Quality of Life

Escondido Country Club Homeowners Consider Options For Proposed Development

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published November 3, 2015 at 1:54 PM PST

This story was published more than 9 years ago.

The unwatered Escondido Country Club Golf Course sits next to green gardens, Aug. 7, 2014.

A group of Escondido homeowners will meet Tuesday night to consider their options.

The city of Escondido settled a lawsuit with a developer who wants to build houses on the former Escondido Country Club golf course.

But Mike Slater, president of the Escondido Country Club Homeowners Organization, said it will not accept any settlement that involves the project's developer, Stuck in the Rough.

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"After two and a half years of bullying and intimidation and insults — like the five tons of chicken manure dumped on the property — people have no trust in him at all," Slater said.

The homeowners are not against the development altogether, Slater said.

"We would welcome another developer who has no ties to Stuck in the Rough," he said. "There are other developers around who would spend a year or two working with the community on a plan that the community would endorse.”

Part of the settlement reached with the city requires Stuck in the Rough to pick another homebuilder to complete the project.

Dick Daniels, a spokesman for Stuck in the Rough's Mike Schlesinger, said that choice should be announced within a week or two. However, he did not know if the developer chosen would present a plan or come to the community for input.

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Schlesinger will not sell the land until the development plan is approved, Daniels said.

The site of the golf course is zoned for more than 600 homes. Schlesinger had proposed building 430 homes, then reduced that to 270. Neither option was acceptable to homeowners, who defeated the developer's initiative on last November's ballot.

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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.