What does North County most need?

John MacDonald, 68, has lived in Oceanside since 1949. He has been the county supervisor representing North County since 1987. He is the retired president of MiraCosta College, and he served on the Oceanside City Council for four years.

North County needs to develop a regional cohesiveness, which will provide the opportunity for us to look ahead at long-range goals.

North County has grown so rapidly, and individual cities have different goals. We really haven’t had a chance to take a long-range look at the area. That needs to be done and will be one of my goals in the next year: to gather together a group of the people who have knowledge of the North County business, industry and education to see if we can’t come up with a set of long-range goals.

The North County is the fastest growing area in the entire county now, and most of the growth is in migration from the north, from Orange County and Los Angeles County. As a result, we have a lot of new people in the area who need to be involved in taking a look at the future. As an example, there were about 38,000 registered voters in 5th District who will vote in this election who were not registered when I ran in 1986.

We do have some well-thought-out general plans for the cities in the North County, and they have done a lot to modify the rate of growth and to improve the quality of life and the quality of growth in the cities. But we really have not had a chance to sit down and say what we want to see for the North County in the next 50 years.

For instance, we need to address as a region the industrial and economic development needs of the North County. North County has been somewhat of a bedroom community for San Diego and the Los Angeles metropolitan area. We have people driving to San Diego to work in great numbers; we have people driving and taking the train to Los Angeles and Orange County in great numbers. We need to develop our regional economic and job base.

I think we also need to take a look at preserving some of the open space that, as time goes on, will shrink.

We need to tie the general plans of the cities and the county together so that it is a unified long-range look at a most beautiful area. One of the things we have done to lay the groundwork for this is to bring the mayors of the cities of the 5th District together to work on a number of regional problems.

For example, the cities have worked together to help fund the widening of Highway 78. They have cooperated to develop regional traffic demand management programs. And most recently they have come together to work on a regional approach to the needs of the homeless. So we do have the climate for what I think is needed.

Most of the things we do in government are reactive rather than proactive, and I hope we can sit down and look at a proactive plan for North County.

Ken Lounsbery, 50, is vice president and general counsel of Lusardi Construction. He is a former city attorney and city manager in Escondido and has also worked for the San Diego city attorney’s office and in private practice. The Escondido resident has lived in North County since 1970.

I think many people will say that we must solve the problems of waste recycling, transportation, water shortages, crime and all the other problems North County residents associate with growth. It’s my opinion that those issues are being addressed and that they will be resolved--not easily, but they will be resolved.

North County has the land area, the climate and the will of its people to solve those problems. Technologically and politically, we are going to face them.

I don’t mean to minimize them. But I think there are two supervening issues, which are cited with less regularity because they are more difficult to address.

First, I believe it is critical for North County to encourage a positive educational environment. If there is one asset that just must be nurtured, it is the education of our populace. I realize this is also a statewide issue, but I think it requires a very special resolve at a local level.

And that leads to a second issue that more directly addresses the personality of North County. By encouraging our local education prerogatives, we encourage our young people to stay in North County. What I fear is that we are becoming the home of the wealthy retirees and the playground of the rich and famous. And I dread the thought that we would lose the vitality and the variety that young people, and the retention of our young people, assures North County.

That’s why I am so enthused about Cal State San Marcos. That’s why I believe in the merits of local education. But it must start even earlier than that. I can’t imagine a more important asset than the value of all our young people.

Sure, we need to talk about funding at the state level. And we need to address it there. But I think at the corporate level, in the home, at the municipal and the district level, we have to address these educational prerogatives.

I’m not talking about creating an environment where everybody goes to college. I think that should be encouraged as well, but we also have a tremendous asset in our technological fields for non-college graduates.

I do know one thing. I see the educational values of other Pacific Rim countries, and I would hate to lose all the value we have in our youth who are just as smart and just as bright and just as capable.

The advent of Cal State San Marcos will bring with it younger people with younger ideas, not to mention their educators, who are known to bring different ideas to a community. And I think that is very healthy.

It keeps us from becoming what I think we have already begun to take pride in: the idea that we are sort of better than the rest of the county. A lot of North County folks are very much imbued with the idea of “Look at us--we have Rancho Santa Fe, we are Pauma Valley, we are La Costa, we are Fairbanks.”

Pretty soon we start believing all that rhetoric. But we are a lot more than that.

Randall L. Mitchell, 69, retired from the Marine Corps in 1963. He owns a public relations firm and is active in the community. He lives in Oceanside and has been a North County resident since 1960.

We have two things that stand out as needs in North County, probably neither of which is unique to us at all.

One of them, of course, has to do with the homeless, because there are an awful lot of people in this area who don’t have any place to go, no place to live and hardly any way to take care of themselves. There are a number of those people who shouldn’t be on the streets, period.

The other side of the issue are the undocumented people who hang out along El Camino Real and other places waiting for employment in the morning. When they are employed, it is not legal to do so. Something should be done to control them, perhaps find an opportunity for them to be registered correctly and made available for labor if that’s what they want to do. I think those are the two big pressing things.

There are a lot of other things I’d like to see up here. I think we are sorely in need of a stronger cultural movement here in the northwest corner of the county, and some of us are working toward that end and hope we can do something about it in the foreseeable future. Take Oceanside, for example, and even Carlsbad and Vista. I think there is just not the opportunity to enjoy some of the finer things in life that you can get in the larger metropolitan areas.

We have such an elderly group of people in this area who find it difficult to travel to San Diego--almost impossible to travel to Los Angeles to enjoy plays, art of all kinds, museums and these kinds of things. It’s just not easy for them to get there, and I think we need those cultural amenities up here.

Suzanne Stewart Pohlman, 43, has been executive director of the Escondido-based North County Interfaith Council, one of the largest social service agencies in the county, since it opened eight years ago. She lives in Escondido.

I think there is a cluster of related problems . . . that all impact and are impacted by divorce, unemployment, poor child rearing, lack of child care, a poor educational system, dropouts, drug addiction and pregnancy and on and on and on. It is important to apply resources to this cluster in a way that treats the system as a whole, instead of piecemeal.

The availability of affordable housing is certainly a huge issue. What North County most needs are emergency shelter beds for intact families. We need that desperately. And we don’t have enough housing for mentally ill, homeless women. I have a young woman in the hospital now with possible tuberculosis and pneumonia, and two mentally ill women were raped on the streets recently, and all this is happening because there are not enough beds. What we really need, plain and simple, is beds.

It’s a national disgrace and certainly a local one, too, and it demeans us to ask for something so pitiful and so basic as shelter, beds and food for folks whose basic needs are not being met. We have at least 18,000 migrants in the hills without housing--although the word migrants is kind of a misnomer now, because they are “almost-to-be-citizens.” They are real proud of their opportunity to be here and to direct their own destiny and to make something special here.

I was a social worker when the Vietnamese arrived and I worked at Camp Pendleton because I spoke a little French. At that time, the whole community seemed to open up and embrace the immigrants and whole families were adopted. If we treated the homeless as we did the new immigrants, they would be absorbed into the church community in much the same fashion, and whole families would be nurtured and supported and assisted in job search through a smaller community. Then they would be naturally integrated into the greater community as they grew stronger.

Lee Taylor, 74, was on the San Diego County Board of Supervisors from 1973 to 1979. He is a retired contractor whose company helped build San Diego’s sewer and water system. He lives in Rancho Santa Fe.

What North County needs most is additional roads to match our growth. The major mistake that has been made over the years is not planning a transportation system that would handle the number of people that moved in. The roads need to be in up front. They should be built before the houses are.

As an affluent society, we have drifted into one person to a car, and we may have to drift away from it or the people following us may. I can’t see this going on indefinitely the way it is. Otherwise we are looking at gridlock. I think the gas tax increase on the June ballot is a must.

And, of course, we are going to run into a water shortage here. We’re still building frantically and no more water is coming in. There need to be some big changes in the amount of water people use. There are so many things that can be done. For one thing, we have huge houses being built here--much bigger than what people really need. The major problem with that is the consumption of energy and water, especially water.

Our local water supply amounts to only about 10% of what we use. We have to bring in the water, and that source is becoming more and more overloaded all the time. I’d like to see some conservation measures.

In our sewage disposal systems, an awful lot of water is wasted. There are many systems . . . on boats and in motor homes that use a lot less water. . . . Water reclamation plants are a must at some time. We are shipping about 200 million gallons off Point Loma every day, most of which could be reused. But the best way, by my reasoning, is not to get the water dirty in the first place. That’s easier than cleaning it up. . . .

If you are looking very far down the road, there will have to be some real drastic things, because we just don’t have the water to keep going the way we are going.

BIGGEST PROBLEMS

North County residents see the top problems in their area differently from those of the county as a whole. Drugs are the county’s biggest problem, they say, while the topic doesn’t emerge among the top three problems for North County.

Biggest problems North county’s countywide biggest problems Ranking Problem % mentioning Problem % mentioning 1. Drugs 35% Traffic 41% 2. Growth 31% Growth 40% 3. Traffic 27% Affordable 26% housing

Note: percentages may add up to more than 100 because respondents were allowed to make two choices.

Source: Los Angeles Times Poll