Fallbrook Sees Its Yesterdays in Tomorrow

While many communities plan for the future--with modern industrial parks, master-planned residential neighborhoods and gleaming, climate-controlled shopping malls--civic leaders in Fallbrook hold a vision for the past.

That past, they say, includes not only the charm of downtown antique stores, but a recognized dependence on agricultural workers for their contributions to the area’s economy--and the acknowledged responsibility to provide housing for them.

“Towns and cities grow up, but we don’t want to lose the character that’s been ours for more than 100 years, because, if we do, we might lose our town’s sense of itself,” said resident Bill Ross.

With that notion, a committee of townsfolk will go before the County Board of Supervisors today with a wish-list of projects and goals that they hope will preserve Fallbrook for what it is: a heterogeneous community complete with million-dollar ranch homes and downtown apartments and migrant worker dorms, Main Street welding shops and tourmaline jewelry stores.

The committee was formed at the urging of the county itself, which wants unincorporated communities to develop their own plans to improve what they’ve got, and to let county bureaucrats know how they can be of assistance.

Fallbrook’s community leaders--representing such organizations as the Merchants Assn., the senior citizens’ center, the Board of Realtors, the Fallbrook Land Conservancy and even the Marine Corps, which looms over Fallbrook on its western edge, have been studying that mandate for the past 1 1/2 years, and they say they’re now ready to make their pitch.

In a sentence, said Ross--a retired Chicago advertising executive who moved here two years ago, smitten by Fallbrook’s ambience--the community’s vision “is to retain its rural lifestyle.”

“It must be noted, however, that what constitutes a rural lifestyle today differs significantly from what it was a generation ago,” adds the report, authored by the committee headed by Ross. “The best that can be hoped for today is to maintain the appearance of a rural lifestyle with as many of the amenities of small town or village life as possible.”

Given that, the committee decided, the two major goals for Fallbrook are to preserve and revitalize the “friendly village” atmosphere that the town has promoted for years--around a town center that’s anchored by Main Street--and to preserve the surrounding rural environment, even to the inclusion of migrant workers who tend to the town’s abundant avocado and citrus groves.

Indeed, one of the stated goals of the community committee is to support county efforts “to provide appropriate housing for agricultural workers in the area.”

Said Ross:

“The success or failure of Fallbrook won’t depend on law enforcement and crime, but on how well we maintain our agricultural infrastructure--the packing houses, the groves, the low-cost housing opportunities for labor, the entire working landscape. So many people in Fallbrook maintain their own small groves, and we’ve come to rely on a labor pool--the people who manage our groves, pick our fruit and pack it. We don’t want to lose them. We don’t want to drive them away.”

Not only does the so-called Fallbrook Revitalization Advisory Council support the county’s effort to encourage private growers to build housing for agricultural workers, but the committee is considering promoting its own education program for citizens “so they’ll all realize that these lower-income workers are not a problem. They’re a resource. Without them, what is Fallbrook--with all of its agricultural grove areas--wouldn’t be what it is.”

The acknowledgement of the need for migrant housing is only one small component of the entire revitalization plan for Fallbrook.

Topping the list of priorities is a request for more law enforcement coverage, including sheriff’s deputies assigned specifically to auto theft and narcotics. “Those are the two biggest problems we’ve got in Fallbrook,” said Ross. “We don’t have serial killers or homicidal maniacs here.”

The committee also wants the county’s help in establishing a downtown business improvement district to tackle such problems as a shortage of customer parking, traffic congestion, litter, the need for improved landscaping, and a proliferation of commercial signs.

“We look like the original sign street,” Ross said. Furthermore, he said, there is an excess of billboards in Fallbrook, creating a visual blight for which there is no solution except to ask the county to adopt an ordinance to address the problem.

One of the focal points of the downtown revitalization, the committee decided, is to improve the flow of vehicular and pedestrian traffic--perhaps by establishing Main Street as a one-way street and restricting truck traffic to the parallel Mission Road.

“We want to make the downtown village ‘pedestrian-friendly,’ a place where you’re not threatened by automobiles and noise, where you’re invited to walk. After all,” said Ross, “that’s what malls are--the parks of today. People don’t go to parks; they go malling.

“We want to think of Fallbrook as a park, and to make it comfortable and easy for seniors or mothers with small children to walk from one end of Main Street to the other, comfortably.”

None of this suggests, Ross said, that downtown Fallbrook merchants want to posture themselves to generate business from outsiders. “We’re not looking to become a tourism destination. We just want to make downtown friendlier for ourselves.”

The committee also wants the county’s help in winning a federal or state grant to fund a marketing study on behalf of downtown merchants.

“That’s a problem facing lots of small communities with old downtowns,” Ross said. “People’s shopping habits have changed, and they no longer tend to shop their main streets. We need to study our market area and identify what goods and services people want to find here in Fallbrook. We won’t get a Nordstrom to open up in Fallbrook. That’s not the issue. But there are other businesses that maybe we should be attracting here.”

The county will also be asked to make a variety of public improvements, including the installation of more traffic signals, the extension of Reche Road to Mission Road and its widening to four lanes, the extension of Fallbrook Street, the construction of sidewalks, improvements to wheelchair access points downtown and completion of an unfinished horse trail system.

County supervisors will also be asked today to implement its existing Sensitive Lands Ordinance to protect hillsides and wetlands, to develop a 4-block-long walkway along a creek from Fallbrook Street to Fig Street, the establishment of more downtown “mini-parks” and improved facilities, maintenance and hours of operation at Live Oak Park.

Finally, the citizens’ group wants the county to finance a survey of Fallbrook’s historical structures to better highlight the downtown as the community’s commercial and cultural center.

“This revitalization plan is an attempt to get the community to focus on itself and to determine what it’s going to take to keep what we all came here for,” Ross said. “It’s a vision on how to maintain our friendly village. We may not accomplish all of it, but it’s the ideal of what we want.”

The Board of Supervisors is expected to refer the plan for review by its staff, which will report back within four months.