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Fallbrook Rejects Incorporation

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Times Staff Writer

Voters in Fallbrook Tuesday rejected a bitterly fought proposal to incorporate their community as the 19th city in San Diego County.

In neighboring Bonsall, voters were turning down the establishment of a community service district to provide library and recreation services in their rural community.

Voters in San Marcos, meanwhile, were supporting a proposed ordinance which would require developers to pay for such public improvements as schools, parks and fire stations as conditions of building in the city.

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In Fallbrook, David Lowry--who is chairman of the community’s planning group and would have been elected to the Town Council had incorporation passed--said he was discouraged by the results.

He blamed the loss on voters who “didn’t really research the issues. That indicates to me that Fallbrook isn’t mature enough to handle its own destiny, so this wasn’t the best time to incorporate.”

Tuesday’s election was the second time voters in Fallbrook had gone to the polls to decide which course the community’s future should take. In 1981, incorporation was defeated by a 4-1 margin.

An Earlier Defeat

The earlier election defeat stemmed from concern that the rural community could not sustain the cost of cityhood, and that concern was again the cornerstone in the campaigning toward this week’s election.

Try as they might to focus on issues of local control, a more efficient spending of local funds and the need to cut ties with the cumbersome county bureaucracy, proponents of incorporation could not escape the issue of money.

That issue was hammered on unrelentingly by incorporation opponents, who said Fallbrook could ill afford the risk of running its own government. Opponents coupled their concern with the argument that Fallbrook has fared well without a locally elected Town Council.

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Opponents, in a series of advertisements in the local Fallbrook newspaper, argued that developers and the real estate business were the true movers for incorporation because the community would need to grow on commercial, industrial and residential fronts to help pick up the cost of local government.

Critics said economic forecasts indicating Fallbrook could afford cityhood were skewed in favor of incorporation and not to be trusted.

Cityhood supporters countered that the projections were credible and that Fallbrook’s future was far better determined by a locally elected Town Council than continued reliance on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, 60 miles away.

“The opposition’s campaign was misleading and deceptive,” said Lowry. “But I accept that as politics. Deception is the name of the game. In political elections, it goes with the territory.”

Lowry said he felt voters were being asked to decide between the lesser of two evils, since there were risks both in incorporating and in staying with the county, which is experiencing its own fiscal crisis.

In neighboring Bonsall, along Fallbrook’s southern boundary, the issue was slightly akin to a poor-man’s incorporation: whether the rural valley along the San Luis Rey River Valley should establish a community service district designed to provide a community library and recreation services.

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Would Have No Funding

The district would initially have no funding, and would have to seek government grants or private money unless voters later approved a special district tax.

Proponents of the district said Bonsall had been neglected by the county in library and recreational programs. Some supporters of the district also argued that, by its formation, Bonsall would be politically more powerful in fending off unwanted annexations from neighboring cities, especially Vista.

But opponents to the district said that the establishment of the district would have little or no bearing on the area’s growth patterns and that there was no need shown for a library and recreation services in the community.

Opponents also argued that, with no immediate taxing provision to finance the district, it would be a meaningless layer of bureaucracy.

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