Bitterness That Lingers Over Bonsall Vote Is Joined by Fear

Politics in Bonsall can be hazardous to your health.

At least that’s what resident Bernadean Hanson thinks. Someone threatened recently to blow up Hanson’s home unless she “quit screwing with people’s heads.”

The anonymous telephone threat came about two weeks ago, long after the June 7 election in which a proposal to form a Bonsall community services district was defeated by a mere 50-odd votes. The months preceding the election were filled with bitter words and political high jinks, but not one ominous bomb threat. When it came, it spelled the end of Hanson’s long reign as president and spark plug of the group Bonsall Area for a Rural Community, or BARC.

“Enough is enough,” she said. “I am stepping down as president and am withdrawing from all community activities.” Hanson added that she may even move away from the rural community, perhaps to her daughter’s home in Oregon.

‘I Jump at Every Noise’

“I jump at every noise. I know in my heart that it was probably just a crank call, but, even so, I am not going to have the grandchildren visit here,” she said.

A death threat seems too extreme a reaction for losers in the election to hurl at her, but Hanson can’t think of any other feathers she has ruffled in past months or years. BARC and its Bonsall News Letter did not take a position for or against the hotly contested issue because the group does not take positions, she said.

Hanson personally expressed concern over the way the issue was being “sold” to voters in the 34-square-mile area bounded by Vista, Fallbrook, Oceanside and San Marcos, and she signed the ballot argument against the community services district. She lobbied long and hard against the proposal, arguing that it was under-funded and overly ambitious.

At one time or another, each of the communities around Bonsall has eyed its unincorporated turf, only to be rebuffed by the fiercely rural inhabitants who don’t want to grow up to be a big city. Formation of a community services district was touted by proponents as a means to mark off Bonsall’s boundaries and to discourage surrounding cities and towns from nibbling away at its edges.

Ironically, almost everyone in Bonsall shares the same views about the town. They want it to stay rural, uncluttered with urban subdivisions and shopping centers. But the means to that end are varied.

Some say that the bitter words and angry scenes that preceded the June election were a clash of personalities or a power struggle, but no one could even guess as to the identity of the man who called Hanson and threatened to “blow your house down.” She reported the threat to the Sheriff’s Department, but it has no leads either.

Look-Alike Newsletter

Marshall and Dorothy Byer, BARC members, live in the Warmlands area just outside the Vista city limits and within that city’s sphere of influence--an unincorporated area Vista expects to annex eventually. The Byers favored the services district as a protection against Vista’s incursion into their neighborhood and continue to fight for their rural cause.

Shortly before the Nov. 8 election, Marshall Byer and other BARC members published a look-alike newsletter under the name of Members for a Better BARC, and included an opinion survey asking the group’s 370 members just what they would like to see changed about the Bonsall property owners’ group.

In an 18% return, BARC members indicated they would like to see the group operate a bit more democratically, becoming more of a “town hall” organization where members had a voice in the group’s direction, now firmly in the control of a small board of directors, including Hanson.

“Members want a voice in BARC,” Marshall Byer said the survey showed. “They want more membership meetings. We all have the same objectives, but some of us feel that things aren’t happening fast enough.”

Hanson acknowledges that she was irate over the Byer newsletter and survey, calling it “unauthorized” and in violation of BARC’s policy of not making endorsements. The Members for a Better BARC newsletter backed Proposition D, a citizens growth-control initiative, on the Nov. 8 ballot, and recommended against Propositions B and C, a Board of Supervisors growth-control measure and a proposal for a regional growth-management agency, respectively.

‘The Person Was a Coward’

“I don’t know if they were trying to use the BARC name to promote their own causes,” Hanson said of the newsletter Byer sent out.

“I said that the person who did this was a coward,” she said, explaining that the newsletter was unsigned.

Byer conceded his part in distributing the newsletter and questionnaire, stressing that it was not illegal or underhanded.

R. William Ferrante, an attorney and a promoter of the ill-fated community services district plan, is no fan of Hanson but tips his hat to her as a worthy adversary.

Ferrante rallied a band of disparate interests behind the services-district cause: rural Vistans who did not want to be taken into the city; business and real estate leaders who favored the district as a form of government, albeit a weak one, which would give the Bonsall community a voice and standing with state and local agencies that deal with unincorporated communities; environmentalists who backed it as a means to obtain state and federal funds to preserve the unspoiled San Luis Rey River Valley; and a few dissidents who wanted to supersede BARC’s and Hanson’s hold over Bonsall’s affairs.

Hanson claims that, after the defeat in June, Ferrante and the Byers demanded her immediate resignation from the BARC presidency she had held for three years. She concedes that the action was probably out of frustration and anger after the hard-fought campaign and loss.

Lost By 52 Votes

Ferrante concedes that the loss of the election by a mere 52 votes was a bitter pill. But he is planning another campaign to create a rural government to protect the community from its neighbors, this time without the determined opposition from Bernadean Hanson.

“She was a thorn in our side,” Ferrante, “but a bomb threat is something that just doesn’t seem possible here in Bonsall.”

Hanson, her friends and her foes, agree that the Bonsall boundary wars are far from over.

Although Oceanside has withdrawn after failure of its efforts to build a dam and reservoir that Bonsall residents feared would threaten wildlife and human life, Vista is again preparing plans to extend its sphere of influence north to Gopher Canyon Road. And San Marcos is following suit.