Carving Up Los Penasquitos Canyon : Civilization Soon Will Invade With Houses, Roads, Bridges

Within the next 10 years, there will be some drastic changes in Los Penasquitos Canyon, the gaping stretch of open space that runs through San Diego’s northern tier.

Bulldozers will begin clearing paths for roads and rearranging more than 8.9 million cubic yards--enough to fill an average city block over a half-mile high--to make way for 4,100 new homes and condominiums. Concrete pillars will be driven into the canyon floor for bridges carrying three major four-lane roads, one of which would connect the street-starved communities of Mira Mesa and Penasquitos East.

Civilization will be invading one of San Diego’s most distinctive natural areas.

Already, the plans are beginning to kindle opposition from planning groups and residents, who say the press of civilization will not only compound local traffic problems but also will endanger wildlife and change forever the relatively undisturbed vistas of rolling hills.

But apparently there is little that can be done. What will happen in Los Penasquitos Canyon is the product of an uneasy truce between the city’s burgeoning urban growth and efforts to preserve the trunk of the canyon.

“I think we’re seeing plans that will change the character of the canyon,” said Pam Stevens, a member of the Mira Mesa Planning Group and chairman of the Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve Citizens Advisory Committee.

“What we have now is a six-mile-long coastal canyon . . . a nearby place where people can go for hiking, horseback riding and getting away from the surrounding city. And these plans, especially cutting across it with a road, would really cut off the eastern quarter of the canyon.”

Los Penasquitos Canyon stretches across the city from Sorrento Valley on the west to Interstate 15 on the east. Part of the Los Penasquitos canyon system is Lopez Canyon, a tributary off the main canyon to the south.

City traffic engineers saw the canyon as a wall between the communities of Mira Mesa on the south and Penasquitos on the north. Hoping to ease traffic congestion in those areas, they planned at least six years ago for a major street to traverse the gulf. Those designs were codified in the Mira Mesa and Penasquitos East official community plans.

Meanwhile, other city officials considered buying the canyon with part of the $65 million in bonds that voters approved in 1978 for the preservation of open space. But the corporate forerunner of Genstar Southwest Development, which owned the canyon, earned the city’s gratitude when it donated 1,800 acres of canyonland for open space in 1979, thus saving taxpayers millions of dollars. That gift formed the largest chunk of Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve, now 2,533 acres of open space.

In return, the city affirmed the right of Genstar to develop the land it retained alongside the preserve. Most of the company’s land, which it has owned since 1978, consists of ridges and knolls, but some of it dips to the canyon floor, particularly on the northeastern edge of the preserve.

Now those agreements and plans--never hidden from public view--are spawning some changes that have nearby residents and canyon preservationists chagrined. Those changes are:

- Genstar’s proposal to build 2,635 homes and multifamily dwellings over 734 acres on the northeastern slopes of the canyon. The development, called Park Village, would extend approximately two miles along the northeastern edge of the canyon. At its eastern boundary, along Black Mountain Road, the homes in the development would be built down gentle slopes and extend to the canyon floor.

- Genstar’s plans for the 1,534-home Lopez Ridge development on 255 1/2 acres of a mesa that juts out between the Penasquitos and Lopez canyons. The mesa is a peninsula in the open space, and a city environmental report warns that the homes could serve as an “urban wedge” that would restrict the movement of animals in the canyons.

- Camino Santa Fe, a four-lane road. This road would be paid for by Genstar and would be built across Lopez Canyon to connect the Lopez Ridge development with Mira Mesa to the south. Building the road may be a key element in Genstar’s bid for approval of some Lopez Ridge homes. The road is part of the 1981 Mira Mesa community plan and a recently completed traffic study projects that it will carry 18,000 to 21,000 vehicles a day, equivalent to the daily traffic on Park Boulevard near the Navy Hospital in Balboa Park. Construction is scheduled for the mid-1990s. The bridge across the canyon would cost $2.9 million.

A city environmental report, however, warns that the roadway would change not only the aesthetics of the canyon, but also could endanger the habitat of the black-tailed gnatcatcher, a small songbird.

- Calle Cristobal, which would run down the center of Lopez Ridge and span a bridge over wetlands at the opening where the Lopez and Los Penasquitos Canyons diverge. Construction of the road could begin within the next six months, pending City Council approval, and the roadway is sorely needed to move traffic on Lopez Ridge west to jobs in Sorrento Valley, say city officials. Traffic projections call for the street to carry up to 16,000 vehicles a day.

The road has been approved by the state’s coastal commission, but canyon preservationists contend the street would seriously compromise the visual beauty of the canyon system, disturb habitat for birds and effectively seal off Lopez Canyon from Los Penasquitos Canyon to the north.

- Camino Ruiz, a four-lane road. A $6.2-million bridge to carry this major street is scheduled for construction in the mid- to late-1990s and would carry as many as 28,000 vehicles a day--about the same traffic volume carried by Washington Street in Hillcrest. The street would span the canyon and cut across the preserve about 1.5 miles west of Black Mountain Road.

These plans are drawing opposition as they move through city government to completion. Some environmentalists are more worried about the effects of the roads, while other residents are upset at the prospect that Genstar’s homes--particularly the Park Village development--will pour out thousands more cars onto their already crowded streets before new roadways are built or widened.

But traffic concerns are exactly what prompted engineers to recommend the roads spanning the canyons. And Genstar officials say their developments are part of the trade-off that helped create the preserve in the first place.

“It was the city that decided years ago that it would take the 1,800 acres . . . and that the price . . . to get the canyon for nothing, and have to spend none of the taxpayer money, was to allow development on the hillsides,” said Brian Laidlaw, Genstar’s vice president of operations.

“That’s the deal we’ve struck and we are living by it.”

Genstar lobbyist Bruce Warren called the agreement a “compromise: ‘We give you this and you let us do that.’ So now, Genstar is trying to do ‘that.’ ”

Opponents of Park Village acknowledge Genstar’s right to build, but they object to the size and scope of the project and say it may violate the spirit of the company’s agreement with the city seven years ago.

“I am alarmed by it,” Stevens said. “I feel like to some extent what we see by a Park Village issue, we’re reaping the unfortunate consequences of something we didn’t realize quite what we were getting into then . . . the unfortunate consequences of an uneasy, perhaps misunderstood, compromise.”

Originally granted permission by the city to build 1,700 homes, the company on Monday will seek approval from the city’s subdivision board and planning director to add 700 housing units to Park Village.

Genstar needs to sell the extra units, Laidlaw said, to pay for an estimated $6.5 million in new and widened roads that the city is requiring to help handle the additional traffic--an estimated 25,100 vehicles a day--coming from Park Village. The new roads would include portions of California 56, Mercy Road from the Interstate 15 interchange west, and Black Mountain Road.

The Rancho Penasquitos planning group, however, voted March 5 to reject the new Park Village proposal and has asked the city to roll back the project to just under 2,000 homes, which is still about 300 more than the city had originally approved.

Pat Recame, a Penasquitos resident and planning board member, said the group rejected Genstar’s proposal for several reasons, including its encroachment into the canyon and the fact that new housing will be about 700 feet from a historic adobe house. There were concerns, she said, over the company’s intent to run a road through a large patch of “tuna” cactus supposedly imported from Mexico by the Kumeyaay Indians 150 to 200 years ago. Genstar said its experts believe the cactus is native and has been there only 50 years.

The major gripe, said Recame, was what Park Village would do to local traffic. Recame said she lives two blocks from the nearest I-15 interchange but that it still takes her 45 minutes some days to reach the highway to drive to work work.

“The board realized the insanity of what’s happening in Penasquitos and decided we need to do something about our present problems and not compound them by approving future developments without roadways,” she said.

As for Genstar’s commitment to new roads, Recame said: “There is no guarantee that they will (not) put in 1,000 homes before they put in Mercy Road.”

Although some are against canyon developments because of the lack of roads, some are against building key roads to relieve congestion because they would go through the canyon. Stevens said she could live with the houses pressing on the preserve, but she is against both Camino Santa Fe and Camino Ruiz.

Stevens and others brought their objections to the City Council last year. At the urging of former Mayor Roger Hedgecock, who opposed the roadways on environmental grounds, the council in April put off approval of Genstar’s Lopez Ridge development until the need for the streets could be studied further. That study was completed in December and may be forwarded to the council in the next couple of months.

The study, obtained by The Times, concludes that both roadways should be built, but it acknowledges environmental concerns as well.

“The Los Penasquitos Canyon Regional Preserve . . . is a very important open space canyon that now exists in its basic natural state with limited public access. All efforts must be taken to preserve the unique natural resources provided by the canyon.”

Acting Mayor Ed Struiksma, whose 5th District includes the canyon, said an assessment district has already been formed to pay for the $20-million construction costs of Calle Cristobal and Camino Santa Fe. He added that he supports the construction of the three canyon roads in an “environmentally sensitive” manner.

To delete them from the community plans, he said, would be a “travesty.”

“You will have people literally strangling on their own emissions and (traffic) congestion because of that,” Struiksma said.

But Stevens says that no matter how sensitively the streets crossing the canyons are built--even if suspended on expensive bridges--their effect would be to forever change the preserve. For instance, Camino Ruiz would effectively separate the eastern quarter of the preserve from the rest, she said.

“It’s going to destroy the feeling that we have right now, the feeling of being a place where you can experience nature within the city,” she said.

Stevens said she is trying to mobilize community sentiment to persuade the City Council to kill Camino Ruiz.

But her efforts may be slowed by some of the conflicting concerns on the part of people like Recame that reflect the uneasy compromise between the canyon’s development and the desire to keep civilization from encroaching.

Recame said she has yet to decide whether she wants to see Camino Ruiz go.

“I would love to eliminate it because environmentally it would be the best thing to do,” she said. “But the traffic problems in Penasquitos scare me to death. . . . I feel I would be slitting my own throat and could never again complain about the traffic problem if I favored the elimination of Camino Ruiz.”