2nd Group Joins Battle, Will Seek Incorporation of Encinitas Only

A second incorporation group has swung into action in the San Dieguito area, challenging the current effort to incorporate the entire area by seeking city status for Encinitas only, a spokesman said Monday.

Robert Weaver said that his group, Party for the Incorporation of Encinitas (PIE), will begin circulating petitions on Wednesday in an effort to place the issue on the June, 1986, ballot.

Another group, North Coast Incorporation Coalition, led by anti-bullet train activist Bob Bonde of Cardiff, is seeking an election to incorporate Encinitas, Leucadia, Olivenhain and Cardiff as one city.

Weaver said that his group picked the acronym PIE “because we haven’t been getting our fair share of it from the county.” He said that residents in the unincorporated San Dieguito area pay more sales and property taxes than the county spends in services for the area.

Weaver said that he opposed the philosophy of the coalition. “They want to incorporate so that they can put roadblocks up on the highway and keep everyone else out,” he said. “We do not.”

PIE workers will meet Wednesday evening to receive instructions and petitions to begin collecting 3,500 to 4,000 signatures from registered voters in Encinitas, Weaver said.

The group was started to counter Bonde’s efforts to place the entire San Dieguito area up for incorporation again, Weaver acknowledged.

Encinitas, with several shopping centers and a thriving strip of commercial businesses along El Camino Real, can afford to incorporate. “But if we try to take on all the problems of our neighbors at once (by incorporating the entire area), I am not so sure we would succeed,” Weaver said.

Bonde, however, is convinced that the entire area, “except maybe for a part of Olivenhain,” could become one prosperous city on the current tax revenues generated in the region.

The Greater San Dieguito Town Council, which has been conducting studies on an Encinitas-only incorporation, released results of a telephone survey that showed San Dieguito residents are not sure which part of the region should be incorporated. They also are uncertain whether any part should be incorporated, the survey claimed.

Fred Schreiber, president of the Town Council, said that responses from the poll of 5% of the registered voters in each of the four communities showed that residents of Cardiff and Olivenhain were almost equally divided between favoring, opposing and being undecided on the issue. In Leucadia, 44% favored incorporation, 30% had no opinion, 18% opposed incorporation and the remainder favored annexation by Carlsbad or some other alternative. Tallies from Encinitas had not been completed, Schreiber said.

Schreiber said that the Town Council also has hired Public Affairs Consultants of San Diego to assess the economic consequences of incorporating Encinitas.

The council’s board--made up of representatives from all four San Dieguito communities--voted unanimously to study the option of an Encinitas-only incorporation, Schreiber said. But the group would go no further than to study the issue and bring out all the facts “so that someone else can take up the cause,” he said.

Schreiber said that the Town Council took up the Encinitas incorporation issue because the group that wants to incorporate the entire area “seemed to be doing an end-around” by not circulating petitions to obtain signatures of 25% of the residents involved.

Bonde said that his group has “obtained the cooperation of the Encinitas Fire Protection District, which will file the incorporation application--a perfectly legal way of doing it.”

Jane Merrill, executive officer of the Local Agency Formation Commission, said that either method of initiating an incorporation effort is legitimate. But she said the agency has not faced a situation in which two groups have filed opposing incorporation proposals for the same area.

In Solana Beach to the south, Citizens Intending To Incorporate will begin a petition campaign Thursday seeking signatures of 25% of the town’s voters to try for an incorporation initiative for Solana Beach on the June, 1986, ballot.