Steve Hall ABR, CDPE, GREEN, SFR

Jack's Pond is great little rural piece of the City that is hidden in a small canyon below the Walnut Hills area in San Marcos. There is a very easy 1 mile trail with abundant wildlife all around. I do not believe that most residents even know that it is part of our community. I took a stroll through the other day and snapped a few photos.

You can locate more information about the San Marcos Trail System on the City's web site at City of San Marcos, CA

Below are a few photos from around Discovery Lake in San Marcos, which is a nice little gem hidden in Discovery Hills.

The photo in the bottom right corner is a little (ok extremely) hard to see but there is a duck feeding a chick.

Discovery Lake is at the end of Foxhall just beyond the small park and tot lot. The loop around the lake is part of the San Marcos trail system, which includes over 50 miles of hiking/biking trails throughout the community.

Among the many initiatives and propositions coming to voters this November, one is specifically for San Marcos and has potentially devastating ramifications for the citizens and the City of San Marcos.

Seifert Consulting Group was commissioned by the City to offer an unbiased fiscal impact report. That report, combined with the initiative itself, speak volumes. There are several areas that are of concern financially to the City and to the taxpayers should this Proposition O pass.

The initiative, submitted by two community activists, is an initiative that has been called legally flawed by both the Seifert report and the City Attorney. These flaws contain a number of core questions and likely legal pitfalls that will almost certainly cause the City to have to defend the initiative in court. Yes, believe it or not, this is per the initiative's own language with that wording requiring the City to defend it legally! For example, all affordable housing is exempt from the initiative's impact. What if the affordable housing is part of a mixed use designation with retail as part of the development? No one is sure if the retail component would put the project back under the initiative's requirements. There are several other legal areas of equal concern.

One of the primary concerns and frustrations of the voters of virtually every city in San Diego County is traffic. San Marcos is certainly no exception. Residents who have lived in San Marcos for more than 5 years would agree that the traffic flow has been improved tremendously. That improvement is due to infrastructure enhancements made possible by locally elected representatives. A few of the major streets that have been improved are: San Marcos Boulevard, Rancho Santa Fe Road and Twin Oaks Valley Road south into San Elijo. These improvements, along with others in the planning stages, are the result of a carefully crafted long term plan. This long term and well thought out plan will result in mutually beneficial infrastructure improvements. Infrastructure improvements are often funded with State and Federal grants matched to impact fees paid by developers. Take away those impact fees, and much of this plan will collapse without the necessary funding to continue the improvements. Even without future development in San Marcos, increased traffic from rising regional growth will still require an ongoing effort to mitigate traffic impacts. Essentially regional growth outside the control of the City will impact San Marcos. If this initiative passes, our City would not have the means to adequately respond to those outside forces. Incapacitating the City's ability to respond would be devastating for the City of San Marcos.

A similar measure was passed in Escondido a number of years ago and has had challenging impacts to their growth and redevelopment prospects. In Escondido, their measure exempted their downtown area, which is why what growth and development you see in Escondido is all in that downtown core area. In the rest of Escondido, virtually all their proposed projects, large and small, have failed at the ballot. More importantly, as a result, developers simply quit coming into Escondido to propose new projects because of the greatly increased potential costs. The risk of failure at the ballot causes developers to go to cities where the process is more conventional and the risk to reward is more reasonable to assume. Thus, an insurmountable challenge is created in getting developers interested in urban infill projects. These are the very areas that are the core of redevelopment needs when they become rundown and blighted - with initiatives such as this, they become untouchable areas.

The Seifert Consulting Group report outlines in detail many fiscal impacts relating to election costs, legal challenges, affordable housing impacts, lost business revenue, shortfalls in property tax revenue, lack of infrastructure improvement, and many others.

Finally, there are many quality neighborhoods in San Marcos that well might not be here if this initiative had been in place when they were first planned. Discovery Hills, San Elijo, Santa Fe Hills are all master planned communities that required general plan amendments at the time they were developed. Today, because of the vision exerted by City Planning commissions and City Councils at the time, these developments are quality neighborhoods which would likely have been prevented by a public vote. Cal State San Marcos would definitely be Cal State Carlsbad if the university project went to a public vote. The State simply would not have waited for San Marcos voters to determine if San Marcos was the correct location. We would not have CSUM, which is the keystone in the educational hub of North County.

Here is the link to the City of San Marcos website that has the agenda and documentation that show the actual initiative itself as well as the report by the consulting firm documenting the potential financial impacts to the City if this initiative were to pass.

http://sanmarcos.granicus.com/DocumentViewer.php?file=7abc6f43d7bdf64fde2c1636eecd5f54.pdf

For all these reasons and many more, a NO on Prop. O vote is urged for San Marcos.

If you walk your own farm or contract out the work there are a few rules to keep in mind:

1) Try not to walk across home owner lawns.

2) Never leave your literature at properties that are already listed by another agent.

3) Always provide something of value in your door drop material.

4) Always wear a smile. Be friendly and acknowledge neighbors if they are out.

5) If the property has a stack of papers, literature, newspapers, etc, don't add to the stack. Simply make a note of the address and mail your information to that home.

6) If you are approached and asked not to leave your information at a specific property any longer, make a note to skip that property during future door drops. Based on your conversation with the neighbor, future farm material might be able to be mailed.

7) It is ok to do the spider web dance should you happen to walk through one. Any neighbor watching will truly enjoy.