More Controversial North County Growth : Ranch Burgeons Into Sprawling Development

Another sleeping giant has awakened and soon will make its presence felt in inland North County.

The 4-S Ranch, an unincorporated roller-coastering acreage that protrudes into San Diego’s urban reserve, has lain fallow for decades. Now it is about to generate a crop of industrial sites and residential subdivisions that will emulate its nearby neighbor, Rancho Bernardo.

The 3,600-acre tract, which stretches from Lake Hodges on the north down to Rancho Penasquitos, is the last of a series of once-dormant large land holdings flanking Interstate 15 north from Miramar Naval Air Station to Escondido to initiate its development plans.

It differs from the rest--Scripps Ranch, Carmel Mountain, Penasquitos, Rancho Bernardo, etc.--by being in the unincorporated county area which is ruled by the Board of Supervisors, not the San Diego City Council. Because of this invisible boundary line, its nearest neighbors are in the dark about the immediate and future plans for the massive property.

Jim Carter, president of the Rancho Bernardo Planning Board, remembers that the 4-S Ranch group visited the board a few years ago and laid out its plans.

“I thought it was just to be an extension of the Rancho Bernardo industrial park,” Carter recalled. “I don’t remember a thing about 800 apartment or condo units on Rancho Bernardo Road.”

75,000 Car Trips a Day

By the turn of the century, Ralphs Ranch, or 4-S Ranch as it has been renamed by its owners, will be generating 75,000 car trips a day out of the North County hills and onto I-15, according to county transportation planners.

Now under way is a 170-acre, 3-million-square-foot industrial/commercial park west of its Rancho Bernardo counterpart, and soon to begin is construction of a 57-acre multifamily residential complex of 800 units. Both are part of a 634-acre development plan approved by the county several years ago.

Tom Ralphs, an heir to the Ralphs supermarket chain and leader in the development of the Ralphs family’s North County land holdings, said that the 4-S Ranch will develop as a self-contained community complete with light industry, office buildings, commercial enterprises, housing ranging from high-density apartments to rural estates, and lots of open space to buffer one from another.

The remaining 3,000 acres is in an agricultural preserve which expires Jan. 1, 1992, after which the land will be ready for development.

The 4-S firm has spent or committed $51 million so far to prepare the land and provide urban services, Ralphs said. About $38 million of that amount has gone for public improvements--roads, sewerage, water and fire protection services. The remainder of the money is committed to grading and land preparation for the industrial/commercial property located between Rancho Bernardo Road on the north and Camino del Norte--the future SA 680--on the south, Ralphs said.

The Ralphs family has owned the ranch since 1938 and still use the ranch house, which is located on the northernmost point atop the highest hill overlooking Lake Hodges.

In the early 1980s, applications were made to annex the ranch to the City of San Diego. The annexation never occurred for reasons that Sierra Club spokeswoman Emily Durbin said stemmed from city leaders’ realization of the growing opposition to runaway growth along the crowded I-15 corridor.

A citizen-initiated ballot measure which required a public vote before land in the urban reserve could be removed and developed also would have affected the 4-S property, if it had been annexed to San Diego.

Durbin has been a lone voice of concern over the 4-S plans in recent months, questioning the suitability of the high-density apartment development in the hinterlands of North County. Plans call for 14 dwelling units per acre--more suitable to the urban core of a city than to a rural countryside setting, she said.

The San Dieguito Community Planning Group, the county’s local citizen watchdog for the mid-North County area, questioned grading and landscaping plans but did not oppose the 4-S project. According to one of its members, attorney Paul Marks, the planning group voted 11-0 to raise the grading and landscaping issues during the planning process on the residential development.

“Let’s face it,” Marks said, “they could walk into the county today and pull 800 building permits” without having to undergo any further review of their housing development plans.

Ralphs defends the specific plan for the initial 4-S development as “unchanged” from its original version approved by the Board of Supervisors in 1984.

“We are not going to develop our ranch and then move away,” he said. “We plan to remain here and we don’t want anything on the property that we wouldn’t want as neighbors when we pass through to go to the ranch house.”

The road to development has been a rough one for the Ralphs family. For several years, 4-S was caught in a “Catch-22” situation. Although the ranch land was outside the city limits, under state law it could not be developed until the City of San Diego completed a study outlining future development plans for the area once it was annexed into the city.

But in 1985 that restriction was lifted when the Legislature exempted from the law nine property owners, including Ray Watt’s Fairbanks Country Club, Gene Klein’s Rancho Del Rayo and the Ralphs’ 4-S Ranch.

Opponents to the legislative action branded it “special interest legislation” but Rusty Selix, a Sacramento attorney representing 4-S interests, accused the City of San Diego of “foot-dragging” for failing to prepare its study of the 4-S area.

But several other major steps still remained to be accomplished before the bulldozers that are now busy on the 4-S Ranch could begin their work, such as: purchase of water rights, a $5.9-million dollar item; annexation to the Olivenhain Municipal Water District; annexation to the Rancho Santa Fe Fire Protection District, and approval of a sewage treatment plant to serve the 634-acre portion of the ranch now under development. All of those things have now been accomplished.

Additionally, agreements have been made to widen and extend Rancho Bernardo Road to the west to join with an extension of Camino Del Norte, also a 4-S commitment. Eventually, Camino Del Norte (Route 680) is proposed as a major east-west highway linking inland I-15 with Interstate 5 along the coast.

Fire response time from the Rancho Santa Fe area takes a 30 to 45 minutes, but 4-S developers have agreed to construct and equip a fire station on the property, and nearby Rancho Bernardo firefighters would respond to 4-S fires under a mutual aid agreement with San Diego.

Water service from the Olivenhain district to 4-S requires construction of a three-mile long main, to be paid by the developers. This was a project opposed by then-Supervisor Roger Hedgecock.

As a supervisor Hedgecock blasted the 4-S development plan as “promoting a pattern of unplanned, ill-timed growth” in the North City/North County area.

Future 4-S residents and workers will find that police protection afforded Rancho Bernardo dwellers is not available to them. The ranch will be served by the Sheriff’s Department from its Encinitas substation, about 18 miles away.

Schools, however, will be the same in both Rancho Bernardo and 4-S Ranch. Both areas are within the Poway Unified School District.

Ralphs explained that his firm has “done everything possible” to meet the needs of future residents and the wishes of surrounding communities, including dedication of open space areas and design of roads to detour 4-S traffic off Rancho Bernardo roads.

Rancho Bernardans had five concerns, Ralphs said. “They were traffic, traffic, traffic, traffic and view-sheds.”

When the remaining 3,000 acres of the ranch property is developed, he said, “we envision it as entirely golf course (and) estate-residential.”

The initial high-density apartment development now undergoing hearings before county planning and environmental review boards, Ralphs said frankly, is being proposed to provide some needed return on the family firm’s investment, and may be “refined and perhaps scaled down” if the housing market warrants the change.

The development plan has remained unchanged since its inception in 1983, Ralphs said. “There is nothing in it that my family isn’t in agreement on.

“After all, we intend to remain neighbors and we intend to be good neighbors.”