Sold on Business Park : Industrial Area Seen as Solution to Poway’s Problems

It’s a scruffy, dry stretch of rolling hills in south Poway that has been good for nothing much except mining gravel and grazing cattle.

Now it promises to become a pot of gold for the 9-year-old “city in the country”--a 2,500-acre industrial park that eventually will contain 12 million square feet of building space.

However, the building of such a huge development in Poway, a bastion of slow-growth and less-is-nice philosophy, where gardens and horses are part of a cherished life style, takes some explaining.

Poway’s incorporation as a city in 1980 was driven by the desire to keep rampant growth from the area. But now Poway is welcoming the developers who are turning the open hills into the South Poway Planned Community, the euphemism for what will be one of the county’s largest industrial parks.

What turned the Poway City Council and the community around was the prospect that the industrial park will solve the city’s two most pressing problems: the need for tax revenues and a solution to traffic congestion.

Rush-Hour Traffic Jams

Poway Road, the city’s main street, is the only direct route between inland communities and Interstate 15. It has become jammed with morning and evening commuter traffic. The commuter crush rankles Poway residents and is bad for Poway Road merchants. The traffic blocks customers from businesses and few of the hurried commuters stop for more than gas or a cup of coffee.

In the early 1980s, owners of land on the south side of town proposed an industrial park that would be out of sight of most residents, along with the building of an east-west expressway to serve both the business park and commuters.

The slow-growth City Council gave a reluctant nod to “at least look at a proposal if we came up with one,” according to Martin Lotz, a transplanted former mayor of Culver City and one of the owners of the property in south Poway.

Mary Shepardson, a member of the original City Council, remembers those early discussions differently. Shepardson, a slow-growth advocate, said the prospect of getting the out-of-town commuters off Poway Road “was the carrot that attracted us.”

Lotz admits the early years of the ambitious project contained a lot of missteps and a few downright errors before the landowners formed into the Buehler Property Owners’ Assn., named after a pionner Poway family, and came up with a successful plan.

One practice that the landowners followed--inviting everybody and anybody in to see what they were planning--is credited by Lotz and others with turning the property owners’ dreams into reality.

“We had meetings, dozens of meetings,” Lotz recalled. “We invited them to each and every one. And a lot of them came.”

Neville Bothwell, another of the 42 owners of the 2,500 acres of south Poway land involved in the the industrial park, kept count. There were 40 planning sessions. Detailed minutes of each meeting were sent out promptly to each property owners’ group and to key city officials.

In addition, the Buehler group listened.

The city wanted an east-west bypass route to relieve congested Poway Road and the South Poway Parkway idea was born.

Nearby residents of an area known as The Beeler Creek residents didn’t want any part of the industrial revolution. So The steep slopes to the north of the creek bed will remain untouched, masking the massive cut-and-fill operations that will create nearly 800 acres of building pads that are out of sight in a hollow above the homes. in a hollow swale high above, that is out of si

The city wanted a tax base that would support the urban services without disturbing their rural life style. or digging deeply into their pocketbooks? No problem. The industrial park would provide the solution.

“We went to all the (town council) meetings before there was a city, and to all the City Council meetings. We helped in the (city council candidate’s) campaigns,” Lotz said, adding there probably were few people in town who weren’t familiar with the proposals and progress of the plans.

When the project arrived before the Poway City Council for final approval in late 1985, there was hardly a voice of dissent from the audience and few questions from the council, Lotz recalled.

But Ex-Councilwoman Shepardson remembers it a bit differently. That 1985 version of the South Poway Planned Community and the reality of the emerging business park are out of sync, she said.

Shepardson believes that she and other city leaders were misled on the visual impact of the industrial park for the rest of the city.

“I have serious reservations,” she said. “It is much more visible than the (1985) council was led to believe.”

Instead of glimpses of the industrial buildings from the Poway valley, there are silhouettes along the ridgelines and raw earth “V’s” where the developers lopped off the tops of the hills and filled in the valleys.

Poway City Manager Jim Bowersox, the city’s top administrator since its incorporation, shrugs at the thought that Poway has sold out its rural character.

Bowersox is seen by both developers and Poway residents as the key figure in negotiating the development agreement and obtaining the highway bypass in the bargain.

The industrial park and the east-west South Poway Parkway, linking California 67 on the east with Interstate 15 on the west, bodes nothing but good for Poway, Bowersox believes.

The dust and the truck traffic that now disturb a small portion of the community as builders move 22 million cubic yards of earth to create the first segment of the business park will soon be gone. The crunch of traffic on Poway Road will vanish when the six-lane South Poway Parkway opens at the Mercy Road-I-15 interchange by the end of next year, Bowersox said.

The traffic that the commuters and the industrial park will bring--estimated at 167,000 cars a day in a “worst-case scenario”--won’t travel local roads once the expressway is built, but the property taxes and the sales taxes generated by the project will flow into city coffers for years to come, he said.

It takes $70,000 a year to maintain a single city park, Bowersox pointed out, and the tax money from the industrial park will pay for the city services for residents and industrialists alike, years into the future.

A Poway city staffer, who asked that his name not be used, called the industrial park a happy compromise for the city.

“By setting aside a tenth of the city’s area for industrial development in an out-of-the-way place that doesn’t bother many people, the city can stay rural and still have the money to build a new city hall or a cultural center,” he said.

Russ Johnson, senior sales consultant for Coldwell Banker Commercial, roved the county for three years seeking a site for an industrial park before he hit pay dirt struck gold in Poway. He became the catalyst that brought together the developer, the property owners and the city.

The Cadillac Fairview, a Canadian-based development firm, was exactly what Poway needed to make the its redevelopment project AKA industrial park, work, according to Johnson. Cadillac Fairview had the financial resources to advance millions of dollars to build the roads, dig the sewers, bring in the water and rearrange the hills to make the 660-acre first phase of the industrial park come into being.

“It’s a win-win-win situation,” Johnson said, explaining that the city got its tax base, the property owners got premium prices for their land and Cadillac Fairview became the developer of what may be the last major industrial area in San Diego County’s prime mid-section for years to come.

Johnson describes the Pomerado Business Park--Cadillac-Fairview’s name for its 280 acres of building pads in South Poway--as just what the market needs, and the response from businesses seems to bear out his claim.

Flat land in San Diego County is at a premium, Johnson pointed out, and the city of San Diego has further curtailed the market by a citizen-initiated moratorium on development of much of the North City’s undeveloped areas.

Poway’s industrial park gives the price-conscious business community just what it is looking for: a centrally located site where distribution costs will be lessened.

Johnson can offer potential tenants a building at a cost $2 to $3 a square foot less than the Carmel Mountain Ranch industrial site along I-15 to the northwest, and at a much lower cost than the high-tech business parks along the coast.

Johnson believes the South Poway industrial park will an example of what the industrial jumble along Miramar Road could have been--a well-planned, moderately priced industrial park where the essential “little guys” of industry can find a home. Sunshine Bakers, Executone, an offset printer, a moving firm, a Taiwanese manufacturer of golf clubs and a dozen other firms have already made the move.