Bonita’s Beauty Fast Fading as Developments Ring Once Pristine Valley

On a recent spring evening, a bit chilly for May, the Sweetwater Valley Civic Assn. gathered here to discuss the frustrations of the year past and to map battle plans for the year ahead.

Association President George Kost set the tone of the annual meeting by pointing out that 30 years ago, before he had arrived, the Sweetwater Valley was rural. A decade ago, when he moved here, it had become semi-rural. Nowadays, he admitted, “it is something else.”

That “something else” was reflected in the annual meeting’s agenda--a series of urban problems to be dealt with: traffic and traffic accidents, crime and Neighborhood Watch groups, flooding and flood control, noise abatement, billboards, traffic lights and road widenings.

The inward groans of valley old-timers sometimes escaped as sighs. They remembered when Bonita Road was only two lanes wide, threading through a bucolic Eden up to Sweetwater Dam.

Then, only a few hundred houses had invaded the hillsides. Fields of wildflowers filled the valley floor each spring, the pre-dawn crow of a rooster was the only noise pollution and the breeze off the bay carried the scent of new-mown barley fields, not exhaust fumes. Back then, the only traffic jams came on a Saturday night, when the old red barn was transformed for square dancing and the strains of “Virginia Reel” echoed up the hillsides.

Today, that Bonita is just a memory. The red barn, a former citrus packing shed, has been razed to make way for a financial center. A bustling regional shopping mall has replaced a golf course. Another commercial complex covers a former dairy farm.

Parking lots and office buildings present a concrete view where horses once grazed. The stink of the city has invaded the Sweetwater Valley.

Bonita is still a tight-knit valley community of city folk seeking a rural life style. Increasingly, the life they sought is fading away and residents are at a loss as to what can be done. One old-timer marked the decline of the valley’s rural ambiance a decade ago with the comment: “They are killing horses now on Bonita Road.”

As late as the 1970s, Bonita often was twinned with Rancho Santa Fe in descriptions of affluent communities. The eucalyptus trees, horse ranches, quaint village centers and high incomes of residents were nearly identical in those days. In 1980, the cost of new housing in the Sweetwater Valley ranged from $130,000 to $450,000, only slightly behind the upscale housing in Rancho Santa Fe and La Jolla.

But unincorporated Rancho Santa Fe had something that unincorporated Bonita did not--a protective covenant that dictated exactly what could be built and what it must look like, right down to the placement of the clotheslines and the color of the gateposts. Bonita had no such shield to protect it from outside opportunists.

According to Max Branscomb, a writer for the monthly Bonita Style newspaper, “two failed annexation attempts (and a couple of incorporation studies that never went to a vote) probably sealed Bonita’s fate as a ‘town with no boundaries’ subject to piecemeal annexation by the contiguous cities of San Diego, National City and Chula Vista.”

Gretchen Burkey, a tireless fighter for the status quo in Sweetwater Valley since she and her husband moved here in 1959, sees an even more ominous enemy on the horizon--developers, who no longer build houses in tracts of 100 or so, but specialize in full-grown cities.

Burkey says she sometimes feels she is alone when she appears before hostile county supervisors, Chula Vista and National City city councils and unresponsive developers with her demands that they keep their hands off the unincorporated area, “but I keep at it because I can’t just sit back and let them rape and rape our valley.”

Disheartening, too, she says, is the surrender of some of her neighbors, who fought alongside her in earlier battles against urbanization.

At a recent meeting of the Chula Vista Republican Women’s Club, Burkey sat horrified as she heard Ric Williams of Arizona-based Pointe Developers outline plans for a 1,200-acre residential-resort development on the shores of Sweetwater Reservoir--right at the head of her Sweetwater Valley. If traffic along Bonita Road is bad now, what will it be with thousands of newcomers traipsing up the valley to the Pointe? And, she asked, what would happen to the South Bay’s water supply if Pointe officials gain their goal of turning the reservoir into a water playground?

The Pointe spokesman concluded his pitch with an offer of a free stay at the Pointe’s Arizona resort community for anyone interested in seeing what the future Sweetwater development would be like. Burkey dismissed the invitation but her fellow clubwomen did not.

“When the meeting broke up, nobody said a word about what they were planning to do to our beautiful valley,” she said. “They were all too busy talking about taking him up on the free vacation!”

“I guess I understand somewhat. The old-timers around here are satisfied to sit around and remember how things were,” she said. “The newcomers don’t realize what’s happening, or maybe they don’t think that there is anything that can be done.

“I know that growth is going to come. I know it is inevitable. But I am going to keep fighting for the best growth possible.”

Even so, Burkey admits that the Bonita she would like to save is not there any more. It hasn’t been around for years. What’s left is the spirit of a few of the valley dwellers who refuse to give in to the inevitable, a sentiment summed up on the bumper sticker of a car parked in a crowded Bonita shopping center:

“Bonita is a State of Mind.”