ENCINITAS: Council candidates divided over school issue

By BARBARA HENRY - Staff Writer | Saturday, August 30, 2008 5:10 PM PDT ∞

ENCINITAS ---- There's no shortage of opinions among the 10 candidates running for Encinitas City Council when it comes to the contentious topic of whether the old Pacific View Elementary School site ought to become a city park.

In recent interviews, four of the seven challengers in the race for three council seats ---- Betsy Aceti, Rachelle Collier, Bob Nanninga and Joe Sheffo ---- all said a city park would be the best option for the nearly 3-acre former school campus; the school has been closed for several years.

"We have every opportunity to save it and we need to save it," said Nanninga, a 44-year-old downtown cafe owner who stressed that schoolchildren have used the property since the city’s pioneer days.

But the three incumbents and other challengers in the race said they weren't so certain that the park idea would pan out. Some said the city might have to reach a compromise with the Encinitas Union School District, and others said they weren't sure that the downtown area needs another park.

Incumbents Jerome Stocks and James Bond repeatedly stressed in interviews that it was up to the school district, rather than the city, to determine the future of the old school site on Third Street downtown. The school district's most recent plans call for putting homes and offices there.

"The reality is the school district ... is not required to sell it to the city," said Stocks, 51, who has served two terms on the council.

He added that he wants to host a series of joint meetings between the City Council and the school district's board of trustees, saying there's a lot of "misinformation" in the community about the plans for the site.

Reworking the plans

The old school parcel already has had its share of conflict.

Several years ago, the school district proposed putting a massive medical office complex on the site, which is a block from the ocean. Neighbors hated that idea, and the district eventually dropped it.

The district's new proposal calls for 12,000 square feet of office space, 14 town houses, seven condominiums and five single-family homes on the 2.8-acre site. Also, the district has agreed to preserve a historical one-room schoolhouse on the property.

The latest plans would require a rezoning of the land from public facilities, which allows schools and medical centers, to mixed-use zoning, which would allow offices and homes. The zoning request went before the city’s Planning Commission in July, but that public hearing didn’t go well for the district.

The local historic preservation society enthusiastically endorsed the concept, but planning commissioners said the development plans lacked basic details and neighboring residents said the proposal would cause traffic troubles and other problems.

In the end, the Planning Commission directed the school district to rework the plans, saying that the number of on-site parking spots needed to increase, among other things.

The commission was scheduled to revisit the zoning issue in September, but school district officials have recently asked for more time and the hearing has been put off to an unspecified date.

Selling the site

In the days since the commission hearing in July, community members have said school district officials should have provided more information about the choices they faced in dealing with the Pacific View property.

District officials are proposing to change the property's zoning, and then hand over the land to a developer in exchange for other property that the developer owns in town.

As long as the district does the land exchange, rather than selling the parcel outright, it doesn't have to follow state laws regarding surplus school property, district officials told planning commissioners during the July hearing. If the district sells the land as surplus, it first has to offer part of it to the city or another public entity at a discount price.

Encinitas officials said after that hearing that they hadn’t realized until then that the district had the choice of offering it to the city at a discount price.

Some of the City Council candidates said last week they think the school district deliberately didn’t tell the city that it could have purchased the land until late in the game. Other candidates said city leaders should have realized it on their own.

Here’s a breakdown on the 10 candidates' positions on the Pacific View situation:

---- Aceti, a 46-year-old candidate who is active in coastal preservation issues, said that city officials were "asleep at the wheel" and should have pushed the purchase issue earlier. She said she would like the property to become a park, but not a standard playground-style one. She wants a sculpture garden there, saying it "benefits ... the child in all of us."

---- Bond, 69, who has served 16 years on the council, said that it is "a little premature to say we ought to consider it as a park or anything else" because the district hasn’t offered it for sale. He said the city shouldn’t be tackling a new park proposal, given that it still hasn’t resolved the long-standing controversy over whether to put sports fields on the city-owned Hall property near Interstate 5.

---- Tony Brandenburg, a judge and longtime North County resident, couldn’t be reached for comment for this story.

---- Collier, 57, president of the Leucadia Town Council, said she thinks the city needs more parks and would love to see the school site become one, if the city has the money to buy the land. She added that she thinks the city could have underground parking below the property to help with the shortage of parking spaces in the neighborhood.

---- Incumbent Maggie Houlihan, 60, who has served two terms on the council, said she wishes the district had informed the city about the purchase option earlier. She said she would like to propose a compromise that would allow the school district to develop part of the site and turn about an acre of it into a city park. She also said that underground parking could be included in the plans.

---- Doug Long, 58, who runs a plumbing repair business, said he thought any discussion of what to do with the site was "premature" because the district hasn’t offered the land for sale. However, he said, the city could use more parks, adding that he knows this because of his work as chairman of the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission.

---- Nanninga, who has run unsuccessfully twice for council in recent years, said the city should buy the land and that putting homes and offices on the parcel would be "reckless" given the shortage of streetside parking in the area. If the place can't remain a school, then it should be preserved in its entirety, given the site's history, he added.

---- Sheffo, 38, a former assistant opinion page editor for the North County Times who also has worked as an aide to Supervisor Pam Slater-Price and former state Assemblyman Mark Wyland, said the property should be sold as surplus to the city. Saying that he wouldn’t support the rezoning request, he added, "We need more parkland and that's a great site."

---- Harriet Seldin, 55, a dentist who lives in Encinitas and works in Clairemont, said her personal view is that the property should become a park. She said she would like a "full public process" to determine what ought to happen to the land.

---- Stocks said he thinks the district could have been more forthcoming about the land sales option, but said the city needs to be careful about how it handles the situation now. The district could decide to walk away from negotiations and build a small medical complex on the site, and that won’t require city approval of a rezone request, he said.