Economy

San Elijo Conservancy Buys Prime Lagoon-Front Acres

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published January 2, 2012 at 3:00 AM PST

This story was published more than 12 years ago.

San Elijo Conservancy Buys Prime Lagoon Front Acres

The economic downturn has a silver lining for one environmental organization in North County. The San Elijo Lagoon Conservancy has bought a piece of land from developers who failed to raise the money to build on it.

If you drive up Interstate 5, you cross several lagoons: stretches of open water that are home to numerous birds. For years, developers have tried to build a hotel on the shores of the San Elijo Lagoon between Solana Beach and Cardiff.

But now the San Elijo Conservancy has closed escrow on the three-acre waterfront site, putting a stop to any development.

“We called it the parcel of story poles,“ said Doug Gibson of the Conservancy, “because there would be different iterations of proposed developments with their story poles on it for the last ten years, which would have been a dramatic change in the view-scape of the lagoon.”

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Gibson said the land was priced at more than $10 million in 2006 and was too expensive for the conservancy to bid on. This year, they got it for $3.75 million.

The land in question is between I-5 and Highway 101, on the south side of the Lagoon entrance.

Gibson said the conservancy still has to raise the money to pay off the loan they took out to seize the opportunity while it was available. But he’s confident they can do that in the coming year.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.