North County Drives for City Status Gain Steam

Going, going and gone. That’s the consensus of opinion about three incorporation efforts along the North County coast that would turn communities into cities.

Going along at a rapid rate, and a predicted shoo-in at the polls in June, is Solana Beach incorporation. Benefiting from the mistakes of past crusades for cityhood, Citizens Intending To Incorporate (CITI) are confident but predictably nervous about their front-running position. A certain amount of opposition is necessary to keep interest up and bring out the voters, they feel.

Going along on schedule and with plenty of no-sayers baying at their heels are members of the North Coast Incorporation Coalition (NCIC) who are seeking to form a city, as yet unnamed, composed of the towns of Encinitas, Cardiff, Leucadia and Olivenhain. The CITI and NCIC proposals cover different areas and would not be in conflict.

Gone are the early hopes of the Party to Incorporate Encinitas (PIE) when, last week, a three-month effort to gather enough signers to place an Encinitas-only incorporation measure on the ballot failed by 883 valid signatures.

Yet to approach the starting line for the obstacle course that precedes any incorporation vote are Rancho Santa Fe residents. A $10,000 study is under way to determine how best to protect this rich estate community’s rural life style from street lamps, stoplights, freeways and other urban niceties required in populated areas under county regulations. The Ranch wants none of them, but ranch leaders may have trouble explaining to residents why the area must become a city in order to protect its rural quality of life.

NCIC leaders smell victory in their effort, the umpteenth time that an incorporation of the San Dieguito region has been attempted. Other efforts stumbled and failed for a variety of reasons, one of which was the need for a new name for the merged hamlets.

Marbello was a catchy name, but it turned voters against incorporation in the 1950s. Carlana, an effort to create small craft harbors in several coastal lagoons, fared no better in 1962. At the last incorporation try in 1982, NCIC steering committee member Marjorie Gaines recalls that the name “San Dieguito” or “The Villages of San Dieguito” was a factor in the negative landslide that buried the cityhood effort. “Some people voted against the name,” she said.

This time, Gaines said, voters will have a choice of three names for the new city. The name candidates are to be listed on the ballot along with the incorporation proposal and the candidates for the new city council. The contenders chosen in a name-the-city contest held earlier were: Encinitas, San Dieguito and Rancho San Elijo. The city name that receives the most votes will be selected if the incorporation measure passes.

Other city names that made the finals but not the ballot included Playa del Sol (beach of the sun), Villa Pacifica (Pacific home), Flora Vista (flower view) and Poinsettia, a traditional Christmas bloom shipped from the area to buyers around the world.

Although proponents of the four-community incorporation were equally optimistic before the 1982 defeat, there are signs that San Dieguito’s incorporation time is now. The city, if it succeeds at the polls in June, would be equal in population to annexation-hungry Carlsbad to the north. Incorporation would halt the southward march of Carlsbad boundaries which already have hit Leucadia on the north and east and are nibbling at parcels to the south. Former opponents of what is characterized by its foes as an anti-growth incorporation effort now say they have joined the cityhood drive as the lesser of two evils.

Even opposing PIE spokesman Bob Weaver admits that he has found no signs of opposition to either incorporation effort in his door-to-door campaign to gain signatures for an Encinitas-only incorporation vote.

PIE resorted to paid petition circulators to overcome a late start in May and learned last week that its effort fell short of valid signatures of the required one-fourth of Encinitas voters. Fred Schreiber, a PIE supporter, said the effort to gain another 900 or more signatures will be “far from easy” in the two-week extension period granted by the Local Agency Formation Commission.

But PIE leader Weaver calls the signature-garnering, “a piece of cake.” All that needs doing, Weaver said, is to “raise the ante” from 25 cents per signature paid previously to $1 a name.

This time, however, Weaver plans to add some quality control to the signature-gathering system to cut down on the high percentage of invalid signatures submitted. More than 35% of the signatures gathered earlier for PIE were declared invalid by the Registrar of Voters office. This time, petition circulators will be paid only half of their commission initially and will receive the remainder only after signatures are validated by the county registrar’s office.

Weaver and Schreiber view the Encinitas-only incorporation as the most sensible path to cityhood, economically and politically. Encinitas, which contains most of the San Dieguito region’s commercial development could easily support a city government, Weaver explained, but would be hard-pressed to bring the entire four-community area up to urban standards with street, sewer and drainage improvements. The Leucadia area alone needs about $20 million in public works projects, he said.

Weaver said that the logical way to proceed is to incorporate the smaller Encinitas area, then annex sectors of the other three towns as money becomes available to make the improvements.

However, he admits, part of Leucadia--northward from Encinitas Boulevard to Union Street--is included in the Encinitas-only incorporation proposal. The area is proposed as a site for a major shopping center which would use the Leucadia Boulevard interchange with Interstate 5 for access, he said. Major retailers have shown an interest in locating in the freeway frontage project, which could bring in added revenues for the future City of Encinitas, Weaver said.

The proposed shopping center would have access not only to I-5 but also to future Route 680 which is proposed as a major east-west highway linking I-15 at Poway to the coast at Leucadia Boulevard.

The freeway site could put a crimp in plans by the billionaire Hunt brothers of Texas, who have plans for a 280-acre commercial center, office complex and residential development at the intersection of El Camino Real and La Costa Avenue, he said, because the Hunts’ land is more than a mile from the freeway.

However, Bill Doyle, a project planning official with Ernest W. Hahn Inc. said that the major shopping center developer does not consider the San Dieguito area a suitable site for a regional commercial development.

The region is ringed by three regional shopping centers--Plaza Camino Real on the north, University Towne Centre on the south and North County Faire to the east. A population of 200,000 is needed to justify another commercial center, he said, and San Dieguito would have to grow by 250% to reach that figure, Doyle said.

Solana Beach CITI co-founder Jack Moore has no economic bonuses to pull out of his hat but, he said, the future city does not need a larger economic base than it has to support a city government. Moore also is unconcerned that the last Solana Beach incorporation attempt failed to pass by only about 200 votes.

“It seems like it has been a million years since we started this,” Moore sighed, “and we still have many miles to go.” But, he said he foresees no flagging of interest in incorporation with a hearing scheduled before the Local Agency Formation Commission on Nov. 18 to approve the incorporation and to fix the proposed city’s boundaries. After that, he said, council candidates will begin filing in mid-February and campaigning will continue until the June 3, 1986, election.

NCIC leader Bob Bonde, purposefully or unwittingly, has kept the four-city San Dieguito incorporation drive in local newspaper headlines with his verbal barbs at opponents and outspoken criticism of the area’s county supervisor, Paul Eckert.

Most recently he asked Eckert to step down from the LAFCO hearing on the San Dieguito area proposal on Nov. 25 because, Bonde said bluntly, the supervisor is biased against the NCIC proposal and in favor of the competing PIE proposal backed by Eckert’s close friends, Fred and Betsy Schreiber.

“He’s accused me of running for (state Assemblywoman) Sunny Mojonnier’s job and he now says I want to be city manager,” of the new city, Bonde said of Eckert. “He’s wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Comments made by Eckert about dividing Cardiff between Solana Beach and the new city and about splitting Leucadia between Carlsbad and the new city, “let’s me know how much he thinks of our welfare,” said Bonde, a Cardiff resident.

Eckert has refused, through an aide’s statement, to step down from his LAFCO post, but Bonde plans to pursue his efforts to disqualify Eckert from voting on the San Dieguito incorporation by appealing to county Board Chairman Leon Williams and to the LAFCO commissioners.

Michael Ott, LAFCO analyst who has been handling the San Dieguito-area incorporation filings of all three groups, said that “very probably” the commissioners will make a final decision on the San Dieguito incorporation issue at its Nov. 25 meeting. The action of setting the incorporation boundaries and placing the proposal on the June, 1986, ballot could end the immediate chances of the PIE group, he said, because only incorporation for the four-community San Dieguito area can win a spot on the June ballot.

However, Ott explained, an Encinitas-only boundary will be considered as one boundary alternative to the NCIC proposal at the Nov. 25 LAFCO hearing, and, if PIE leaders are successful in gathering the remaining petition signatures for their Encinitas-only proposal, another hearing will be scheduled by LAFCO to discuss it and, perhaps to put it on a future ballot in the event that the four-city incorporation measure fails in June.