In Encinitas, Parts Add Up to a Whole Lot of Bickering

One day there, next day gone.

Just like that, the freeway signs up and vanished last December, after proudly announcing to motorists along Interstate 5 that, yes indeed, they were entering “Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Pop 5730, Elev 40.”

Their sudden disappearance probably bothered no one more than Betty Knutson, Chamber of Commerce director and a longtime Cardiff resident. Not one to sit idly by, Knutson did some calling around and soon got to the bottom of the matter.

It seems that a California Department of Transportation crew, well aware that Cardiff had been absorbed into the fledgling city of Encinitas in the incorporation vote of 1986, figured the old signs should come down when placards for the new municipality went up.

Big mistake.

A Prime Ingredient

One of the prime ingredients of the incorporation for residents of Cardiff and the three other communities that joined to form Encinitas was a promise that cityhood would not dilute the unique identity each had cultivated. And little things like freeway signs can go a long way to promote community individuality.

Knutson got back on the phone and soon traced the Cardiff signs to a scrap yard, where they were destined for the shredder. She hustled over, loaded the billboards into her husband’s pickup, and ferried them home. Eventually, with the help of city officials and a state senator, Knutson persuaded Caltrans to reinstall the freeway signs, and they went back up in February.

It is a telling tale. In the four distinct communities that make up Encinitas, neighborhood identity is a cherished part of the civic constitution.

During the two years since Leucadia, Encinitas, Cardiff and Olivenhain banded together under one flag, residents have jealously guarded their sense of separateness while reveling in the advantages of local rule.

Of late, however, some city officials and residents have begun to question whether the communities, in celebrating their individuality, have failed to effectively unite as a single municipality. Some extremists go even further, grousing that the grand experiment of incorporation simply isn’t working, that Encinitas is fast becoming a Balkanized cluster of suburban enclaves hostile to one another.

“Some people in the community persist in believing that we really are just separate communities that happen to be called the city of Encinitas,” said City Councilwoman Anne Omsted. “I think they’re looking at it backward. We’re the city of Encinitas, and we just happen to be made up of separate communities.”

Battle Over Traffic

In recent weeks, neighborhood factionalism has heated up, most notably in the battle over the future of the city’s road network.

At its most simplistic, the fight breaks down into a classic case of north versus south, with residents of southern Encinitas complaining that they have been burdened with most of the city’s major thoroughfares and traffic.

Other rifts have also appeared. Earlier this year, a band of landowners in Cardiff threatened to launch a secession effort after they became angered by the council’s attempts to block the wave of high-density twin-homes sprouting up in the seaside community. Though nothing ever became of the threats, bad feelings linger among many of those involved.

With the city’s new General Plan just weeks away from adoption, some critics have boldly suggested that Councilwoman Marjorie Gaines dominated the drafting of it, favoring her home community of Olivenhain at the exclusion of others. Gaines roundly disputes those claims, saying they are politically motivated statements made by her opponents.

Other residents, meanwhile, complain that Gaines’ four council colleagues, all of whom live in or near Leucadia, have demonstrated far more allegiance to that northern community than to neighborhoods to the south, especially on issues involving traffic planning. Like Gaines, those council members flatly deny any suggestion that they play favorites.

In the area straddling the busy El Camino Real business district, a stretch of shopping centers and tract houses known as New Encinitas, some homeowners say they feel bedeviled by the area’s very nickname, which seems to suggest they are newcomers and, therefore, somehow less entitled to a say in the governing of the city. Noting issues such as the traffic battle and a city decision to put a trash-recycling operation near their homes, these New Encinitas residents say they feel “dumped on.”

Not ‘Working as a City’

“We really aren’t working as a city,” said Betsy Schreiber, a New Encinitas homeowner and former county planning commissioner who opposed the incorporation. “It’s Olivenhain, Cardiff and Leucadia, and the rest of us be damned.”

Many residents and city officials, however, paint a far brighter picture. They cite the strides city leaders have made to rectify problems they inherited from the days of county rule, and the numerous citywide issues that apparently have galvanized the disparate communities--what to do about growth, how best to handle the migrant worker influx.

“I think it’s working very well,” said Councilman Gerald Steel. “You expect different neighborhoods to have different ideas and different interests, and that’s the reason we’ve been very sensitive to the individual identities. . . . It’s that individuality that makes our area delightful to live in.”

But few city officials or residents would deny that Encinitas is an unusual municipal beast. Probably no other Southern California city that has incorporated in recent memory has brought together a set of individual neighborhoods that work so aggressively to protect their separate identities.

In Cardiff, a crowded grid of streets is host to duplexes and homes stuffed with owners and renters, ranging from Yuppie professionals to tousle-haired surfers. Olivenhain is most notable for its rural, low-density backcountry flavor, where decades-old horse ranches vie with sprawling new estate homes.

The community of Encinitas is marked by two distinct business districts and the residential neighborhoods that surround them. On the coast is Old Encinitas, with its 1950s-era storefronts and funky beach-town ambiance; to the east is New Encinitas with its sprawl of new commerce and tract houses.

Decidedly Bohemian

Leucadia, meanwhile, is marked by a hodgepodge of greenhouses, single-family homes and invading high-density condominium projects bordering a simmering business district that retains a decidedly bohemian character.

During the 1986 incorporation campaign, limited growth and improved civic planning were the rallying cries of pro-cityhood forces, so it is only logical that the centerpiece of the new municipal government has been the formation of individual community planning boards for each of the neighborhoods.

These planning groups, known as community advisory boards, or CABs, are the front-line forces in the city’s planning scheme, deciding numerous minor issues such as design review and lot splits while providing important advice for bigger decisions tackled by the city Planning Commission and the council.

While the CABs seem a perfect vehicle for perpetuating neighborhood individuality, criticism of the groups has come almost exclusively from pro-development forces, not from residents miffed by a perceived lack of civic cohesiveness.

“I think the CABs are a good thing,” said Ann Patton, a New Encinitas resident worried that the city lacks a unifying force. “If anything, it is the traffic issue that is serving to crystallize a lot of the divisiveness.”

Indeed, the chief battleground in the city these days has been the traffic debate. And the central question has been how best to provide a major east-west road in the city’s northern tier to remove traffic pressure on streets to the south.

Pushing for Extension

Many residents in the city’s southern half are pushing for an extension of Leucadia Boulevard through the vast, undeveloped 900-acre agricultural preserve owned by the Ecke family. It would link up with Olivenhain Road at busy El Camino Real, the prime north-south road in the city.

They suggest that the Leucadia Boulevard link would not only help divert local residents from roads to the south but would also handle motorists from the sprawling new inland housing tracts in Carlsbad and San Marcos who are heading for the coast.

The Eckes, too, have favored this option, saying it would have far less impact on their poinsettia operation, which is focused on the southern half of the property.

But city leaders like Gaines and Steel disagree, saying the link would dump too much traffic into the quiet residential neighborhoods of eastern Leucadia. Traffic projections indicate that more than 48,000 cars a day would thunder along the four-lane road.

The two council members are also concerned about the road’s implications on the now-dormant effort by their opponents to see Highway 680 built to connect Poway with the coast. To link Leucadia Boulevard with Olivenhain Road, Steel said, would be akin to “opening ourselves to a higher probability that a future decision-making body could say, ‘Let’s build that last segment of 680.’ We’d be inviting Highway 680 in.”

Although the council initially favored a four-lane road that would siphon off traffic from El Camino Real by running through the southern half of the Ecke property, a compromise plan has been hammered out by a special subcommittee that held talks with the grower.

No Resolution Soon

That plan calls for two roads, a two-lane thoroughfare linking Leucadia Boulevard with El Camino Real at Garden View Road, and another two-lane, east-west road skirting to the south of the Ecke land to connect the El Camino Real shopping district with Quail Gardens Road.

The issue is set to go before the council Tuesday, but few folks around these parts are betting that any sort of resolution will be reached soon.

Some suggest that the traffic issue is being politicized in an effort to make hay during the City Council races, which will be decided in November.

“It’s unfortunate that a lot of these comments are actually directed toward November,” said Richard MacManus, a Cardiff resident and former CAB chairman. “I think the city is working. It’s going through all the problems any new entity or corporation would. But I think the spirit of incorporation is still there, the flame is still lit.”

Gaines, meanwhile, points an accusatory finger at Schreiber--the former county planning commissioner and her longtime nemesis in numerous land battles and the fight over Highway 680--as the chief cause for the current unrest.

“Betsy Schreiber feasts on divisiveness. That’s her bag,” Gaines said. “It’s a power play to get her back into some sort of position of strength in the city. . . . It’s one of the oldest tactics in the world and it’s called divide and conquer. She pits the north against the south so she can be champion of the south.”

Schreiber balks at such talk.

‘Nothing Personal’

“That’s baloney,” she said. “I don’t want to be in city government. I don’t want to be a City Council person. The truth of the matter is I would have been happy to have stayed out of this whole fight.”

Although she insists that the battle is “nothing personal” on her part, Schreiber says that is not the case for Gaines. Schreiber said she is “like a lightning rod” for Gaines’ wrath.

Such tussling aside, Councilwoman Omsted and others worry that both residents and politicians may be losing sight of citywide goals.

“Traffic is the perfect example,” Omsted said. “Instead of getting into what’s best for the whole city, people have gotten into this very parochial attitude of ‘what’s best for my neighborhood.’ ”

“People come before us and testify about their community and act like they don’t give a rip about the rest of the city,” she said. “I just don’t think that’s where we should be going.”