Guest column: What will Poway’s leaders do with Bob Emery’s legacy?

Bob Emery spent 38 years shaping Poway into the beautiful little city it is today, and then guarding and protecting it. During that time, his integrity, his blunt honesty, and his commitment to a low-density, rural residential Poway became legend.

Bob said that what defines Poway is not so much what you see here as what you don’t see. Here are some things you don’t see, proposals that would have passed easily in another city (see Lakeside).

• A mass of three-story apartment buildings lining both sides of Espola Road.

• A seven-acre shopping center at Lake Poway Road and Espola Road.

• A major shopping center, with department store anchors, at the corner of Old Coach Road and Espola Road.

• Espola Road widened to six lanes, the short route from East County to Highway 395.

• The hillsides along Old Coach Road terraced and covered in condos.

• Stone Canyon Road cut through to the high school, carrying 40,000 vehicle trips per day through Green Valley.

• “Boulder Mountain” blasted, terraced and lined with condos.

• A shopping center at Stone Canyon and Pomerado roads.

• Twin Peaks flattened and topped with multi-story Navy housing.

• A gas station/shopping center at Poway and Espola roads, and the massive development that would have followed if water and sewer had been extended to Highway 67.

• A large trailer park where Avocado Glen now nestles in the hills.

• A massive sand and gravel operation and an asphalt plant, dominating Beeler Canyon.

• Five thousand more multi-story apartments along Poway Road.

Recognizing that a pro-growth future council could undo everything the first council had accomplished, Bob proposed, and Poway passed, his Proposition FF, which changed the development game completely. Prop. FF requires a vote of the people before the council can increase the density or intensity of use in any rural residential zone. Prop FF passed overwhelmingly in Poway and then was copied by other cities around California, including Escondido. That’s why Escondido’s outlying fields and hills are not paved over and covered with condos.

In 1980, when we became a city, Poway Road was known as the tackiest little town in the county. It was lined with huge, ugly billboards, and garish onsite building signs, each business vying to outshout the others. Patches of sidewalk alternated with patches of weeds, and down the center ran a “chicken lane,” allowing you to turn left anywhere — and get hit by someone racing down the turning lane to avoid stalled traffic.

To many, the problem looked unsurmountable. Undaunted, Bob, Councilman Bruce Tarzy and City Manager Jim Bowersox set out to buy, beg, bargain and remove all the existing billboards, and outlaw new ones, and the council passed codes to phase out garish onsite signs. Gradually, old signs were replaced with more tasteful types and sizes. Bob achieved arch-villain status in the business community for the council’s plan to replace the “chicken lane” with a planted median (they eventually came around to admitting it was a good thing). Since then, Poway Road has gentrified, gradually but steadily, while keeping to the General Plan.

But Poway Road is not protected by Prop FF. Now that Bob’s gone, will the current City Council toss out our height and density restrictions, set off a race to see who can build higher and denser, and turn our little downtown into a wall of glass and concrete that blocks the view of the hills and the mountains, with traffic so clogged noone wants to go there? Will they trash our General Plan’s population goals? Or will they respect the General Plan that has protected us so far?

And will the City Council remember Bob’s words: “Growth can’t continue infinitely. At some point we have to make the transition to an economy that’s not based on endless population growth. The question is, will we do it now, while we can still preserve some quality of life, or later, when it’s too late?”