Breathing Life Into Dreams for River Park : Preservation: Lack of money for land purchases remains biggest obstacle to San Dieguito River Valley Regional Park, but some development is expected within the next year.

Like an infant that finally rolls over in its crib while doting parents talk of future weightlifting championships, the fledgling San Dieguito River Valley Regional Park is both blessed and burdened by expectations.

Its guardians hope that some day the park will be a 55-mile-long wildlife and greenbelt corridor, winding from the beach at Del Mar, along the San Dieguito River, threading between the estates of Rancho Santa Fe and Fairbanks Ranch, along the bottom of the Santa Fe Valley, across Lake Hodges and up the agricultural San Pasqual Valley preserve, alongside Ramona and Santa Ysabel, and finally up the side of Volcan Mountain near Julian.

For all the talk, today the 1 1/2-year-old park agency only owns 89 acres--valuable wetlands alongside the Del Mar Fairgrounds. And that purchase only came last Friday. Until then, and to the frustration of those who question whether the park will ever come to be, it had existed only in bureaucratic documents, like adoption papers for an unborn child.

But now that the park agency has made its first critical purchase, its guardians are buoyed and proclaim that skeptics should now take the park seriously.

And attention turns to other acquisitions and the development of park amenities--picnic grounds, trails, cultural and nature interpretive centers--on land already in public ownership, and which might be able to be completed within a year.

Still, no one expects this child of a park to reach maturity any time soon.

“When I see how many years it takes to develop even small park projects, I know that I won’t be around when this one’s completed,” remarked Diane Coombs, executive director of the San Dieguito River Park authority.

And for good reason.

Reflected in the yearlong negotiations it took just to acquire the 89 acres of lagoon and river bottom on the south side of the Del Mar Fairgrounds, between Interstate 5 and Jimmy Durante Boulevard--the park agency’s challenge is in wresting control of thousands of acres of private land.

Because some of the land is prime commercial and residential property, it may eventually cost hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire.

For people like Coombs, it’s like walking into a swanky jewelry store and being dazzled by the array of gems, but only having a few bucks in your wallet and a dismal credit limit on plastic and hoping that some sugar daddy will come along and bail you out. And, all the while, you sense the well-heeled customers standing over you and breathing down your neck, ready to snatch the gem away before you can muster your own resources.

This is a park agency rich with dreams--of fantasies of developing the county’s most unusual regional park--and poor in funding to make it happen.

Indeed, for all of the county’s existing and planned parks--from Mission Bay to the Tijuana River to Mission Trails near Santee--the San Dieguito Park is said by officials to be the most ambitious undertaking.

It could eventually provide a continuous habitat corridor for wildlife from the ocean to the mountains, and an aesthetic and symbolic swath of open space in areas now pummeled by the pressure of new residential and commercial development.

“We have to protect this land as a park for future generations,” said Mike Gotch, who for several months headed the park agency and who was sworn in Dec. 3 as a new state assemblyman. “It’s a choice of what kind of legacy we want to prepare--one of development and growth, or one of preservation of natural resources that, once lost, could never be regained.”

Typical of that either-or option is Boden Canyon, a bucolic, 1,500-acre valley near Ramona with stands of sycamores, oaks and willows bordering creeks and ponds, providing treasured riparian habitat for deer and mountain lion alike.

The owners’ managing partner is Roger Steppe, a Tustin-based developer of residential and mobile-home park projects around the nation. His group at one time planned to build a gated community featuring 40-acre estate lots and a golf course, but he said he had second thoughts after learning of the San Dieguito River Valley Park.

“None of us really ever own land. We’re just caretakers,” he said. “So the question is, do we destroy the land and build buildings, or do we preserve the land and make a difference in people’s lives?

“Do I want to leave behind a high-rise as my legacy, or do something for kids, who can walk down a dirt path away from the video games and neon signs and get their hands dirty. I don’t think we can afford not to do that.”

So Steppe has been meeting with the park staff for months, negotiating the sale of the property that he described as “having the most character of any land in San Diego County.”

And, although he said the property has been appraised at $20 million, he’s willing to sell it for about $15 million. “I’ve been fighting off attempts by deep-pocket foreigners to buy it, and I’ve got a waiting list of people in Orange County who want to buy estate lots there because they know how beautiful that land is--just as people in Los Angeles knew years ago how beautiful the land was in Orange County. But I’m tired of serving the rich,” he said.

The problem, though, is that the park doesn’t have the money to buy the land just yet.

Enter the Trust for Public Land, a private, nonprofit agency that helps public agencies acquire private land for parks and open space.

The trust serves as a middle-man by buying land with its own line of credit, then holding on to it until public funding is available to, in turn, buy it for public use.

The trust is meeting with Steppe--and trying to assess, at the same time, if public money will come down the pipeline for the purchase of Boden Canyon.

“We’re trying to negotiate for a bargain sale,” said Neil Gaston, an attorney for the organization who toured the property last week with park officials and state legislators.

“There’s a lot of (state and federal) money out there,” he said of the resources that could be tapped for parkland acquisition. “But it’s a question of whether this park fits into the logical pool of funds that are available. It’s up for others to decide.”

Those others include state legislators--such as Assemblywoman Lucy Killea (D-San Diego), who also toured Boden Canyon to see for herself how valuable it could be as a park.

Afterward, she offered a cautious assessment, saying the park deserves funding--but has to get in line with other projects. “We just don’t have a lot of outstanding park money available,” she said. “Maybe the picture will improve in 1992.

“But we’ve got 20 years or more to do this. We have to take manageable bites of the park. This project is overwhelming. We need to see the entire picture, but it’s got to be broken down into smaller pieces. It was a big victory just to form the joint-powers authority.”

Flush from their acquisition of the lagoon property, park officials are also looking at two other critical pieces of the park puzzle besides Boden Canyon.

They covet 317 acres of agricultural and potential residential land between El Camino Real and I-5, now owned by the San Dieguito Partnership.

The trust is represented by developer Roy Collins on behalf of, among others, UC San Diego founder Roger Revelle. The property is zoned for agricultural use and residential development and, because of its freeway frontage location, is considered the “western gateway” to the park.

An appraisal of the land by the park authority is under way.

Next to it, park officials hope to buy 86 acres behind the Big Bear shopping center on Via de la Valle, on the east side of I-5. The site was once envisioned as a private project called “Horse World.”

The mortgage on the property was held by a savings and loan that now is under the control of the federal Resolution Trust Corp.

The park authority is in line to receive a $2-million grant from the state’s Coastal Conservancy to buy the property, Coombs said. The property is valued at about $2 million, she said.

But the park agency--whose directors represent the cities of San Diego, Poway, Escondido, Del Mar and Solana Beach and the county of San Diego--is hardly in position to start making cash offers for property up and down the valley.

The day-to-day operations of the park agency, including paying two full-time employees, part-time workers, consultants and appraisers, are funded through two sources.

State legislation allocates a share of the off-track horse betting proceeds from the Del Mar Race Track, which this year amounted to about $93,000. The member cities and the county kick in an additional $97,000 or so among them, as their contributions to the regional park that will wind through their jurisdictions.

But the big bucks--the tens of millions of dollars ultimately needed for major land purchases--just aren’t there.

The park received an immediate infusion of $10 million from Proposition 70, the statewide open-space and parklands bond measure approved in June, 1988. Of that, $700,000 went toward last week’s purchase of the 89-acre wetlands property, which was valued at a relatively bargain-basement $2 million because the property could not be developed commercially.

The balance of that purchase price--$1.3 million--was picked up by the city of San Diego, through its wetlands acquisition funds.

The park agency also hopes to tap some of the $10 million in Proposition 70 funds earmarked for the preservation of riparian areas--and which will be awarded by the state’s Wildlife Conservation Board--and get some money set aside by state voters who approved the so-called mountain lion wildlife habitat bill in June.

The park authority hopes to be awarded another $1 million or $2 million in Proposition 70 funds that are specified for “resource conservation areas.”

And it hopes to receive state funds allocated annually from federal payments to the state for off-shore leases, and from proceeds on the sale of personalized license plates. Such funds are typically “pork barreled” by state legislators annually for various pet open-space and other environmental projects.

The park agency had hoped its most significant single source of revenue--$15 million in bonds to buy parkland--would be approved by San Diego city voters in November. Instead, it failed by 2,000 votes, and the park agency hopes the measure will be put on the ballot again next November, and that voters will be in a better mood.

So for now, much of the potential parkland remains on the park’s wish list.

Even without the purchases of major park pieces, the agency is moving ahead with other plans that may allow public use of the San Dieguito River Park within a year.

Among them:

* The Bureau of Land Management deeded property at the upper end of the San Pasqual Valley, alongside California 78 as it winds uphill to Ramona, to the city of San Diego. Officials now are planning hiking trails on that land, as well as staging areas along the highway where hikers can park their vehicles.

* The city of San Diego is in the process of buying 70 acres between the San Pasqual Valley and Poway’s Big Sky Ranch, to serve as a link for horse trails between the two parks. The property costs about $1 million, and the city is paying for it with its own share of Proposition 70 funds.

* Within the San Pasqual Valley itself--which is a San Diego city agricultural preserve--businesses leasing property from the city are on notice that they will have to allow hikers and others to cross their property on park trails.

* The area around Lake Hodges--whose shoreline is owned by the city of San Diego’s water utilities department--is being planned for various park uses, including picnic areas, trails and two interpretive and cultural centers. One would showcase the historic Sykes Adobe as an old California farmhouse as it would have appeared 100 years ago, and another would display the Native American influence in the region--both in a contemporary sense and how it dates back 9,000 years.

And in respect for those who don’t ride bicycles or horses or hike on foot, Coombs said one proposal calls for stagecoach rides to take visitors from the Sykes Adobe to Mule Hill, where the battle of San Pasqual was fought in 1846, and then to a private Thomas Jaeger Winery on the north side of the valley, where owners are planning a restaurant.

Coombs said the park offerings around Lake Hodges will be the first to be made available to the public, since that land already is in public ownership.

On the western front, the park already had been awarded a $100,000 grant from the state’s Coastal Conservancy to study whether the San Dieguito Lagoon can naturally be extended beneath I-5 easterly, filling now-private river bottom as a lagoon that would be impacted by natural tidal influences.

If that is possible, she said, the would-be parkland would then be an obvious recipient of funds from developers and public agencies--such as the Port of Long Beach--which by law must off-set environmental damage it does to the coastline by contributing to coastal projects elsewhere.

Meanwhile, private development plans continue along the parkland corridor, to the concern of park officials who hope they won’t find parkland lost before they can get the money to buy it.

Property owners in the Santa Fe Valley, between Rancho Santa Fe and Lake Hodges, slowly are preparing their own residential development plans, for instance. But Coombs is hopeful that before they progress too far, the county of San Diego will implement new overlay zoning laws specifically intended to mesh private development with the future park, so that if the land can’t be set aside as parkland, at least private development will be compatible with whatever trail systems can be installed.

Among the possible carrots being considered for extension to the Santa Fe Valley developers, she said, will be permission to “cluster” homes in greater density, in exchange for the dedication of private land for park use.

In other areas, though, private development has already occurred without regard to the park, she said. She offers as an example new homes in a development on Rancho Santa Fe’s east side. The development, on the north side of Del Dios Highway and within the park’s so-called view shed, “are huge, with white stucco walls and red tile roofs, that just jump out at you.”

“Some projects,” she lamented, “were approved before the park authority was established and before the city and county were able to adjust their own land-use guidelines. We hope that the new regulations that are being developed will guarantee that private development along the park will be more sensitive to the park.”