Bonsall Doesn’t Beat Around the Bush : Growth: If you’re talking rural, this community’s sophisticated citizens group knows what it wants--and is ever vigilant in protecting what it has.

Gee, you would think a couple of neighboring North County communities would get along better than this.

But there just isn’t any ambiguity these days in the relationship between the city of Vista and Bonsall, its rural, unincorporated neighborhood to the north. At least there isn’t any among their leaders.

Consider what Vista Mayor Gloria McClellan has to say about a Bonsall resident who happens to preside over that community’s citizens activist group and who personally monitors the Vista City Council meetings.

“He attacks us constantly, and not nicely. The man is rude. He’s not a very nice person when he gets up there (to the microphone). He’s constantly at it.”

The target of McClellan’s criticism is Marshall Byer, who has his own thoughts about Vista:

“I don’t like their politics, their restrictions and their cronyism, too.” Adds his wife, Dot: “They’ve got the dirtiest politics this side of Chicago.”

The Byers, who moved from Upstate New York to Bonsall six years ago so the wife could nurture her collection of cactus and succulent plants, don’t consider themselves at all rude. They say that, like others who live in this North County underbelly between Interstates 5 and 15, along the San Luis Rey River, they’re simply passionate about preserving their region’s storied rural ambience.

Bonsall is a place of rolling hills punctuated by rambling ranch houses and white picket fences. There are golf courses and thoroughbred horse training facilities. There are strawberry fields, avocado groves and a mushroom farm. A one-time animal petting farm has a sign that still boasts: “Our Donkeys Don’t Wear Pants.” And then there’s the river--sometimes but a trickle, but a river nonetheless, with banks of cottonwoods and oaks and, oh, all those birds.

Bonsall has remained mostly unaffected by the explosion of growth in North County. Granted, there’s the hillside of condominiums next to San Luis Rey Downs Resort and Country Club but, heck, those were built years ago, before local residents banded together to oppose such complexes.

Sure, there’s the small tract of homes alongside California 76 that lookes like--egads--a residential neighborhood. But that’s in the so-called town center and, by city standards, the back yards are downright spacious. And yeah, there’s the new shopping center under construction at the intersection of 76 and Mission Road--called, quaintly enough, River Village--that will even feature a six-screen movie theater, if you can believe it.

Indeed, Bonsall has come a long way in 10 years, when the community’s most notable landmark was, next to a real estate office, an outhouse with the half-moon window that bore the sign “City Hall.”

But Bonsall is still mostly just countryside, and most of its residents want to keep it that way--so much so that back in the ‘70s they formed a community group known for its endearing acronym, BARC.

As in trees? Maybe more as in bite.

It stands for the Bonsall Area for a Rural Community, so it’s clear what they hold as their vision for tomorrow. Keep it like yesterday.

BARC is the closest thing this town has for an organized voice among residents. It’s got 430 dues-paying members (and a mailing list of 1,800 families) and foremost on its agenda these days is to fend off threatened annexations by neighboring cities.

The logic goes something like this: We’re in the county and even though it may be underfinanced and understaffed and underserviced, it still beats the unknown bogey man of cityhood.

So far, they’ve been successful.

BARC was formed 13 years ago, initially to stave off the city of Oceanside to the west, which wanted to move its city boundaries eastward up the San Luis Rey River Valley. BARC organized, its members complained loudly and articulately, and Oceanside backed off. Today, Bonsall is as much a boundary to Oceanside’s eastern expansion as the Pacific is to its western expansion.

Then there’s San Marcos to the southeast, which hasn’t shown too many aggressive tendencies toward Bonsall and is considered mostly benign by Bonsallites.

So all eyes in Bonsall these days focus on Vista, which, to hear Bonsall say it, has a voracious appetite something akin to a pit bull with a tapeworm.

“Some people say that annexation, maybe into Vista, is inevitable,” says Byer. “But we don’t think so. The majority of us don’t want to be in a city, and, for the indefinite future, we will remain in the county.”

County rule is prized, Byer and others in Bonsall say, because it is more likely to preserve the current land-use zoning in the region, which, in most cases, requires lots of at least two acres for each home. Anything more dense than that would destroy the very rural ambience that makes Bonsall what it is, Byer says.

Years ago, Vista tried to move in on Bonsall by claiming it had a sphere of influence up to where Gopher Canyon Road dead-ends at the river, and where Ormsby Road dead-ends at East Vista Way, which is the main drag for Vistans heading out of town toward Fallbrook and I-15.

But the Local Agency Formation Commission, a government panel that rules on such things as city boundaries, told Vista to back off, and today Vista’s technical sphere of influence along East Vista Way comes short of Ormsby Road.

Vista attempted to annex an area known locally as Strawberry Hills a few years ago, saying it wanted to authorize a housing development there. Again, LAFCO said no, mostly because there was no clear means of providing city water to the proposed neighborhood.

But Vista won’t say die, and that’s what’s got Bonsall worried.

“They’re still trying to get land along East Vista Way as it leads to Bonsall, and if they get it, they’ll put a lot more housing along there,” says Byer.

Is he exaggerating?

Well, even McClellan says her city wants that strip of land so it can raise the residential density over what the county has now authorized. One-acre lots would seem reasonable without jeopardizing a rural lifestyle, McClellan insists.

“We’re interested in having that area as beautiful as they are,” she said. “But we also feel there’s got to be some affordable housing in the area--if you can call one-acre lots ‘affordable housing.’ If everyone has estate homes (minimum two-acre lots), where are our kids going to live? Are we saying this is an elitist world?”

Bonsall residents fear, though, that once Vista gets its hands on Bonsall, it will continue to up-zone the property to allow greater and greater residential density.

McClellan answers: “That couldn’t happen under our General Plan, though. Any changes to the General Plan would have to be by vote of the people.”

But the only people Bonsall people trust are other Bonsall people.

“The overwhelming consensus of the community is that we’ll grow, and the land will develop, in accordance with the rural county plan as it now exists--so long as we stay under the protection of the county of San Diego,” says Bill Ferrante, an attorney and BARC member who also serves as chairman of the Bonsall Community Planning Group, a panel of citizens appointed by the county Board of Supervisors to advise on planning and land-use issues.

“If ever we are annexed into an adjacent city that has a different view of how our land should be developed, then those areas would be lost, and our lifestyle would be lost. Instead of having one house on two acres, we might end up with five houses on one acre. That’s the risk. We recognize it as a real imminent one, and both BARC and the planning group are doing all in our power to hold the line,” Ferrante said.

Indeed, the Bonsall planning group and BARC typically work hand-in-hand on local land-use issues. Almost without exception, the planning group has recommended planning and land-use guidelines with the support of BARC--which, as an organization, will rent buses to cart loads of people from the community to downtown San Diego like so many reinforcements for the planning group.

“While the sponsor (planning) group is one of the most sophisticated ones that we have in the county, BARC preceded it, and they were the ones that really began to demand that the county maintain the rural atmosphere of Bonsall,” says county Supervisor John MacDonald, whose 5th District includes Bonsall.

“The thing about BARC is that they don’t oppose all kinds of development. You don’t always hear them saying, ‘We don’t want it, period.’ They didn’t, for instance, oppose the new shopping center. Instead, they worked very hard with the developer to come up with plans that would fit in with the area. They were very, very demanding of quality.”

Added Dana Smith, a staff analyst for LAFCO, “They are a tenacious and relatively sophisticated community group, as active as any in the county.”

BARC hasn’t limited itself to issues of zoning and annexations--where it has been successful in protecting two-acre lots and thwarting Oceanside and Vista. The various directors of BARC have their own specific assignments. One is charged with monitoring the county’s decision of where to put a landfill in North County. Others monitor the city councils of the various neighboring cities.

One of BARC’s most ambitious projects was in conceiving, financing and producing a video showing how the San Luis Rey River has been ravaged in parts by sand mining. In the video, BARC proposed the formation of a so-called “river authority” to coordinate the various public agencies that are supposed to monitor sand mining in the river, because of criticism that the bureaucracy has not successfully regulated the extraction of sand from the river.

The video cost about $2,000 to produce, and more than 100 copies have been sold or distributed to residents, politicians and bureaucrats throughout the state.

State officials are now considering the formation of just such a river authority.

“We were able to show the river--and what’s happened to it because of sand mining--that people had never before realized,” crooned Dominic Savoca, who served as BARC president for five years.

But, even with Savoca, who has put the mining issue foremost on his action agenda, the discussion still comes around to Vista.

“The people here just don’t have any faith and confidence in the city of Vista, based on what has happened to that city over the years,” he said. “Vista would screw everything up in Bonsall. Somehow they’d figure a way to screw up our hills.”