Margaret Liles

by Margaret McCown Liles, Secretary and Past President

I came out of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors meeting on Wednesday, when the Stonegate/ Merriam Mountains project was declined, with a tremendous feeling of relief. Finally, the politicians in this County seem to understand that there may indeed be a limit to our natural resources, especially water, and that development should be regulated accordingly. The Stonegate Merriam Mountains project would have placed over 2600 houses in an area that the existing General Plan (outdated though it may be) would restrict to 345 houses. The many, many citizens who objected to this project, including most of the Deer Springs Fire Protection District Board (an elected body,) undoubtedly made a difference, especially in the thinking of Ron Roberts. You can fight city hall.

(Margaret’s comments continue after the jump. See Union-Tribune columnist Logan Jenkins’ observations about the vote HERE.)

The heroine of the day was Supervisor Diane Jacob. She reminded me of my favorite high school English teacher. Her criticism of the Developer’s Environmental Impact Report was scathing, pointing out the equivalent of major grammatical errors and misstatements of fact. She pointed out that the Vallecitos Water District added a caveat to their statement of water availability that basically said they could not guarantee they would be able to provide water in a drought situation. Supervisor Jacob also emphasized that this Merriam Mountains project would be a very bad precedent to establish for future development of San Diego County’s backcountry.

One of Bill Horn’s cheerleaders, Tom Francl, told the Board of Supervisors that it was the NIMBYs, not the developers, who were greedy, since they were preventing “our children” from having a place to buy a home, or builders from having jobs. Ed Gallo indicated that the growth in San Diego County was only due to people having babies. Both are wrong. San Diego County is one of the most desirable places to live in the nation. We cannot, and should not, try to prohibit people from moving here. But, we do not need to encourage them. It is people moving here that cause the population growth. They move here to fill the “new jobs” that our local politicians are so inevitably eager to produce. What they always forget is that there is no guarantee that the “new jobs” will go to existing residents. These new jobs will go to the most capable applicant whether that applicant is from San Diego, Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, or the Indian subcontinent. The best thing we can do to ensure our children are able to remain in San Diego County is to give them the best education we are able to afford.

In October of 2001, I spent an enchanting week on the Turkish Aegean coast–a land similar to San Diego County in climate and topography. One highlight of that trip was a visit to the Dilek Yarmadas National Park. The park is on a peninsula south of the resort town of Kusadasi and north of the Meander River delta. Here, the relatively barren hillsides of olive groves and overgrazed pasture give way to a rich native ecosystem. The fauna is reported to include wild boar, foxes, jackals, striped hyenas, martens, porcupines, lynxes, badger, bears and leopards! I saw none of these rare creatures, but I did see, touch, and smell the wonderful flora. The native olive trees grow compatibly with carob, cypress, oriental plane, sweet bay, stone pine and judas trees (to name but a few). This was the landscape encountered by the ancient Greeks who founded the nearby port cities of Priene and Miletus–ports long since left high and dry by the silt of the Meander River.

I felt at home in this park. It was like walking through parts of San Diego County. Dilek Yarmadas National Park gives a tantalizing taste of what these Turkish Aegean hills were like before two thousand years of human exploitation. In San Diego, we have a chance to save our wonderful back country habitats from similar devastation.

The lands surrounding the Aegean have been stripped of most of their native flora and fauna. It was only in the twentieth century that an effort was begun to counter two-thousand years of overuse by humans. Progress appears to be slow and difficult. It doesn’t have to be that way in Southern California. We can save the natural habitats we now have. But it will take a huge political will. I believe I saw the beginning of that political will March 24 at the Board of Supervisors.