SEA ISLE, N.J. -- I met Elaine Scattergood for breakfast last
week in a little coffee shop on Dune Drive in Avalon, just a few
blocks from where Utz potato chip magnate Michael Rice is putting
the finishing touches on a super-sized mansion that sits atop the
highest dune in town.
Now in its third year of construction, the 40-room, 14,000
square-foot house will have nine bedrooms, 13 bathrooms, a
three-car garage, maid's quarters and a dune-top pool when it's
completed.
Ms. Scattergood, the founder of Save Avalon's Dunes (SAD), a
community group with about 150 members, has been the town's most
visible opponent of Rice's project. She lives with a cat, parrot
and her dog, Francis, in what Philadelphia magazine
called a "ramshackle cottage," a "tattered beach house that's
cluttered with the accoutrements of the intellectually eccentric:
mismatched furniture, old flashlights and lamp shades, messy
stacks of books, a healthy back stash of Mother Jones."
Mother Jones magazine is named after Mary Harris Jones,
an early-20th-century radical labor organizer, community activist
and self-described "hellraiser." In 1898, she helped found the
Social Democratic Party of America, later renamed, more
accurately, as the Socialist Party of America.
I asked Scattergood if she was a socialist. "No," she replied.
"I'm been a Republican most of my life. I attended a Republican
convention in Pittsburgh." This time around, though, she went for
Obama.
After breakfast, we took a ride past Mr. Rice's current house,
now on the market for $12 million. At 7,000 square feet, it's one
of the largest beach houses in Avalon, located only a few blocks
from the new mansion. But it sits next to the dunes, not on top
of one. It has seven bedrooms, seven bathrooms, an elevator, a
spa and a library.
Not buying the more-is-better ethos, Ms. Scattergood can't see
why the $12 million house isn't good enough, especially when
getting bigger might mean the destruction of a species of rare
cattail or an endangered turtle or piping plover.
She described the time she ran into Rice during one of the
hearings to obtain approval for the new construction. "Why," she
asked, "do you need a house that large?" She said he replied that
his attorney had told him to ask for more than he actually
wanted, so in the end, after negotiations, he stated that he got
"exactly what we wanted."
Scattergood labeled Rice's new house as "hideous" in a 2007
interview with Philadelphia magazine. "We don't need to
look at big houses," she said. "If you were a thoughtful person,
you just wouldn't do this. You wouldn't do it for the sake of the
environment. Heavens, these people have sold enough potato chips
to buy an island somewhere. They could live anywhere without
destroying."
Building a house that's "going to take that load of electricity
and heat is insane," she continued. "I don't care how much money
you have."
"It's a treasure," Scattergood said to me, speaking of the
maritime forests and sweeping grasslands in the high dunes of
Avalon. "It's what defines Avalon. Once it's gone, it's gone.
What makes life wonderful are the contrasts. You walk through the
wilderness and then suddenly you see the vista of the sand and
the sea."
I counted 19 pickup trucks and vans at Rice's new house when we
drove up, evidence that he has become a one-man stimulus package
for construction jobs during this especially severe downturn in
new home building at the shore. That doesn't seem to matter much
to Ms. Scattergood. I'd guess that she would maintain,
Obama-style, that the birds and the people would both be better
off if some of Mr. Rice's millions were taxed away and spread
around to create greener jobs in education, health care and the
environment.
In another class warfare skirmish at the beach, the United Auto
Workers union is running a multimillion-dollar advertising blitz
against Bally's and Caesars in Atlantic City in order to break a
stalemate in its negotiations for a first-ever labor contract at
both casinos.
In a gaming industry that's already down some 38 percent this
year, the union, in effect, allegedly on the side of "job
security" at Bally's and Caesars, is telling the public to switch
to Trump's.
Responding, the casinos are running full-page ads in the local
newspapers with this headline: "Don't let the UAW turn Atlantic
City into the next Detroit."
topics:
Socialism, Unions, Environmentalism
