Valley Center at Crossroad on Growth

It was big news in Valley Center when, just a few weeks ago, the first traffic light was installed along the main drag.

It was a symbol, literally, of a little town growing up and of the debate now taking place among townsfolk about the area’s future.

The San Diego County Board of Supervisors today will decide how much growth will be permitted in Valley Center while still preserving the rural ambience of the small community northeast of Escondido.

The town’s dominating faction wants significantly fewer homes built than were allowed in a 1984 community plan. Others, though, say more homes--and businesses--are needed to ensure the town’s integrity.

Many people move to Valley Center because they are smitten by country living and horizons marked by ridgelines, not rooftops. Homes are on minimum 2-acre or 4-acre lots. There’s no big business here, no grocery store, no shopping mall.

Some of those people fear that the county wants to transform Valley Center into--egads!--Uptown Escondido.

They fear that Escondido’s Valley Parkway, with its retail stores and apartments and mobile home parks, will snake up the grade to the northeast and keep flowing right down Valley Center Road like some awful run-on sentence.

Others say Valley Center must expand its commercial base and housing opportunities, or else the town is destined to become too elite for senior citizens or low-income families, and the rural residents will continue to have to motor to Escondido for most of their services and goods.

Given those two opposing visions for Valley Center’s future, county supervisors today will be asked to adopt a new community plan that will guide Valley Center’s residential and commercial growth for the next 20 years.

But this bureaucratic exercise comes with a twist. The advisory Valley Center community planning group has proposed a growth plan that dramatically reduces previously planned residential development and resists commercial retail growth.

The planning group, dominated by a slate of slow-growth champions elected two years ago, wants two relatively high-density residential and commercial neighborhoods, or “country towns,” developed along Valley Center Road--one at Woods Valley Road, the other about 4 miles away at Cole Grade Road. In those areas, homes could be built on lots as small as a half-acre--if and when sewers are brought to Valley Center to serve them.

The San Diego County Planning Commission and the county’s own planning staff agreed with the thrust of the new plan.

But Supervisor Brian Bilbray, who represents South County, sees a different future for Valley Center.

He argues for greater commercial and residential growth along Valley Center Road--a “linkage” between the two town centers reflecting more intense land uses.

“To think there will be low-density residential along Valley Center Road between those two nodes is to stick your head in the sand,” he says. “Dynamics will be created along that road.”

Indeed, Valley Center’s 1984 community plan called for some frontage property along the road to be zoned for as many as 7.4 homes per acre--not urban density but, nonetheless, 15 times more homes per acre than is now allowed along the two-lane highway.

That plan called for a 2,337-acre country town, contrasted with the current proposal for two smaller ones totaling just 662 acres. More telling, the old plan called for as many as 3,800 homes within the country town boundaries; the new one calls for a maximum of 485.

The 1984 plan assumed that the center of Valley Center would be served by sewers. The town is now served exclusively by septic tanks--and because of high ground water, a moratorium was issued in 1980 on any new development in the center of town because the ground couldn’t handle any more sewage percolation from leach lines.

In 1986, Valley Center water district officials, armed with a large federal grant that would have picked up most of the tab, were ready to bring in sewers. But strong opposition surfaced, a public vote was conducted and the sewers were rejected.

To this day, the building moratorium remains in place, there has been no new growth in the central part of Valley Center, and the debate about the benefits and liabilities of sewers continues.

Bilbray and others say those sewers are inevitable, and want a community plan developed that will allow a greater number of homes, once the sewers are installed, as well as more commercial businesses.

Bilbray is not without local support.

Local egg rancher George Armstrong, who served on the Valley Center planning group for 19 years and championed the 1984 growth plan, said commercial and residential growth needs to be better concentrated along Valley Center Road in order to preserve the rural settings farther out of town.

Besides, he says, without higher-density--and less expensive, and easier-to-maintain--housing, “the seniors who live in Valley Center are going to be squeezed out. And that’s 39% of our population base” of about 12,000 people.

“And there’s no way for young families to afford 2-acre estates up here,” he said. “I’d personally be better off if no one moved up here, because chickens and houses are not very compatible. But we have to realize what’s necessary to make a good, well-balanced community.”

Realtor Alan Dorris agrees.

“I can make a fine living either way--whether I sell 10 $500,000 homes or 50 $100,000 homes,” he said. “But I don’t want to just sell upscale, Rancho Santa Fe-type properties in Valley Center. I want a complete community that represents the entire population. I don’t want to see an elitist-type town.”

Ted Marioncelli agrees, too. A former aide to Supervisor John MacDonald, Marioncelli now consults for developers, including one who wants to build in Valley Center--and whose plans are in jeopardy.

“Because of the 10-year-old sewer moratorium, there’s a pent-up demand (to grow) in Valley Center. You can live there and enjoy the rural life--and drive to work somewhere else. Well, I don’t see the kinds of development that’s being proposed out there jeopardizing that life style.

“In fact, it will enhance it. These developments can bring in horse trails, golf courses, public parks--the kinds of amenities that Valley Center wouldn’t otherwise get,” Marioncelli contended.

The counter arguments are offered by the likes of Kevin Mahan, an attorney who serves as chairman of the Valley Center planning group; Craig Johnson, who spearheaded the opposition to sewers, and Lynn Leichtfuss, a Valley Center resident who also serves as chairman of the county Planning Commission.

“There are maybe 300 people in Valley Center who are in favor of high density, high growth and strip commercial--the people who own the businesses along Valley Center Road and the landowners who hope to get tremendous returns on their property,” said Mahan. “But I look at Valley Center like living in a Norman Rockwell painting, and (the 1984 growth plan) would destroy that, maybe not this year or next but in the next five or 10. You wouldn’t recognize this place. It would be like living in an elevated Escondido.”

Johnson said: “Bilbray is operating on a system of mediocrity, in trying to make sure each community is numerically responsible in terms of regional planning. People move here in order to not live where they work. Why take that from us? It’s not that we’re elitists, but we do believe we have a right to a rural community somewhere in this county. Bilbray would have the entire county bulldozed.”

Said Leichtfuss: “It’s very difficult for me to understand, when you have three bodies in concert, working to develop a plan and being in agreement, that one supervisor can try to throw a wrench in the works and cause a good deal of confusion and animosity in the community. The mechanics, and the notion of democratic representation, seem to have broken down.”

She said she has no conceptual problem with two separated country town centers. “That makes perfect sense for rural living,” she said. “Let’s use some ingenuity.”

For his part, John MacDonald--whose district includes Valley Center--is withholding comment because “not all the evidence is on the table,” said his chief of staff, Nancy Allen.

“But he’s very concerned about a strip-commercial atmosphere. We don’t want Valley Center covered in neon,” she said.

One option to pursue, she suggested, is a mixed commercial-residential use along Valley Center Road, allowing small businesses to operate with persons living upstairs, something akin to an artist’s loft.

“Valley Center doesn’t have too much commercial now, but, on the other hand, there’s not much existing base to support it,” Allen said. “You probably won’t find a supermarket in Valley Center for a while.

“People who move to Valley Center don’t anticipate having all those kinds of amenities. When they move out there, it’s with the understanding they’ll have to drive down the hill (into Escondido) for that.”

Are developers licking their chops to develop Valley Center? “Well, I overheard a conversation in the hallway the other day,” Allen offered. “A developer was saying, ‘There’s land out there screaming, Grade me! Grade me!’ ”