Flood of Change Is Poised to Wash Over Valley : Interests Vie for Fertile San Pasqual, Where Residents Hope to Keep Time at Bay

San Pasqual Valley, that fertile flood plain that divides the San Diego neighborhood of Rancho Bernardo from the fast-growing city of Escondido, is a place where time seems to have stood still. At least until recently, when someone wound the clock and set the alarm for the 21st Century.

The valley, just upstream from Lake Hodges, looks much as it did 100 years ago when farmers there boasted of growing giant sweet potatoes.

One early-day visitor, a doubting Thomas who scoffed at the claims, had his bluff called by a valley native. After the visitor returned home to New York State, he received a 27-pound yam in the mail--c.o.d. from San Pasqual Valley.

But that was 1887, and today the sweet potatoes are market-size and not too profitable a crop. Before long, the potato crops and cornfields will be history, replaced by specialty crops that yield more dollars per acre.

Commercial nursery stock and tree farms now stand where fields of barley and hay once were. Soon some of the commercial growers who replaced the valley farmers will themselves be replaced by a city of San Diego water-reclamation plant.

The picturesque San Pasqual Winery, established in the early 1970s to revive an industry that flourished there in the 1800s, found the going too rough in modern competition and went bankrupt. New owners have started to replant the vineyards, but the winery still must import most of its grapes as its acreage shrinks to make way for a golf course and adjoining estate homes.

The sheep that once ranged the hills around the valley have been replaced by subdivisions. A few sheep still wander through the lowlands, allowed to graze at random to keep down the weeds on fallow land.

Hardly a House Seen

Yet the view along the valley floor to the east from Interstate 15 is still bucolic. The dusty farm roads still meander through the bottomland, and hardly a house can be seen. The greens, browns and yellows of a rural landscape still predominate.

“It looks pretty much like it did when we first came here,” said Frank Konyn, owner of a prosperous dairy on 100 acres with 750 head of dairy cattle.

“We had to walk in over that hill. The road wasn’t here then,” Konyn said of the day in 1962 when he first brought his wife to see the acreage he had leased. “I asked her if we should build our house here, and she said yes, but only if it had air conditioning.”

As for the future, Konyn smiled wryly and predicted that “the whole place will be a park.”

The San Dieguito River Regional Park, a proposed 43-mile-long linear greenbelt stretching from the ocean at Del Mar to the river’s headwaters near Ramona, is well along the road to becoming a reality. And the San Pasqual Valley is smack in the middle of its path.

Can ranches and dairy farms and nurseries and vineyards coexist with hiking trails, golf courses, fishing lakes and equestrian centers? San Pasqual Valley residents are divided on the issue and keenly aware of the threatened intrusion of the outside world into their quiet way of life.

Valley residents have opted for a status-quo future for the fertile floor of their valley in their community plan, but the prospect of a regional park and half a dozen opposing pressures have arisen in recent years to threaten their wishes.

Among them are:

- The treasure trove of sand--high-quality construction-grade sand--lying in the valley floor beneath the farmland.

- The prospect of a major dam and reservoir on one of two major streams that feed the valley’s underground water table.

- The pressures of growth, which already are apparent on the hillsides, where the spires of a regional shopping center and a massive retirement complex rise among the manicured lawns and curving streets of upscale subdivisions.

- The need for undeveloped flood plain as mitigation areas to replace habitat for endangered birds and wildlife destroyed by major projects elsewhere. If ever built, the Pamo Dam, for example, would require about 240 acres of habitat mitigation to replace the wetlands inundated by the resultant reservoir.

- The valley’s agricultural industry itself, which has degraded the soil and, in the western end of the valley, deposited nitrates and other chemicals in concentrations that poison the soil for growers and threaten the quality of water in the city’s Lake Hodges reservoir, immediately to the west.

- The perennial financial pinch of San Diego city government. The city owns almost all of San Pasqual Valley, acquired after a 1958 legal fight over water rights ended with a verdict that the city had damaged the valley farmers by building Sutherland Dam upstream and reducing the underground water table.

With rising governmental costs have come pressures for increasing returns on the city-owned farmland, pressures that have caused growers of traditional crops to lose out in the bidding to specialty growers who can afford to pay higher rent because they earn more per acre for their produce.

A recent bid proposal by the city to lease land across the road from the San Diego Wild Animal Park drew, among others, lucrative bids from three companies interested in developing a golf course in the valley. The bid proposal was withdrawn to allow city officials to ponder the financial and ethical implications of leasing the traditionally agricultural acreage for a recreational purpose.

Fodder for Animals

The Wild Animal Park, the first major recreational use in San Pasqual Valley, is eyeing the same tract of land to grow fodder for its hundreds of animals. It remains to be seen whether the popular park can bid against commercial enterprises for the property.

Longtime valley leaseholders say the line has already been crossed that allows commercial activity within the city-owned agricultural preserve. For nearly two decades, the San Pasqual Winery carried on commercial activities with a city permit. When the William Jaeger winery took over the lease last year, it was granted even greater commercial leeway over protests from neighbors who felt the agricultural area should not be used for wine-tasting parties and other social events.

Bill Knowles, city agricultural lease manager, concedes that prices are going up in the valley as arable land becomes scarce. With each rise in price, some of the leaseholders are priced out of the market.

“There are very few farmers making any money anymore,” Knowles said. “Someday the whole valley will be in commercial-nursery stock.”

To Mike Horwath, a former leaseholder who moved his fields of artichoke and rhubarb to Valley Center, the valley should remain “a varied agricultural setting,” a miniature of what the county’s coastal slopes and inland valleys once were--cows and chickens, corn and oats, flowers and vineyards, citrus and avocado, row crops, orchards and dairies.

For Future Generations

Horwath, who headed the San Pasqual-Lake Hodges Planning Group for two years, believes that the residents of the valley share his dream of preserving the landscape as it was, as an agricultural preserve to serve future generations as a showplace where parents can take their children to show them the way it was in the old days and teachers can take youngsters on field trips.

One way to preserve agriculture in the valley, Horwath said, is to have a tiered rental rate for city leases so that poultry farmers would not be bidding against landscape nurseries for acreage.

Horwath tried and failed to rouse valley residents to create their own specific plan for the valley lands that would rule out further intrusion of commercial businesses and strictly limit the types of recreational uses to those that did not interfere with agricultural interests.

“La Jolla did its own plan. Mission Valley did its own plan. If we want to have the valley remain the way we want it, we should do our own plan,” he said. “Otherwise, the city will do it their way.”

But, without city funding, his efforts failed to win support among other valley residents.

Fine, Pure Sand

Sand mining in the valley, until three years ago, was restricted to widening and deepening the 8-mile-long natural flood channel running the length of San Pasqual Valley. Leaseholders of tracts along the riverbed often made more money off mining rights on their leaseholds than they did on agricultural pursuits, Knowles said. The fine, pure sand in the valley brought from 10 cents to $1 or more per cubic yard.

As land leases expired, the city renegotiated out clauses granting mining rights to lessees and brought control and profits from sand removal back to the city, only to be halted by the federal Environmental Protection Agency from allowing any sand mining until a federal discharge permit was obtained.

Hal Valderhaug, deputy city attorney, termed the valley’s sand deposits “a very valuable asset to the city”--which could be considered something of an understatement. The San Pasqual Valley is estimated to contain 505 million tons of this construction industry essential, according to state natural resources experts.

At a modest $2-a-ton extraction fee (sand retails at $7.25 a ton), the city of San Diego could earn more than $1 billion for the sand in the valley.

Although the city has legal grounds for fighting the federal permit requirement, “we didn’t argue the point,” Valderhaug said. Plans are under way to apply for the needed EPA permit in the near future.

Another Civic Payoff

If and when the permit is granted, the city can cash in on its sand bank anytime it is strapped for cash but unwilling or unable to raise taxes.

Bob Cain, a San Diego city engineer overseeing the flood-control operations, sees another civic payoff in the buried treasure of sand.

Sand and gravel concerns seeking mining rights in the valley “are going to build our flood channel for us and pay us for the privilege of doing it,” Cain said.

A recent engineering study by San Diego-based Boyle Engineering indicated that a 600-foot-wide channel is needed to give valley inhabitants protection against a 15-year flood--a flood of the intensity that statistically should occur once in 15 years.

The current flood channel, which ranges in width from 200 to 300 feet, can be expanded by the private sand and gravel contractors under the city’s supervision, at no civic expense, Cain pointed out.

“In fact,” he said, “we’ll make a profit.”

‘Sword Hanging Over It’

Considering that the 1978-80 storms caused flooding at the level that can be expected only twice in a century, Cain said, “the valley has a sword hanging over it” in the form of future storms such as those of the past decade that the widened channel would be unable to handle. Farmland can be restored after floods, he said, “but it is unlikely that any major development could ever be allowed in the valley.”

Floods judged at the 50-year intensity in 1978-80 turned the valley into a sea of muddy, roiling water, destroying cropland, washing out bridges and flooding homes during winter rains.

A channel that would protect the valley against 50- or even 100-year floods would have to be much wider and deeper than the 600-foot-wide channel. But, Cain added, any increase in the 600-foot channel would be “counterproductive,” taking out more prime land than it would protect.

Both the flood-control project and the proposed Pamo Dam project a dozen miles upstream require wildlife habitat replacement, which is scheduled to be placed in the San Pasqual Valley. That means that hundreds of acres of river-bank soil must be planted in willows and brush, turned into nesting grounds for the least Bell’s vireo, an endangered songbird, and other threatened or endangered species.

Mike Horwath, who has left the valley but still holds it dear, predicts that it faces a future as a “dumping ground” for every habitat-mitigation project that developers face. Unless the residents band together to plan the future of their valley, he said, the fertile land and future recreational uses will be shelved to make amends for development elsewhere.

Ran Into Trouble

Jim Overstreet, the city planner responsible for guiding the valley’s future, acknowledges that the only approved community plan for San Pasqual was completed in 1964. Another plan completed by community planners in 1985 ran into trouble when it came before the City Council that year.

The plan, which reiterated the will of valley residents to keep the valley in agricultural uses, was shelved for two years, or until the Pamo Dam became reality. It remains in its pigeonhole while the County Water Authority conducts yet another study of the dam site and other alternatives to local water storage.

“For myself, I would like to see the valley go on as it has, with as little development as possible,” Overstreet said. “Hold back the lions and encroachment. What I think will happen is the San Dieguito River Regional Park, with a minimum of agriculture remaining.”

One plus factor for agricultural interests in the valley is the water-reclamation plant the city plans to transplant from Mission Valley near San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium to a canyon on the southern edge of the valley.

Water utilities department spokesmen say the plant, which turns sewage water into acceptable irrigation water, will be able to supply growers in the valley and also recharge the water table at the western end, leaching out salts and chemical wastes deposited from years of farming in the valley.

Agricultural Preserve

Also protecting the present agricultural interests are past City Council actions establishing a 4,500-acre agricultural preserve on the valley floor and designating the valley as part of the city’s urban reserve--prohibited from urban development until 1996 without approval of city voters.

However, attorney Valderhaug pointed out that the agricultural preserve will have little impact on the valley’s future development because it was formed by a simple resolution of a past City Council “and can just as easily be dissolved by another resolution passed by the present or future councils.”

As for protection against urbanization offered by the urban reserve designation, city planners point out, 1996 is only a few years away.

Thirty San Pasqual Valley agricultural leases are coming due in the next few years, and farmers and ranchers can expect higher lease prices and shorter lease terms, city property department officials say.

Under terms of more recent leases, farmers in the valley are no longer able to obtain free water from their wells just for the pumping costs. Leases now contain requirements that the wells be metered and that leaseholders pay the city for the water they use.

Review for New Leases

In addition, under a draft policy still to be approved by the council, all new leases would contain a commitment to allow riding and hiking trails through the property--a requirement the valley agriculturists oppose.

Although the city property department today controls leasing in the valley, the draft plan calls for a review of new leases by half a dozen city departments and by the San Diego Regional Park Joint Powers Authority, which holds the reins on developing the regional park.

Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer, whose district includes the San Pasqual Valley and who is a ramrod in the development of the linear park, sees the pressures on the valley as a challenge, not as a problem.

“I think we have reached what appears to be a happy compromise,” Wolfsheimer said, explaining that the farming, recreational facilities and sand mining are compatible activities for the valley.

“What we had before was a bunch of different community plans up and down the (43-mile-long) valley. Now we have strung them all together into a single plan that takes into account the wishes of each area.”

‘A Serene Setting’

Sand mining is a necessity to create flood protection for San Pasqual farmers and, at the same time, create a waterway for the regional park, she said, adding that agriculture creates “a serene setting” for visitors to the regional park and should be preserved.

“If the park planners were going in and saying, ‘No more agriculture in the valley,’ there would be a problem,” she said. “But we won’t and we can’t, because we don’t have the money to purchase all the parkland, and we must purchase the city land at market rate just like private property.

“Perhaps 50 or 75 years in the future, things will change and agriculture will no longer be in the valley,” Wolfsheimer said. “But now we have a happy merger of uses: farmlands, greenbelts, open space and waterways. I don’t see that changing in the San Pasqual Valley for a long time.”