Transit district, Solana Beach, spar over Cedros project
by Paul Sisson, North County Times staff writer
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Publication: North County Times, © 2007
Date published: December 21, 2007
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OCEANSIDE ---- Simmering tension between Solana Beach and the North County Transit District over a controversial real estate project went public Thursday with an accusation of backroom deal breaking.
At the district's monthly meeting, Lesa Heebner, a Solana Beach City Council member who represents Solana Beach on the transit board, accused transit district staff, and some of her fellow board members, of trying to derail the Cedros Crossing commercial and residential project planned for track-side property that the district owns.
Saying she wanted to speak for herself, and not as a district board member, Heebner left her dais seat and walked to the public speaker podium to read a letter from her city to Shea Properties, the developer of the track-side Cedros Crossing development.
The sharply worded letter states that the NCTD wants to back out of the long-standing development but wants to do so without telling Shea Properties, for fear of being sued.
"NCTD has been working in bad faith," Heebner said.
The transit board met with Shea in closed session before Thursday's meeting. Afterward, the board's attorney reported that Karen King, the district's executive director, would draft and send a letter to Shea indicating that it is not working toward the project's demise.
"We continue to strive to work with the developer and the city, as we will say in our letter that the board just approved," King said.
The transit director refused to respond to Heebner's allegation that the district is working behind the scenes to kill the project saying only: "People say things."
A representative of the developer could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Cedros Crossing, in its current incarnation, includes a 517-space parking garage, 141 condominiums, restaurants, offices and stores on a property currently occupied by the district's Solana Beach train station at Lomas Santa Fe Drive and North Cedros Avenue. The transit district has a $8.4 million grant to build the parking structure, but that grant must be used by April.
As the plan is written, the parking garage is to be built underground and Shea is to put its residential and commercial building on top. The plan, proposed by Shea five years ago, has received several rounds of public review from Solana Beach residents who have called for fewer, less massive buildings and for a traffic management plan that will keep the seaside city's busy streets from reaching gridlock.
Toward the end of Thursday's meeting, Bill Horn, a San Diego County supervisor and a longtime member of the transit board, said he believed the current crop of elected leaders in Solana Beach are trying to make too many modifications to the original development deal first brokered for the property in 1991 when the district agreed to dig a long trench through the city and put its railroad tracks underground.
Horn said he is not so sure that the transit district should build underground parking, and suggested that the district may as well build a multistory, aboveground parking garage, a move that would surely elicit howls from neighbors who do not want their westward views blocked. Horn suggested that the transit district can simply ignore Solana Beach.
"This is our property, we can do anything we want with it as long as it serves transit," Horn said.
Heebner replied that the city has a critical role in issuing permits for any structure built within Solana Beach. But Horn fired back that railroads enjoy federal right-of-way protection.
"That's for a rail line, period, the end," Heebner said.
The councilwoman noted that Solana Beach incorporated in 1986 to avoid unilateral decisions of regional governmental bodies like the transit district and the county supervisors.
"One of the reasons we incorporated was to get out of the county, and now you know why," Heebner said.
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