Bold Vision of San Marcos Starts With the Heart : Community: Town sees itself as the future hub of North County, with a blossoming college and desire to integrate business, transit and health care.

Just five years ago, the two men stood atop a pile of chicken manure and talked of the transformation of San Marcos from a bedroom community steeped in agriculture to a town teeming in 21st-Century technology.

The new university would go right about here, Mayor Lee Thibadeau said. In its wake, said developer Stephen Bieri, just imagine what might follow: business parks, research-and-development firms, top-drawer retail outlets, who knows what.

And now they know.

San Marcos still doesn’t have a downtown, but it’s developing a heart, civic boosters say. Finally in San Marcos, there’s a there there--and they’re not talking about the Price Club.

The new Cal State San Marcos campus opened 2 1/2 months ago, a 305-acre hillside colony that will someday play host to 35,000 students--and employ another 5,000 people.

Thanks in part to the new campus, the rolling hills south of California 78 at Twin Oaks Valley Road--a one-time sprawling chicken ranch--are expected over the next 20 years to be transformed into North County’s newest high-tech center.

City planners are designing a town-and-gown community, literally from the ground up.

“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” gushed Paul Malone, the deputy city manager who is overseeing the work. “We have the ability to do it right from the get-go. I don’t know of anywhere else where there is such planning for a town-and-gown partnership.”

Thibadeau said: “The only limitations to what we do here will be our own imagination.”

Bieri, who sold the land to the California State University system for its newest campus--and retained another 650 acres or so around it for future development--is giddy over the potential unfolding before him.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something like this, and we’re taking full advantage of it,” he said. “We’re working with the state and the city on a project that will last for decades and decades and decades, and I wouldn’t trade that opportunity for the world.”

When completed, this master-planned area that’s called Heart of the City will be bounded on the north by a new civic center and private business park at the northeast corner of Twin Oaks Valley Road and California 78, and on the south by the new university campus, less than a mile away.

The plans call for the two public monuments to be linked by a wide boulevard as friendly to pedestrians as motorists, and flanked by retail centers that will front 30-foot-wide sidewalks instead of parking lots, several business parks, hotels, restaurants, research-and-development laboratories, child care centers and not one but two hospitals.

There’s even talk of building an elevated people mover that would pick up passengers at the light-rail commuter link running someday between Oceanside and Escondido. If city planners win the cooperation of university officials, the people mover would deliver folks to the new civic center, loop through the university--even giving students rides from one building to another--before continuing on to the side-by-side hospitals and then back into town to the existing Palomar Community College, host to another 20,000 students.

When the dust of construction settles, planners say, San Marcos will emerge as North County’s intellectual, cultural and medical hub. And even if you discount hometown boosterism, there’s no doubt that San Marcos is a happening place.

Consider:

* Scripps Memorial Hospital is planning an 80-acre “health care campus” that ultimately could feature a 450-bed hospital, three medical office buildings, a 150-bed skilled nursing facility, a 100-bed mental health medical center, medical research buildings and other child care, education and fitness centers. Altogether, the facility could employ nearly 4,000 people.

* Kaiser Permanente Medical Center is buying a 40-acre site, across the street from Scripps, to build its own North County hospital. The site is designed to accommodate a 439-bed hospital that, if ultimately built, would overshadow Kaiser’s medical center in Mission Gorge. Kaiser might employ another 4,000 people.

* A project called University Center, at the southwest corner of California 78 and Twin Oaks Valley Road, calls for 1.2 million square feet in office buildings, a 250-room hotel, three restaurants and a day care center.

* Just to the west of that, Old California Development Co. is talking of a major retail center--maybe even an enclosed mall--that would feature a multiscreen theater, shopping center, condominiums and more, between California 78, San Marcos Boulevard, Grand Avenue and Discovery Street.

* The city itself is in the act, already grading for its new Town Center north of California 78, east of Twin Oaks Valley and south of Mission Road. It will feature not only a new City Hall, community center and library, but executive apartments, a senior housing center, hotel, restaurants, retail stores and business offices, all of which will employ 2,000 people.

Linchpin to all of this is the new university itself, with its classroom buildings, library, performing arts center, athletic fields and sports arena.

City officials say state planners have been amazingly cooperative in working with local planners in sharing the vision of the region’s future.

“We’re all in the (planning) loop, and that’s the way it should be,” said Carol Bonomo, a university spokeswoman. “Of course, we can’t have the city dictating our curriculum, and we’re not directing the city’s development plans, but still we’re working hand-in-glove.

“We were the first component of the Heart of the City plan,” she said. “We’re the jewel.”

For Bieri, the developer, the wait has been worth it. He had all along planned to develop his 1,000 acres as a master-planned residential community, but held off after getting wind in the mid-1980s that Cal State was looking to plant a new university in northern San Diego County. The university system chose San Marcos because of its central location and proximity to the freeway. Bieri sold 305 acres for the campus and put his immediate development plans on hold until the campus was designed and construction begun.

Now he’s ready to rock and roll.

“I went to San Diego State University and I lived in Berkeley,” he said. “The neighborhood around San Diego State was hodgepodge. But Berkeley was a real college town. And that’s what I want to see here.”

He talks of how Twin Oaks Valley Road will evolve as a promenade, with cafes spilling out onto wide sidewalks and where cars will be funneled into parking lots behind the buildings. Architectural controls over street furniture and advertising signage will tie the boulevard together aesthetically.

Retail centers--with barber shops and pizza parlors, printing shops and bookstores, movie theaters and boutiques--will share the street with business office parks, high-tech biomedical research offices and laboratories, Bieri says.

Up and down Twin Oaks Valley Road, there won’t be a single drive-through bank or a drive-through fast-food restaurant.

He and city planner Mike Poland talk of plans for apartment complexes, student housing and Greek Row--a collection of sorority and fraternity houses sharing the same architectural guidelines--all within walking distance of the campus, and single-family homes at the base of the foothills just south of campus.

One large parcel of land across the street from the campus has not yet been designated for any particular use because, planners say, they must remain flexible for evolving needs. “It’ll be our safety valve,” said Malone, the deputy city manager. “If we need more housing, we’ll do that. If there’s a demand for a business park, we’ll do that.”

University officials have already agreed to allow the Oceanside-to-Escondido commuter train to skirt alongside the campus to drop off students, faculty and staff.

“The fact that a university would allow the intrusion of a commuter train alongside a campus is unheard of,” Malone said. “They don’t like the noise and the vibration. But in this case, the university planners realized the benefits of it outweighed the negatives.”

Thibadeau, the San Marcos mayor, said an advisory board representing local business and civic leaders, property owners and university officials will review the Heart of the City blueprint and adjust it as necessary to accommodate the area’s evolution--and will also recruit businesses to come to San Marcos and capitalize on the growing synergism.

But there may not be much need to actively recruit. Already, biomedical businesses and other companies have contacted City Hall, unsolicited, for information about the region’s opportunities, Thibadeau said.

Scripps Hospital chose to locate its new North County hospital in San Marcos--instead of Carlsbad, its initial choice--partly because of the hospitality extended to Scripps by San Marcos City Hall and partly because of the development of the university, said Scripps spokesman Mike Bardin.

“The presence of the university adds to the dynamics of the region,” he said. “There’s a great deal of cross-support between an institution of higher learning and a health care facility. We look to the university for the continuing education of our people, and we can provide an outlet for practical learning for the university.

“We’re already talking about what kinds of health services education will be available at Cal State San Marcos that will be complemented by the services and resources of Scripps,” he said.

Bardin and others expect the presence of Scripps, Kaiser Permanente and the university to attract high-tech businesses to San Marcos as never before. “This is going to be North County’s new hub,” he said.

Said Thibadeau: “When you look at the area at night, from a distance, you can see the lights of the university campus. It looks like a diamond. It’s a diamond in the rough, but it’s a diamond.”