Environment

Bonsall Community Considers Initiative To Save Golf Course

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published January 19, 2015 at 3:00 AM PST

This story was published more than 9 years ago.

Golfers played their final round at San Luis Rey Downs Golf Course on Aug. 6, 2014.

Most communities that fight developers are usually against putting up more buildings in their neighborhoods.

But a group called Save the Downs in North County is fighting a plan to turn the closed San Luis Rey Downs golf course in Bonsall back into natural habitat.

That habitat would become a mitigation bank where developers could buy undeveloped land to make up for developing rural land somewhere else.

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“Right in the center, right in the heart of your town, we’re going to fence everything off, so you can’t walk your dog and you can’t ride horses,” said Jon Frandell, a spokesman for the group. “And if you sell your home, you’ve got to say it’s going to be a mitigation bank. You’re going to be looking at weeds. So people are having a hard time selling their homes.”

Save the Downs community group meeting, Jan. 16, 2015.

Save the Downs is considering its options. The group has voted for a feasibility study on an initiative to form a community finance district within the Rainbow Municipal Water District to raise money.

The golf course closed last summer. A spokesman for the company that owns the course, San Luis Rey Downs Enterprises, said it had been losing money for almost a decade.

The Army Corps of Engineers is currently reviewing an application from Conservation Land Group to turn the land back into natural habitat. Community concerns are taken into account during that process.

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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.