Cleveland Nationwide Forest at improvement crossroads as preservationists, some property homeowners battle over zoning proposal

Debate over development in the Cleveland National Forest is raging again, the latest in a long history of struggles about land use in an area that stretches across San Diego, Orange and Riverside counties.

A proposal that will eventually go before the San Diego County Board of Supervisors is inflaming tensions between supporters of denser construction and conservationists, who for more than 100 years have viewed the Cleveland forest as the last frontier in preserving open space in the region.

The measure would amend the county’s general plan to allow more building on thousands of privately held acres within the national forest. The number of dwellings permitted on these properties would increase from about 4,300 to roughly 6,250. Under a citizens’ initiative that expired in 2010, the minimum lot size for a private parcel in the forest was 40 acres. No changes have been approved since.

“Planning the future landscape of rural East County is often a balancing act involving economic growth, community needs and the preservation of our backcountry character,” Supervisor Dianne Jacob, whose District 2 includes much of the region in question, said in a statement. “I’ll weigh these factors, along with any other input I get, before making a decision.”

Over the decades, urban sprawl in the county has bulldozed natural landscapes and reduced habitat for many plants and animals. It has also provided affordable homes for families and allowed people to enjoy rural living a relatively short drive away from grocery stores, hospitals and town centers.

Long before government restrictions came into place, fur traders, loggers, ranchers and miners dramatically affected the backcountry. Wildfires were attributed to overgrazed lands, and mining of gold and other precious metals threatened to pollute rivers and creeks.

By the late 1880s, government officials recognized the need to better manage the forest, specifically to safeguard sources of drinking water there. In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt consolidated existing protected lands and created the Cleveland National Forest.

Once spanning nearly 2 million acres, the forest now covers about 440,000 acres, stretching in a patchwork from state Route 94 in San Diego to state Route 91 in Orange County. Regulations allow for a variety of recreational uses in designated areas, including hiking, camping and off-roading. The forest also hosts a number of commercial uses, such as cellphone towers and electric utility lines.

But for the most part, the territory is left as open space and natural habitat.

In the early 1990s, a group of backcountry environmentalists successfully spearheaded the Forest Conservation Initiative, which limited development on more than 71,000 acres of privately held land within the national forest.

When the measure sunset in 2010, elected county officials had been dealing for more than a decade with disgruntled residents who wanted the option to subdivide their parcels so they could build more structures on them. In response, county leaders are moving forward with a proposal to update the zoning for private lands within the forest.

With more than half of the plan’s envisioned higher density concentrated just east of the unincorporated town of Alpine, efforts have in part responded to residents who feel squeezed by urban development on the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians reservation.

As the reservation has built out its casino, nearby homeowners have lamented the loss of a once-quiet lifestyle. Perhaps ironically, many residents now believe their best hope to escape the lights, noise and ongoing construction in the area may be to allow increased density so they can offload land to commercial developers.

Leaders of the tribe declined to comment for this story.

Two characters central to this rezoning fight, Duncan McFetridge and Larry Freeland, offer unique perspectives on differing priorities in the backcountry. Both moved to East County decades ago, attracted by the area’s natural beauty. Now the land-use proposal has set them on divergent paths.

Duncan McFetridge, a woodworker in Descanso, is a major voice for backcountry conservation.

— Peggy Peattie / San Diego Union-Tribune

DUNCAN MCFETRIDGE

When Duncan McFetridge moved to rural East County about 30 years ago, he had little idea that he’d become one of the region’s foremost advocates for open space.

Over the years, the carpenter by trade and lifelong student of philosophy has taken on many of the county’s most powerful government planning agencies, launching two nonprofits and winning a series of legal battles that have curbed urban sprawl.

Kicking off this second career as a conservationist, McFetridge championed a ballot measure in the early ’90s called the Forest Conservation Initiative, which dramatically curtailed development on private lands within the Cleveland National Forest.

In a move that would presage his dedication to hard-nosed environmentalism, he took out a mortgage on his bucolic Descanso home to help fund the effort. In later campaigns, he would spend as much as half a million dollars from an inheritance to try to contain urban development.

“I’m in love with the beautiful,” said McFetridge, sitting in his dining room-office with walls seemingly made of books. “Money, for whatever reason, it’s meaningless to me.

“Other foundations all focus on fundraising. While they’re out fighting for grants, guess what we’re doing here? We’re literally on the battlefield.”

The Forest Conservation Initiative’s stipulations sunset in 2010, and county officials have since proposed upzoning certain areas inside the national forest. The change would mark the end of an era for those who’ve toiled to limit development in the backcountry.

“The forest initiative was the best thing that ever happened,” said Jeff Rozendal, initially a Descanso and now San Diego-based chimney sweep who partnered with McFetridge on the initiative and other campaigns. “It’s the only thing that has worked. You keep politicians out of it, and you’ve got a chance to preserve things.”

McFetridge and his allies waged two other campaigns related to preservation of the forest, but those measures failed at the ballot box.

Today, he vows to fight the county’s upzoning plan to the end. Asked if he would file a lawsuit to block the proposed density increases, the Descanso woodworker responded without hesitation in a high-pitched tone: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.”

He’d have to scrape together the funds. His nonprofits typically generate less than $50,000 a year in revenue, with his and one other paid staff member’s modest salaries often getting cannibalized by the groups’ expenses.

“I’m adorned, as the Chinese say, with poverty,” McFetridge said, sipping well water out of a wine glass.

The usually lean years have alternated with big fundraising efforts for specific campaigns, such as in the early 2000s when he and others pushed in vain for a ballot measure that would’ve create a so-called “urban-growth boundary.”

McFetridge said this model of operating on a shoestring budget hasn’t held him back. Rather, he said, refusing to take money from government agencies helps preserve the ideological pureness of his campaigns.

“All these groups beg for grants, and then they have ties,” he said. “And I found out very quickly that money is rotten here. I see it everywhere. Everyone gets compromised. So I said f— you people. I’m going to be free.”

At 75 with a white beard and a ponytail, he flutters about his property talking metaphysically about everything from the Buddha-like state of his Guinea hens to an impressive sculpture of a frog he carved from an enormous boulder on a hill in his backyard.

He adores his forest, but he remarks that he’s also a “connoisseur of cities.” He especially admires Paris, Seattle and San Francisco. He thinks the city of San Diego has potential, but he’s rather blunt with his assessment of its current state.

“Plato says the most beautiful thing on the face of this earth is a well-run city because it is the work of the city to educate the citizens,” he said. “Here we take a city and make it a market place to make the citizens worse.”

This all translates back to his distrust of many local government officials. Specifically, he fears the county’s plan for upzoning private lands within the national forest is harbinger for much unseen development to come.

Under the current proposal, more than half of the increased density allowed would be contained in an area east of Alpine. As the Viejas tribe has built out a casino and mall, local residents have asked that their properties be rezoned to conform to this adjacent urbanization.

McFetridge said he has sympathy for some residents who have seen their rural setting succumb to increased traffic and noise from ongoing construction. But he worries the county’s proposal sets a dangerous precedent for future upzoning throughout the backcountry.

If the proposal goes through, zoning in the area outside of Alpine wouldn’t be set in stone. Under a yet-to-be-funded study, county planners are expected to assess whether further density would be needed in the area to help pay for basic services such as new roads and water and sewer pipes.

Asked how significant the county’s plan would be for San Diego’s woodland areas, McFetridge responded rather solemnly with a laconic summation: “Urbanization is in conflict with forest values.”

Forest at the forefront

Leading the push against a proposal to increase development in parts of the Cleveland National Forest is just the latest crusade for Descanso resident Duncan McFetridge and two nonprofit groups he co-founded.

Save Our Forest and Ranchlands and the Cleveland National Forest Foundation are hardly household names in San Diego County. But during the past two decades, they have played a central role in controversies ranging from backcountry conservation to climate change to the environmental effects of widening Interstate 5.

Here’s a look at the issues they’ve taken on:

1990: Save Our Forest and Ranchlands, or SOFAR, was launched by McFetridge and nearly a dozen of his like-minded neighbors. The group’s mission is to prevent efforts by San Diego County to allow development on land in and around the Cleveland National Forest.

1992: SOFAR blocked in court a county zoning update for the Central Mountain area of East County, which is within the Cleveland National Forest and Cuyamaca State Park. A developer had proposed to build a 125-home community on more than 700 acres known as Roberts Ranch. Eventually, the forest service bought the ranch land.

1993: A citizen-approved ballot measure called the Forest Conservation Initiative, drafted by McFetridge and SOFAR, changed the minimum lot size on private lands within the Cleveland forest but outside of backcountry towns from as little as four acres to 40. McFetridge took out a mortgage on his home to pay for signature gatherers.

1995: McFetridge and others created the Cleveland National Forest Foundation, which aims to preserve open space in the forest.

1996: SOFAR prevailed in a lawsuit that forced the county to implement minimum lot sizes on nearly 200,000 acres of agricultural preserve lands. Following the ruling, the group continued to wrangle with the county for several years over the proper density for those lands.

1997: SOFAR stopped two developments in court, including a project that could have cut off the last mountain-lion corridors connecting the Santa Rosa Mountain Range in Orange County and Palomar Mountain in San Diego County. With support from other groups, SOFAR also halted a sizable RV park planned for Descanso.

1998: SOFAR failed to win passage of a ballot measure called the Rural Heritage and Watershed Initiative, which would have created an urban-growth boundary and increased minimum lot sizes in some unincorporated areas to 40 or 80 acres.

2002: SOFAR reached an agreement with the county for zoning on roughly 200,000 acres of agricultural preserve lands that called for a 40-acre minimum lot size. The state attorney general at the time, Bill Lockyer, had joined the lawsuit in support of SOFAR.

2004: For the second time, SOFAR failed to get voters to approve a ballot measure restricting development on thousands of acres of unincorporated land. The Rural Lands Initiative would have imposed minimum lot sizes of 40, 80 or 160 acres on nearly 700,000 acres in the county.

2007: After threatening litigation, SOFAR reached a settlement agreement with the city of San Diego over its Downtown Mobility Plan, which lays out the transportation plan for the city’s urban core. McFetridge and others argued that the plan needed to focus more heavily on transit, bicycle and pedestrian options.

2011: The Forest Conservation Initiative sunset, prompting county officials to begin looking at updating land-use designations for more than 71,000 acres of private lands within the Cleveland National Forest.

2012: The Cleveland National Forest Foundation prevailed in a lawsuit against the San Diego Association of Governments concerning the municipal planning agency’s regional transportation plan for the county. The foundation said the agency failed to properly account for state-mandated reductions to greenhouse gases. The case is now pending at the California Supreme Court and is expected to have broad implications.

2013: The foundation sued Caltrans over its proposed expansion of the Interstate 5 corridor from La Jolla to Camp Pendleton, which would add four new express lanes. The case is expected to yield a settlement this year.

2016: The foundation has threatened to sue the county over its proposed upzoning of thousands of acres of private lands within the Cleveland National Forest.

Larry Freeland, who lives across from Viejas Casino east of Alpine, supports the up-zoning proposal.

— Peggy Peattie / San Diego Union-Tribune

LARRY FREELAND

When Larry Freeland bought a small patch of land just east of Alpine about 37 years ago, the Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians’ reservation down the road didn’t make much noise.

A decade later, the native tribe put in a bingo parlor, and traffic quickly started to pick up along the road that Freeland lives on.

Today, the Viejas reservation features a large casino, an outlet mall, an outdoor food court and several 24-hour parking lots. Cars and buses routinely roar up and down the once-quite country road just north of Interstate 8.

“You got car alarms going all night long and people who sit in their cars and turn their bump-bump music up,” the 62-year-old said. “I mean, it’s not a residential area anymore. It really isn’t.”

Freeland’s not your typical cranky homeowner frustrated with loud neighbors. In fact, he’s not bitter with the tribe at all. He even said he voted for the statewide ballot proposition in 2000 that allowed Indian gaming to expand.

“They were wrongly treated in history, so I supported them,” he said. “What can you do?”

Still, Freeland and others in the area are desperate to change their situation. Since the 1990s, the county of San Diego has faced pressure from landowners like him to allow greater development that would fit with the commercial growth on the reservation.

“It would hedge our bet in the future about being able to get a reasonable price for the property,” said Jim Phillips, a 61-year-old homeowner who lives across the street from the casino’s parking lots. “The property is no longer desirable for someone to live and raise a family.”

For a long time, the county’s hands were tied. The folks east of Alpine live within the boundary of the Cleveland National Forest, where a citizen’s initiative had for nearly a decade capped development to one lot for at least every 40 acres.

With long hair and a graying handlebar mustache, Freeland’s blue eyes sparkle from under a cowboy hat as he explains how he would’ve already fled the area if he could have found someone to buy his property for the right price.

“Worst-case scenario, now that the tribe’s this far out, I take a big loss and I get the heck out of here,” he said.

On roughly 4.5 acres, Freeland and his wife own a home as well as a western-style novelty shop called the Lost Trails Trading Post. The funky little store sells clothes, hats, old movie posters and other period-appropriate accoutrement. Next to the store, Freeland has built three 1820s-style tent cabins that are open for public viewing.

When Freeland’s not hawking cowboy merchandise or giving tours of his cabins, he’s working as an actor in small-budget western movies and television shows. Recently he played Wild Bill Hickok, he explains proudly, adding that he’s also performed with a Lakeside-based performance group called The Hole in the Wall Gang.

While the increased traffic from the casino and mall has brought him a few more customers, he’d have to expand his commercial business or sell to a developer to really capitalize on the growth — neither of which are a viable options unless the county updates the land use for the area.

“I had one guy very interested, but everyone wanted to see the final zoning,” he said. “Developers want to do something here.”

After the Forest Conservation Initiative sunset in 2010, the county proceeded with a plan to rezone thousands of acres within the forest. The proposal would specifically permit mixed-use commercial development east of the Viejas reservation and up to one residential lot per acre on lands south of I-8.

This could be a bonanza for homeowners in the region, especially those willing to sell to their property. For those who stay on, density could bring amenities such as municipal water and sewer lines from Alpine, another fire station and a high school.

“It gives us a little (security) if we ever want to sell in the future,” said Jim Thomson, 66, who moved to the area in 1999 and has six children. “Nobody wants to buy a house across from all this excitement.”

But it’s far from a done deal. The proposal has infuriated conservationists, who have threatened to challenge the zoning changes in court — fearing a slippery slope of development in years to come.

If Freeland can sell his property, he said he would consider moving up to Grass Valley in Northern California and retire near his two children. But he’s not ruling out enlarging his commercial enterprise here.

“The only way to protect myself, my property rights, my monetary investment, is to turn it commercial,” he said.