City, San Carlos Grappling Over Canyon Deal

When San Carlos residents emerged from a San Diego City Council meeting in November, 1983, they were basking in the glow of political triumph. Their scrappy, grass-roots campaign had persuaded the council to buy and preserve a winding neighborhood canyon as open space.

The council voted unanimously to acquire the 180-acre Rancho Mission Canyon. The residents walked away happy. The deal was done.

Or so it seemed.

Under the quiet scrutiny of municipal employees, the deal may be coming undone. City staffers are worried that landslides in the canyon would make the city a prime target for massive property damage lawsuits. Fixing those landslides would be so expensive--at least $5 million, according to one source--that staff members are urging council members to forsake the purchase of Rancho Mission.

And the folks in San Carlos are steamed, not only about the staff recommendation but because it has taken staff members more than two years to make it. “There’s been delay after delay after delay, and it’s driving us crazy,” said Councilwoman Judy McCarty, who represents the San Carlos area.

The story of Rancho Mission Canyon is a tale of how municipal administrators can work to shape, either subtly or dramatically, proposals and decisions made publicly at City Hall.

It is also a parable of honor and prudence: Will the City Council follow through on its promise to the neighborhood to buy the canyon? Or will it go along with its staff and act in what may be in the best interests of the entire city?

“We don’t feel that the purchase of the property would be a prudent investment of the public’s money,” said John K. Riess, an assistant city attorney.

“It think it’s a shocker,” countered McCarty. “We all expected that they (the city) would purchase it.”

San Carlos residents pushed for the canyon purchase in 1983, when the City Council was trying to figure how to spend $15 million marked for open space. Properties worthy of consideration were on a list, compiled by the city staff, that ranked San Diego canyons by such qualities as size, vegetation, scenic beauty, geologic features and access.

Rancho Mission Canyon was No. 38 on the list of 137 properties. But the $15 million, combined with earlier purchases, meant the city could only buy down to No. 35. Rancho Mission, it seemed, would be passed by.

However, the residents rallied the neighborhood with a homespun letter-writing campaign that, indirectly, attacked the judgment of the city staff. The residents asked council members to bump their canyon up on the list, in part because the unstable soil in the area would make portions of the canyon unsuitable for a proposal to build 168 condominiums and 30 homes there.

Council members agreed. On Nov. 16, 1983, they approved the purchase of Rancho Mission Canyon.

But the decision left a ripple of dissatisfaction at City Hall, said San Diego Municipal Judge Dick Murphy, who represented San Carlos on the council at the time.

“If city staff doesn’t want to do something, they can make it damned difficult to get it accomplished,” he said. “And the main tool for subverting a City Council decision is delay.”

Murphy said that since the Rancho Mission vote, there have been three people who have left the council--himself for a judicial appointment; former Mayor Roger Hedgecock because of felony indictments, and Bill Mitchell, who lost a reelection bid.

“If they wait long enough, the entire City Council will turn over and there will be nobody there who can remember what happened,” said Murphy. “So the idea is you delay and the City Council turns over and the City Council forgets, and you come up with some new facts that suggest the prior decision is wrong and the staff takes another run at changing the decision. I think that’s what’s happening in this case.”

Wilbur Smith, deputy director of the city’s open space division, said he and other staff members did not favor buying the San Carlos canyon. “We were not wild about Rancho Mission Canyon,” he said.

However, Murphy’s theory of subversion is “absolutely false. There is no way that staff, just by merely dragging out a decision, we would ever get it overturned. That’s just not our method of operating.”

What took so long, said Smith and other staffers, were the special studies they had to perform on the geologically fragile canyon, which is in a city-designated “geologic hazard” zone. First, the city ordered a reconnaissance survey of the canyon. Then, staff members went to the council in mid-1984 for approval of a more extensive, $90,000 “geotechnic” study of Rancho Mission.

Worries about unstable land in the canyon finally prompted the staff to suggest dropping the deal altogether. If the city bought Rancho Mission Canyon and a slide caused any of the 400 homes along its rim to shift or crack, the city could be forced to pay a hefty property damage awarded by the courts, said Riess.

“Our inclination is to turn and run . . . ,” said Riess. “We don’t want to buy it. We don’t want the liability . . . .”

For the city to perform work to prevent potential slides would cost about $5 million, said one person familiar with the studies, and those kind of jobs often end up costing two to three times the original estimate.

But McCarty, who as past president of the Navajo Community Planners advocated the canyon purchase in 1983, questioned the need for that work.

McCarty, who was elected to fill Murphy’s post last year, realizes that proceeding with the purchase and the work could amount to a sticky political problem.

“Other members of the City Council may find it difficult to give up future open space money just to buy one canyon in the 7th District,” said McCarty. “The total is out of sight.

“The other council members are going to say: ‘Are we going to spend that money for the park-rich 7th District? I need parks in the mid-city,’ Gloria would say. ‘I need parks in the 4th District,’ William will say.” McCarty referred to Councilwoman McColl and Councilman Jones.

That will be among the questions council members will consider when Rancho Mission Canyon comes before them in a closed session, possibly on Tuesday. Another is what, exactly, the November, 1983, vote meant.

Smith said the city staff doesn’t interpret it to be an iron-clad promise to acquire Rancho Mission. “The council said, ‘Go out and appraise it and tell us what it’s going to cost.’ There has been no public hearing whether to buy this property. That has yet to come.”

San Carlos residents disagree. They agree the council has yet to vote on the final purchase price, but City Hall will be welshing on a deal if it yields to the staff, said April Boling, who led the grass-roots lobbying campaign in 1983 to buy the canyon.

“The City Council voted on it once,” said Boling, “and I’m personally going to see it as going back on their word if they do anything else.”