Environment

San Luis Rey Downs Golf Course Could Revert to Wetlands

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published February 24, 2014 at 5:08 AM PST

This story was published more than 10 years ago.

North County residents living near the San Luis Rey Downs golf course will find out tonight about a proposal to return the golf course to natural habitat.

The San Luis Rey Downs Country Club may not be a golf course for much longer.

It’s not the first time a golf course in San Diego has fallen on hard times. Increasing water rates and falling membership has made some courses prime targets for developers. (For example the Escondido Country Club )

But in this case the idea is not to develop the land - rather it is to remove hundreds of thousand of yards of fill used to create the golf course in the 1960s, and turn the site back into native wetland.

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David Castenon is Chief of the Regulatory Division of the LA district of the Army Corps of Engineers, that includes Southern California, Nevada, Arizona and parts of Utah. He said this is the first time he’s seen an application to turn a golf course into a mitigation bank : in other words, land available to sell to offset environmental damage by development.

“In our district, this is the only one that’s been proposed for an existing golf course,” he said, “ I understand there are some other golf courses that have expressed interest, but they have not proceeded to the point where they have submitted a formal request.”

This evening’s public hearing at the Golf Course Club House is put on by the company that has taken out an exclusive option to buy the golf course, Conservation Land group, Inc. IF the company can get the permits to return it to natural habitat, it could then sell that land to developers who needs to offset environmental damage from their projects

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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.