some people thought we were railroad buffs—“Save the Trestles,” recalled Schlegel.

“Another woman thought she was coming out to see wildlife—wanted to know how big the little Trestles were. She’d never seen a ‘live’ Trestles. We were a big educational process.”

That educational process continues, especially in light of new alternative route proposals brought forward by the TCA. Just last month, an alternative route was presented that would cut further inland and down into the U.S. Navy’s Camp Pendleton before swinging back towards I-5 south of the large agricultural basin alongside the San Mateo Creek. Camp Pendleton brass immediately fired back with a two-page rejection of the plans.

“The newest TCA toll road plan suggests that it be located outside the State Park lease area of Camp Pendleton by pushing the alignment further into the Base,” the letter signed by Major General Anthony L. Jackson and Col. Nick Marano reads.

“While the new alignment may be acceptable from the State Park’s perspective, it is not acceptable to Camp Pendleton or the Marine Corps as it does not meet the Marine Corps’ long maintained stipulation that this proposed project not negatively impact the Base’s mission.”

Collamer and Schlegel—both branded by pro toll-road supporters as “scare-mongers” who use hyperbole and exaggerations, know that the battle is far from over. In fact, they remain incredulous that their efforts have yielded the results they did. The two first met in the early 2000s, and decided to take their fight against the Toll Road and its impacts against the San Mateo watershed to the streets.

They made bumper stickers with the support of the Sierra Club saying “Save San Clemente” and other slogans against the toll road. But Collamer—who made his name as an advertising executive—was the one who famously linked the Save Trestles, Stop the Toll Road concepts together, creating the slogan that ultimately helped give life to a massive and successful grassroots campaign.

“I did it to be big, bold and ugly so no one could miss it,” said Collamer, who in 2009 was awarded a Wavemaker Award by Surfrider for his efforts. “I didn’t want it ever to be trivialized, or thought of in a cute way. Because as soon as we get surfing involved in it, everything becomes California Dreamin and the Beach Boys, and you can lose focus. I was hell-bent on never losing focus on what really was the issue here—basically allowing them to corrupt the watershed and destroy San Mateo Creek.”

Collamer and Schlegel realized they’d struck a nerve with their core audience while manning a table one morning on the dirt patch off El Camino Real and Cristianitos Road. “I couldn’t table with Jerry because I would be talking to somebody explaining something, and if Jerry wasn’t talking to somebody over here he was over here
Collamer said it was there that fateful morning that he had the encounter that changed everything.

“This guy walks by and I go, ‘Hey, have a great session, it’s probably going to be your last one,’” Collamer recalled. “He gets a few steps away, stops, turns around and comes back to me and says, ‘What did you say?’”

“I said, ‘What, you don’t know about the Toll Road?’ He says, ‘What Toll Road?’”

“I said, ‘Right there.’ I could point right to where he’d be able to see it because it would be high, above the freeway. ‘It’s going to come down here, it’s going to ruin Trestles.’”

“So he goes. ‘What?’ He then goes down to the beach, comes back. Within 45 minutes we had 200 surfers around our table saying, ‘They can’t take Trestles.’ That’s when we were trying to find our lighthouse, we wanted to have something to save. Nobody knew what the water shed was, because it’s private land locked from public view. That didn’t do it. We had to save something—and Trestles was it.”

That grass roots movement then got the support it needed from the powerful Surfrider Foundation, as well as the Sierra Club’s Friends of the Foothill and other environmental groups with powerful networks. What started at the parking lot and trail head for Lowers picked up steam, landing the two in Sacramento in 2005 with a signed surfboard they presented to California Governor Arnold Schwarznegger and ultimately helped sway the Coastal Commission at two different public hearings each attracting hundreds of anti-toll road activists.

“We won the Rancho battle, but we knew that the toll road wasn’t going away,” said Collamer.

“What I always thought—and I think that today—is every day the toll road’s not there, we’ve saved Trestles. We’ve been stalling, stalling, stalling until something good happened or something major happened. Well, Coastal Commission was the first major thing. Then the Feds, we sweated that. Frankly, I’ve been very pessimistic since Day 1. I know what’s out there and how much money the TCA has. It seems like they have this pool of money. Every year they put millions into lobbying, and the politicians in D.C. are up for sale, so how long before somebody buys something?”

For now, the two 67-year-old activists are sitting and watching, paying close attention to the ongoing process. Collamer’s Web site, www.savetrestles.com, sits dormant, but is ready to kick start if needed. The environmental groups, Collamer said, are also keeping a close watch on the ongoing TCA efforts to find an alternative route.

“In the world of public debate, we won,” said Collamer. “Whether that’s a sustained win, we don’t know.” SC

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