Valley Center’s Homeless Put Blame on Building Ban

Madge May put most of her savings into a nice piece of property in Valley Center and planned to build a little house for herself and her 6-year-old daughter in the pretty little town.

Two years later, she still waits for a chance to build her dream home, unable to obtain a building permit because of a 9-year-old building moratorium in the valley and unable to sell the land to anyone else. She and her daughter have been living in a white frame garage on the property, “roughing it” without proper toilets or electricity and hoping that inspectors look the other way.

Her washer and dryer sit unused and unplugged in a corner while she goes to the coin laundry each week.

“I knew there was a building moratorium, but I thought the sewer was going in,” May said about buying the 3-acre parcel. “My friend (Bob Winsett) sold it to me for a modest price. He had bought it in 1978, and the taxes were eating him up.”

May had good reason to believe that Valley Center was going to get a sewer system when she bought her land. The Valley Center Municipal Water District had been working on sewer plans for the central part of the valley since 1975. The county Board of Supervisors in 1980 imposed a building moratorium because the valley’s septic systems posed a health hazard. The moratorium brought a federal grant for the $13-million sewer project--and construction of the sewer project would have meant the end of the moratorium.

But, over the years, the population around the valley had changed from farmers, dairymen and ranchers to retirees, young families and others seeking to escape from the urban hubbub.

Newcomers to the valley northeast of Escondido moved there for much the same reasons that Madge May did: to get away from noise and traffic and smog. The thought of a “country town” with tract housing and traffic signals and shopping malls that a sewer system would allow welded the valley’s residents into an slow-growth, anti-sewer coalition.

Soon after May bought her property, the slow-growth coalition campaigned for and won the right to have a deciding vote on any project by the local water district costing more than $1 million. The sewer project was dead and the federal grant withdrawn. Only the decade-old moratorium remained.

Although she has plenty of space for a septic system, May cannot put one in because of the moratorium, which was placed on 3,200 acres of the central valley area after the rainy years of 1978 and 1979. During the late 1970s and early ‘80s, ground-water levels in the valley rose nearly to the surface and septic systems contaminated the runoff. Eleven septic systems failed.

For more than a year, Madge May has attempted to “talk sense” to county officials and win an exemption from the building moratorium. After all, the rainy years are long past and the ground water has receded so low that it would take a 40-day deluge to bring them back up to contamination levels, she argues.

The moratorium was “a political move” to give the local water district the “emergency situation” it needed to win a federal grant for a sewer system, she said. Now, in the driest year in the past century, why can’t the county Board of Supervisors allow one financially strapped woman to build one small septic system?

Runoff from May’s septic system would raise the Valley Center ground-water level by only 0.4 of an inch in 1,000 years, engineers tell her.

“And the irony of it is that I could plant my 3 acres in citrus and put 3-million gallons of irrigation water into the ground every year and do it legally,” May said. “It just doesn’t make sense. But, no matter what you say, no matter how rational you are, they just won’t listen.”

May is not alone. A lot of property owners are in the same fix--unable to do a thing with their property.

Ben Benson owned industrially zoned property in the moratorium area and complains that “the only thing I could do was pay taxes on it and graze horses on it.”

Fred Lloyd, a Valley Center businessman, said merchants in town “are being held hostage by the moratorium.” How can the town grow and businesses thrive when a person can’t even add a bedroom, he asks.

Jack Sharp has owned property in the moratorium area for more than a dozen years and planned to build his retirement home there. He isn’t getting any younger, he says.

Val Wynn, a civil engineer with offices in Valley Center, pointed out that the moratorium has forced development out of the logical “town center” onto the edge of town. The school district had to build its new schools out on the fringe of Valley Center.

What is happening, businessmen and town folk agree, is that Valley Center is growing around the edges, leaving the moratorium area bare, like a hole in the middle of a doughnut.

Janet Waltz, assistant chief of county environmental health services, sympathizes with people caught in moratorium, especially with Madge May.

“I admire her greatly,” Waltz said of May. “She has tremendous perseverance.”

But Waltz takes issue with those who say the building ban is no longer needed in these dry years. Despite the lack of rainfall for the past three winters, Waltz said, there are still septic tank failures in Valley Center and the ground-water level has not retreated all that much.

County supervisors echoed her opinion earlier this month when they refused to lift the Valley Center building moratorium. Perhaps because of the plight of May and the dozens of other property owners caught in the building ban, slow-growth forces and building advocates are slowly edging toward a compromise: sewers in a rural community.

Marty Tisdale, chairman of the Valley Center Planning Group, reports that “the key players in extremely diverse factions” are coming together to revise the community plan, lowering the high-density zoning that was imposed in anticipation of a sewer system.

Ken Knust, who represents the pro-sewer forces, says “both sides do not agree wholeheartedly on anything,” but acknowledges that “they are talking for the very first time.”

Madge May is in the center of the peace negotiations, coming home from work for a quick meal with her daughter in their rustic shed, then rushing off to a subcommittee meeting, which often lasts well into the night.

She resents the time it is taking and admits that daughter Amy views the latest shift in the growth vs. no-growth battle as “just another thing that takes me away from home for three or four hours at a time.”

May doesn’t know if the compromise talks will earn her the right to build her house, and she’s getting mighty tired of the fight and the pioneer existence she and her daughter are forced to live.

“But then I think, what else can I do?” she said.