5 Years of Cityhood : Santee Fighting for Quality Growth

As communities along San Diego County’s coast consider incorporating as cities to achieve local government control and improve the level of public services, the county’s two youngest cities--Poway and Santee--celebrate their fifth anniversaries of cityhood.

What lessons can be learned from the two inland cities’ experiences? What has cityhood brought the two communities--and at what expense? Is incorporation a panacea for local woes?

This East County city celebrating its fifth birthday has spent a lot of years fighting its image as a backcountry bedroom community populated by suburban cowboys living in nondescript tract houses. Today, Santee leaders see unusual opportunities to change the direction of the city.

For one thing, there is a unique opportunity to shape a new downtown on perhaps the choicest land in Santee, a community nestled in a picturesque valley bordering San Diego’s eastern limits. This real estate, known as Town Center, includes 712 acres of what is now open grazing land along the San Diego River and smack in the center of town. Officials hope its development will give the city a focal point it now lacks.

Santee leaders look with equal enthusiasm toward the development of homes, small commercial and industrial centers and recreation areas on a hillside plot northwest of Town Center known as Fanita Ranch. Fanita Ranch offers some of the most striking vistas of the Santee Valley.

In the late 1880s, Jennie Cowles, widow of George Cowles, for whom Cowles Mountain was named, married a local land speculator, Milton Santee, and together they planted thousands of acres of vineyards and attracted residents to what would later be named the Santee Valley.

Much of what is now Santee was once owned by the Scripps family, and the community remained largely rural until the mid-60s, when the real-estate boom in East County and the unrestrictive development standards of the county encouraged widespread residential building in the town.

Plans for both developments are in the preliminary stages. But Santee officials envision the Town Center area as a thriving river-front area similar to centerpieces of redevelopment efforts such as that in San Antonio, Tex. Industrial parks, commercial projects, residential areas, a large civic center and expanses of recreation space along the river would all be a part of a Town Center by the turn of the century. And they hope Fanita Ranch one day will be the city’s showcase subdivision.

But it will likely take another five years, Santee civic leaders say, before the city’s old image as an unplanned, sprawling suburb without a solid economic base is rubbed out by a thriving new Santee of well-planned neighborhoods and lush recreation areas supported by busy and attractive commercial and industrial centers.

The lofty vision of Santee’s future is just beginning to take shape, and it is being guided by a local political movement toward slow-growth politics in a community that only a few years ago embraced development with open arms. While Santee appears to be on a successful course, the road toward becoming a well-planned jewel of East County has produced more than a few ruts.

For a city promoting itself as the ideal place to raise children--a community, according to lifetime resident and now Mayor Jack Doyle, “whose major emphasis is on catering to families, and family values”--Santee has, for reasons nobody can explain, been the center of some downright gritty urban news stories.

Several years ago, it was the center for one of the largest child pornography rings ever uncovered in San Diego County. The perpetrators were operating out of an apartment complex, and many of their victims were local children.

Last year, a promoter was holding professional boxing matches in Santee. The city banned the sport after a young boxer was knocked out, lapsed into a coma and nearly died.

Three months ago, City Councilman Gerry Solomon was arrested and charged with soliciting a lewd act from an undercover police officer in La Mesa, an incident about which he and other officials refuse to comment. The charges against Solomon later were dropped, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Lou Boyle, because the conversation between the councilman and the undercover officer was not explicit enough to convict Solomon.

Pornography has been a predominant political issue throughout the last five years, as Santee officials moved to prevent a topless bar from locating in the city and later created strict zoning provisions for adult entertainment establishments. The zoning provisions restrict such establishments to a 35-acre industrial zone along Woodside Avenue North, parallel to California 67, far from the city’s commercial areas, where the owners of the businesses wanted to locate.

Even so, there is a movement to qualify an anti-pornography referendum that would prohibit any adult entertainment businesses from locating in the city. Ironically, Solomon had been a leader in the campaign to ban adult entertainment from the city. Another prominent figure in the drive is Rev. Dorman Owens, pastor of the Bible Missionary Fellowship in Santee, who, along with his followers, has gained countywide notoriety and been arrested several times and accused of illegally picketing birth-control clinics and homosexual establishments in Hillcrest.

A major setback for the fledgling city was the decision in 1981 by developer Ernest Hahn to abandon plans for a regional shopping center. Hahn pulled out of Santee to pursue what he considered more lucrative opportunities at Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego and at the soon-to-open North County Faire in Escondido. According to a recent city survey, 70% of the sales-tax revenues generated by Santee residents are spent outside the city, although retail sales in the city have increased by more than half since 1980.

“Certainly these (controversies) are not the types of things we want to promote, and it is not the image we are anxious to project,” said Theresa McTighe, the new executive director of the Santee Chamber of Commerce. “We’re changing from a sleepy, bedroom community to a thriving, full-service city, and there are going to be growing pains.

“Some of the negative image is unearned, but it’s out there, so we have to work on reversing it.”

Once the fastest growing city in East County (since the early 1960s, its population has boomed from fewer than 20,000 to the current 50,000), Santee is now emerging as the first East County city to embrace the slow-growth politics that have been so pervasive to the north, across Sycamore Canyon in Poway. Unlike Poway, where local politics have been marked by stability, only one of the five original City Council members has been reelected to a second term.

“We’re definitely slowing the growth now,” said Jim Bartell, the lone council member remaining from 1980 and also an aide to Rep. Jim Bates (D-San Diego). “A lot of the building you’re seeing now is still a result of the decisions made during our first two years as a city--before there was the turnover on the council. There has been a big change in the philosophy of the people of Santee--people in the city now are very much in favor of slow growth.”

Bartell said the movement to slow the rampant development will make Santee “a much more livable community.”

However, there are community leaders who warn that movement to the slow-growth philosophy will hinder Santee’s progress. Perry Shipman, who directed the 1980 incorporation campaign when cityhood was approved by 70% of the voters, said, “The city is becoming so cautious, so demanding in the types of projects it wants built, that I’m afraid it will miss the target and stagnate.

“This fear of growth is bad judgment on the part of the elected politicians. . . . We can either grow or die. I’m looking forward to the time when our elected political leaders gain some maturity--then they will be more understanding and make better judgments.”

But even William Schwartz, a San Diego attorney who has represented several developers in lawsuits against the city, said the new City Council’s growth policies have the support of Santee residents.

“The city is much more thorough now in its review of proposed projects,” Schwartz said. “There is much more intense scrutiny, and I think it resulted because the people who live here wanted to see a higher quality of projects in Santee. There is a lot of undeveloped land in Santee, and that’s why things are much more rigorous than they are in the other East County cities.”

“The goal of the city as I see it now is to upgrade the quality of the growth here,” Bartell said. “We’ve made major strides in that direction. There is an improved fee structure in place now, so that we can pay for flood control, mitigate traffic and build schools to accommodate our growth.

“In the last three years, since the philosophy of the council changed as the original council members were phased out, there is finally a movement to make sure this is a comfortable city--to see that growth pays for itself as much as possible instead of making services more scarce for the existing residents. And that philosophy will become even stronger in the future,” Bartell said.

The opportunity for choice projects exists, city officials say, because the land that was not built on when Santee was under the county’s rule is the prime real estate in the city.

Doyle, at 33 the youngest mayor in the county, says developments like Town Center and Fanita Ranch signal the direction of the new Santee. “When I was a boy, there was a rural atmosphere here, and there were a lot fewer people,” he said.

“That made things simpler here, in a sense, but we’re fortunate, because the people who have moved here are young (the average age of a Santee resident is 27), and they are making a real investment in their futures here,” Doyle said. “I’m excited about the future, and so are they.”