A $100-Million (Plus) Vision: San Dieguito Valley Park

It stretches for 43 miles--from the surf at Del Mar east to the forest behind Sutherland Reservoir.

The first inhabitants were the San Dieguito Indians, a tribe of hunters who may have settled the area as early as 10,000 B.C.

Now, the flatlands not too far from the San Dieguitos’ long-buried encampments have been turned into golf courses and million-dollar “estate homes,” safely inside private neighborhoods with locked gates.

A Varied Valley

East of the fancy homes of Fairbanks Ranch is the undeveloped Santa Fe Valley, where 120 property holders own 3,530 acres and are leery of government--and each other.

Then comes Lake Hodges, where the black-tailed gnat-catcher and the cactus wren thrive, and man is largely forbidden; and then the San Pasqual Valley, where men farm and take sand from the river and golden eagles have their nests high on the cliffs; and finally the pristine Pamo Valley, where the Sierra Club fought off the San Diego County Water Authority, then Sutherland Reservoir, the Volcan Mountains and Cleveland National Forest.

As a thing of nature, the San Dieguito River Valley is varied and largely uncontrolled, and that is its glory.

As a thing of man, it is varied and largely uncontrolled, and that may be its undoing.

To the dreamers, the valley represents a chance to preserve a swath of green from the forest to the ocean. It stands as a chance to block the urban sprawl that threatens to flow continuously along Interstate 5, from San Ysidro to Oceanside, and along I-15, from San Diego to Escondido.

“The San Dieguito River Valley is the Mission Bay Park-Balboa Park of North County,” said San Diego Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer. “We need it to protect our way of life, our sanity, our economy and our environment.”

‘Our Last Shot’

“It’s pretty much our last shot in an unplanned river valley to preserve some natural beauty,” County Supervisor Susan Golding said.

Wolfsheimer and Golding want the San Dieguito River Valley to escape the sad fate of Mission Valley, which went from farmland to a clogged alley of hotels and office buildings, or San Clemente Canyon, which was saved from development but torn asunder by California 52.

Five cities--San Diego, Del Mar, Solana Beach, Escondido and Poway--and the county government have a slice of the San Dieguito River Valley within their boundaries. An autonomous and sometimes ornery state agency, the Del Mar Fair Board, also controls a part.

Several hundred property owners have a piece of the valley. Half a dozen state regulatory agencies--and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach--have an interest in what happens there.

So do at least that many private groups of environmentalists, bird watchers and advocates of open space and slow growth.

People who are interested in preserving the valley are trying to shape a plan--a plan which, if successful, would be the most complex, expensive and politically ambitious commitment ever made to preserving the greenness of San Diego County.

True, there have been other parks in the county where many private landowners were involved (Sweetwater Park), where cooperation between city and county was essential and successful (Mission Trails Regional Park), and where development pressures were impinging (Los Penasquitos Canyon Preserve).

But the San Dieguito River Valley is in a class by itself.

“This is the biggest, most grandiose plan ever undertaken by more than one jurisdiction in San Diego County,” said George Loveland, director of San Diego’s Park and Recreation Department.

“It’s not going to happen in one, two or five years,” Loveland said. “It’s going to test the successive wills of city councils in several cities and the Board of Supervisors for many years to come.”

Wolfsheimer predicts she will need to keep fighting for the park long after she leaves the council.

‘Screaming About the Park’

“I don’t care if I’m 90 years old and using a walker, I’ll be at the council yelling and screaming about the park,” she said. “If it takes lying down in front of the bulldozers, I’ll be ready.”

Golding calls the project the most exciting she has ever been involved with. She adds, “It will be expensive and difficult, but it is do-able.”

How expensive? And how difficult? Consider:

* One off-the-cuff estimate says it will cost a minimum of $100 million to buy a significant portion of the privately owned land west of Lake Hodges (the land east of the lake is publicly owned).

* So far, the county government only has $10 million toward the acquisition of land in the valley (from a statewide parkland and open-space bond passed in June). One property owner has informally valued his land at $30 million.

* Relations between the two most important of the agencies, the San Diego City Council and the County Board of Supervisors, have been marked by suspicion and recriminations. Both the council and the board have endorsed the concept of a park, but neither has been willing to give up any autonomy to form a joint-powers agency. Each blasts the other as pro-growth, although environmentalists say both have reputations for talking green and then voting cement.

The council unsuccessfully fought to wrest control of part of the valley from the county. There also is disagreement over where roads should go and whether there should be a new interchange with I-5.

The San Diego Assn. of Governments has taken the lead in park planning, but participation is voluntary and Sandag actions are not binding. Golding and Wolfsheimer, who represent parts of the valley, serve as co-chairmen of a Sandag committee.

* If inter-agency rivalry is a problem, so may be intra-agency apathy.

“I have yet to see a lot of enthusiasm among my colleagues on the board for spending a lot of money on a park that is not in their districts,” Golding said.

Similar apprehension is surfacing in San Diego. Voters’ passage in November of a plan to elect City Council members by district has evoked fear by the measure’s opponents that it will lead to political tribalism.

It remains to be seen how a project like the San Dieguito River Valley will fare. The valley is at the city’s northern boundary and touches only one council district.

Though proponents would strenuously disagree, it could be argued that the park would benefit North County residents more than those in the city of San Diego.

Even before district elections, warning flags had been raised.

“I really don’t have high prospects for this,” Tim O’Connell, land-use adviser to Mayor Maureen O’Connor, told a June, 1987, gathering in Rancho Bernardo, sponsored by the Friends of the San Dieguito River Valley.

O’Connell offered, at that time, a formula for increasing the park’s chance for success: limit the number of “players” involved in decision-making, give authority to one agency, encourage cooperation with property owners and decide early what kind of park is wanted.

Eighteen months later, the number of decision-makers is increasing, authority over park planning is still divided, property owners are increasingly restive, and there is still no definition of the park’s boundaries or what kind of park is desirable or realistic.

The visionaries behind the proposed park do not have to reinvent the wheel--just customize it, perhaps--as they map strategy, some warn.

Perhaps San Diego County’s best role model is in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, where the National Park Service is working to develop the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, a 53-mile-long project linking Point Mugu to Griffith Park near downtown Los Angeles.

It is some of the most valued land in the nation, both environmentally and for its development value--the same kinds of competing forces that face the San Dieguito proposal. Those who have worked on the Santa Monica recreational area for 10 years or more say San Diegans face a major task, but can succeed.

Years of Work Ahead

“It sounds like San Diego has left the gate running,” said Margot Feuer, a member of the National Recreation Area Advisory Commission. But she warns San Diegans to expect years of work and lawsuits by developers and landowners.

In January, the Sandag committee will consider whether to recommend that a joint-powers agreement be signed, principally between San Diego and the county.

Under such an agreement, one of the existing agencies (the board or the council) or a separate commission would be given authority over park planning and land acquisition. It might also have the authority to sell bonds.

Joint-powers agreements are a common method of attacking problems that stretch across jurisdictional lines, particularly issues of open space and transportation.

The San Diego Unified Port District was formed by a kind of joint-powers agreement; so was Sandag itself, albeit with limited authority. When the county and local cities decided to ask voters for a sales-tax increase for transit projects, a joint-powers agreement was developed, and one agency was given control of administering the funds.

There is already a joint-powers agreement at work in a finger canyon off the San Dieguito River Valley. It is an agency devised by San Diego and Del Mar to acquire and maintain open space in Crest Canyon, south of the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The agreement spells out who pays for what and who makes the decisions.

The idea for a joint-powers agreement for San Dieguito River Valley was greeted with a decided lack of enthusiasm when first considered by the Sandag committee. But environmentalists are concerned that precious time is being wasted and have pushed for reconsideration.

At an October public hearing at San Diego City Hall, Diane Barlow Coombs, a leader of Citizens Coordinate for Century 3, a leading environmental group respected for its political clout, said her group is concerned about “fragmentation in the process” of planning for a park.

“We’re impatient,” Coombs said. “We weren’t here years earlier before a lot of mistakes in the valley were made.”

As it stands now, the city and county efforts are separate, linked loosely by Sandag, which is doing its own planning. Participation in Sandag’s effort is strictly voluntary.

“This is the traditional Sandag role,” said senior planner Michael McLaughlin. “We don’t have a stick to wave at people, or a role in implementing a plan.”

The city of San Diego has hired the Estrada Land Planning consulting group of San Diego to develop a plan for its share of the valley, the bulk of which stretches from Lake Hodges to Sutherland Reservoir and is owned either by the city itself or by the city’s Department of Water Utilities.

(Although the Department of Water Utilities is part of the city government, it has a fiscal separateness guaranteed by the City Charter. Thus the city, if it wants access to the department’s land for a park, may need to buy the land as if it were in private ownership.)

The county government is doing its own planning for the area west of Lake Hodges to the mouth of the San Dieguito River, just beyond Old Highway 101 and the Del Mar Fairgrounds.

To make matters more complicated, a portion of the valley near Interstate 5, and not contiguous with the other city portions, is within the boundaries of the city of San Diego.

There is near-universal agreement that, for a park plan to succeed--whether it be an “active” park with playing fields, a “passive” one with trails and meadows, or a mix--there will need to be constancy among elected officials and a high degree of cooperation among private and public interests.

Park planning will also test the ability of public agencies to cajole, wheedle and bargain with private landowners.

“The $10 million is just a drop in the bucket toward the acquisition costs,” Loveland said. “If we are going to reach a goal of at least a greenbelt link all the way from the ocean to the Sutherland reservoir, we’re talking about developer agreements--agreements that allow some development, residential or commercial, in exchange for open space.”

To Loveland, the San Dieguito River Valley process is the logical extension of something that has been part of land-use planning for at least two decades--requiring a trade-off between public benefit and private profit.

Of the 16,000 acres of open space acquired in recent years by the city of San Diego, records show that 12,000 were through the “subdivision process” of allowing growth in one area to preserve public access in another.

The recent history of relations between park enthusiasts and property owners has not been a cheery one, however.

“I haven’t heard anybody saying they’re not in favor of a park,” said Roy Collins, project manager for the San Dieguito Trust, which owns 368 acres in the lower valley. “What I am hearing is a lot of fear they will not be treated fairly when the city and county begin acquiring.”

Wants ‘Economic Sense’

Some of the sharpest criticism of the planning process has come from what might seem an unlikely source: Roger Revelle, co-founder of the UC San Diego, and a world-renowned oceanographer and conservationist.

Revelle is a property owner in the San Dieguito River Valley, both as part of the San Dieguito Trust and individually. He says park planning has been long on dreams and short on reality.

“They’ve brought together a lot of conservationists and environmentalists who have no property and no money,” Revelle said. “They think this thing should happen without any cost to anybody except the landowner. . . . People like the Sierra Club are full of ideals but without any economic sense.”

In 1985, landowners in the lower valley, including the trust, petitioned the City Council to allow them to form an officially sanctioned planning group. Sensing that it was the first step toward a full-scale onslaught of development plans, the council rejected the idea.

In subsequent years, several landowners in the lower valley have skirmished with the city over how much of their land is covered by environmentally sensitive wetlands.

Three landowners eventually refused to allow a consultant hired by the State Coastal Conservancy to venture onto their property to make a wetlands assessment.

The lower valley is not the only place where cooperation between landowners and government is less than ideal.

An attempt to organize property owners in the Santa Fe Valley--between Fairbanks Ranch and Lake Hodges--into a group that could negotiate with park planners over the valley’s future fell apart. Disagreement emerged over the group’s goals and whether the interests of smaller property owners were the same as those of the large landholders.

Sandag has formed several committees--of elected officials, staff members and the public--to urge greater cooperation among the adjacent and sometimes competing jurisdictions.

Without that cooperation, even those closest to the planning process fear that the result will be a hodgepodge at best.

“We’re not going to have a true regional park if all we have are a series of disconnected bubbles,” said consultant Steve Estrada, whose firm has been hired by the city on a $100,000 retainer.

“I don’t want to see it turn into a paper-work park rather than a real park,” Wolfsheimer said. “I don’t want to see us bogged down with paper and processes. . . . I have a premonition it could if we’re not careful.”

But, without a joint-powers agreement, the city and county are “dancing back to back,” said Don Wood, president of Citizens Coordinate for Century 3.

The public positions of the city and county have been that a joint-powers agreement is redundant. However, that may be shifting; at a Sandag advisory meeting in late November, Wolfsheimer indicated that the city may be willing to reconsider giving up some autonomy.

If cooperation is a problem, so too is money.

Sandag has identified several methods of acquiring land for a park: through restrictive zoning (a politically explosive notion) or through easements, gifts and donations (either of cash or land), eminent domain or transferring of development rights in the valley to sites elsewhere.

The county is writing a grant application, due in early March, for additional funds from the statewide bond issue. Both the county and the city of San Diego have already applied for funds to preserve archeological sites in the Santa Fe Valley and near Lake Hodges.

Interest Up North

Further, the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, under orders from the California Coastal Commission, are searching for coastal wetland sites to buy and restore, in exchange for expanding their own operations closer to home.

Officials from both port districts are eyeing the lower San Dieguito River Valley, east and west of Interstate 5, to fulfill their state-imposed “mitigation” requirements.

While the Sandag committees meet, grant applications are written, and the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles ponder, development pressures increase.

This fall the Board of Supervisors approved a country club development for the lower valley (opposed by the city of San Diego) and pushed the mammoth 4-S Ranch development near Rancho Bernardo closer to development.

In both cases, supervisors complained that their hands were tied by previous actions and that they had no choice, but park enthusiasts were crestfallen.

“I spend my time running around and trying to put out brush fires,” said Alice Goodkind, president of the 360-member Friends of the San Dieguito River Valley. “It’s becoming overwhelming.”

If Goodkind sees brush fires, Bob Copper, director of the County Department of Parks and Recreation, sees opportunity. He urges a long view.

“I think Abbe (Wolfsheimer) may be right; it could well be into the next century when we’re still acquiring parcels,” Copper said. “We started Mission Trails 18 years ago, and we’re still buying land. The important thing is that there is a constituency for the San Dieguito River Valley park, and I’m confident it will happen.

“Slowly and with compromises, but it will happen.”