Trail Advocates Push to Get Development Plan Back on Track

When Jim Miller wants to air it out, really let the workaday cares melt away and commune a bit with nature, he saddles up his 15-year-old quarter horse, Pat, and heads into the San Diego County outback on a trail.

“I’ve had some wonderful experiences,” said Miller, a real estate attorney who lives in La Mesa. “I’ll go on one of those hills above Sweetwater Reservoir and see a couple hundred Canadian geese circle and circle and come in on the lake. The honkers are just yakking and they set their wings and come skiing in. It’s quite a sight.”

Miller worries, however, that the tidal wave of development in many parts of the fast-growing county could shut out residents in the years to come from the chance to enjoy the sort of backcountry pleasures that can be experienced only by hitting a trail.

Along with a cadre of trail advocates, Miller is pushing these days for the County Board of Supervisors to reinstitute a moribund plan outlining a network of hiking and horseback riding trails to be developed throughout the region.

The trail plan was undermined by a pro-growth board in the early 1980s. Battered but not defeated, trail boosters now want to see the plan returned to its original vigor, complete with provisions requiring property owners to grant easements for future trails as their land is developed.

Although such actions could spark opposition from property rights advocates concerned about losing exclusive use of their land, backers of a trail network contend that the effort to preserve existing trails and establish new ones must move forward before time runs out.

“The more subdivisions the county puts through, the more trail opportunities we lose,” said Miller, president of the San Diego County Trails Council. “It’s simply not fair to future generations for someone to say the property they are developing for resale to new residents should be excluded from properly designed recreational uses.”

In recent years, the county’s trail network has advanced only when developers were willing to voluntarily dedicate a public right of way for a trail. All too often, builders simply chose not to grant the easements, and the result has been a patchwork system missing numerous key links.

“It’s tantamount to developing a road system and saying that no one has to provide a road unless they want to,” said Jack Redfern, the county’s trails coordinator.

Backers of the trail network say the plan is a cost-effective way to provide recreational opportunities and ensure that residents will be able to enjoy the open space areas that remain after the dust of the development boom settles.

“In most cases, studies have shown that there is a direct relationship between the quality of health and decreased crime in areas which provide open space,” said Dick Hubbard, a leader of the North County Trails Coalition, a group advocating the countywide trail network. “From an economic point of view, open space and recreational amenities pay for themselves. Trails can be provided at little or no cost and provide maximum recreational opportunities.”

Pam Bender, a horsewoman who enjoys the trails around her Rancho Santa Fe home, agrees.

“They provide such a great benefit for an area,” Bender said. “They’re a crime deterrent, and they get people to get out in the community. So often, people live their lives just getting in the car and going from the garage to the store and back again.”

Miller emphasized that trails mapped out in the plan would be dedicated as a public right of way only when a piece of property is submitted to planners for a development project.

“We’re not putting a trail across anyone’s living room, we’re not going to put it across the corner of their vacant property,” he said. “It’s done when the property is developed.”

Moreover, he argues that the trails add to a parcel’s price tag, adding an amenity that serves as a potent drawing card when houses sprout from the ground.

“Any developer who has any sense of fair play plus a natural acumen to make money should just be overjoyed and tickled pink to work with the county and whatever city to provide trails,” Miller said.

Potential pitfalls may be raised by a handful of opponents, but Miller and others see ready answers.

Maintenance costs? Most trails virtually take care of themselves, with hoof, foot and mountain bike traffic keeping the path smooth, they say.

Liability risks? Miller says he has not found anywhere in the state where a government agency has paid a damage award for an injury sustained on an officially sanctioned trail.

Trail boosters envision an integrated system with major trails, such as the California Riding and Hiking Trail and the proposed San Dieguito River Valley Park Trail, linked up with smaller paths leading from suburban communities.

Currently, the county has more than 50 miles of trails formally dedicated for public use. Other existing trails, however, have yet to be recognized as official rights of way. Still others remain a glimmer in the eye of trail advocates eager to see the rural outback crisscrossed by a web of interlinking dirt pathways.

While the Board of Supervisors has yet to take up the issue of a countywide trail network, the group increasingly seems to be favoring the idea.

In recent years, the board has approved trail systems in several unincorporated sections of the county, including Rancho Santa Fe and Ramona. Advocates were upset, however, when members of the board failed to show for a meeting in April that drew nearly 200 supporters of the trail plan.

Various cities have taken up the cause. A proposed park bond in Encinitas would include $1 million for a citywide trail system. Officials in Poway, meanwhile, have for years worked hard to maintain a network of trails in that inland city and were recently awarded more than $150,000 to build new paths.

Trail advocates, meanwhile, have scored victories of their own in recent years.

Bender and others, for instance, convinced the developer of the 500-acre Horizon Country Club in Rancho Santa Fe to include a perimeter trail around the property, even though the subdivision was not designed to attract horse people.

Miller’s group, meanwhile, has volunteered countless hours to forge trails in the Sweetwater area and also helped secure $75,000 in state money to restore a lengthy stretch of the California Riding and Hiking Trail through San Diego County.

The benefits are well worth the effort.

“It seems to me we have a recreational resource right under our noses that we ought to pay attention to,” Miller said. “Trails open up a community to a higher level of conviviality, of socialness (sic) and niceness. It’s a situation where, as a society, we have a resource that’s not taking anything from anyone, but it’s giving a lot back.”