Escondido Votes to Annex Lehner Valley Land : Activist Concedes Defeat to Developer Interests

“One way or another, they are going to take our valley,” a defeated Wanda Cavanaugh said Thursday. “They’ll chip, chip, chip away until they get the whole darn valley.”

Cavanaugh, a Lehner Valley activist who rallied voters in the unincorporated area northeast of Escondido to defeat a city annexation move in June, now believes that annexation forces will win and the 470-acre rural community will become just another suburb of neighboring Escondido, complete with sewers and stoplights and sidewalks.

With a sigh and a mirthless chuckle, Cavanaugh hung up her gloves and conceded defeat to what she believes are developer interests that want to turn Lehner Valley into a mishmash of tract homes and busy thoroughfares.

Her last battle occurred late Wednesday night when Escondido City Council members voted to proceed with annexation of an elementary school smack-dab in the center of Lehner Valley.

‘Can’t Win Against a School’

The impetus for the school’s annexation request and for six others in the valley supposedly was the need for urban services: sewers, fire protection, paramedics, flood control, police. But Cavanaugh thinks she knows better than that.

“We can contract for police and fire. But developers need sewers before they can build. So developers are getting their sewers.

“I can fight against developers and get a lot of support, but I can’t win against a school,” she said.

Cavanaugh had hoped that the council’s slow-growth majority, voted in at the same June election in which she successfully fended off annexation of the valley, would have turned down school officials’ request that Rincon Elementary School be annexed. But, she acknowledged, such a move would have been “political suicide.”

“Now they will have a finger in the valley,” Cavanaugh said of the encroaching city. “Soon they will have it all.”

Request Called Routine

Escondido Union Elementary School District officials say the annexation request is routine. When the valley annexation was turned down in June, the school district requested the annexation of its 18-plus acres.

Ron Ruiles, principal of Rincon Elementary School, said the school was built in the unincorporated valley because “it has become almost impossible to find parcels in the city large enough for our purposes.”

Owners of six other tracts in the unincorporated valley also asked to be taken into the city, but the council shelved their petitions until the valley can be prezoned for rural residential uses under the city’s general plan.

Councilman Jerry Harmon said he would fight any efforts to annex the valley piecemeal, although he is convinced that Lehner Valley will one day be a part of Escondido, which nearly surrounds it.

Wild and Woolly Campaign

“Not until the general plan assures residents that they can come into the city with their rural life style protected will I favor annexation of Lehner Valley,” Harmon said.

The wild and woolly campaign over the June annexation measure--Proposition O--pitted local residents against local property owners and included at least one political dirty trick. A bogus copy of the Lehner Valley News, a newsletter published by annexation opponents, was mailed to valley residents on the eve of the election, announcing that anti-annexation forces had had a change of heart and favored the annexation. Cavanaugh and her helpers countered the bogus issue of their publication with a telephone retraction campaign.

A postage meter used in mailing the phony issue of the newsletter was traced to an organization headed by John Daley, president of Daley Corp., which owns more than 3,000 acres in and next to Lehner Valley.