Battle Over Water Looms in Tecate

“We’ll be paying the taxes for Ladd Devine’s lake. And when we can’t pay our conservancy assessments, they’ll take our land and give it to Devine. And that f------ Zopilote will sit up there on his throne in his f------ castle putting pennies on our eyes as they carry us to the camposanto, one by one.”

--John Nichols, The Milagro Beanfield War

Development schemes that hinge on water and stir up mean emotions are nothing new in Southwestern deserts. John Nichols wrote about a fictional one that started a little war in New Mexico. Mike Skinner is living one now, two miles south of California 94 in a splinter of a town known mostly for its sprawling Mexican namesake: Tecate.

Skinner, who runs Tecate’s T.C. Worthy general store, is slightly more civil in his sentiments than Nichols’ characters. But he and a handful of others have a bad feeling they’re about to be had.

When Skinner’s family opened the Tecate store 11 years ago, they bought their water from San Diego developer Tom Hom’s private water system, at a steep $200 a month. So when Skinner moved his store down the road four years later, he invested in his own well and septic system.

Now he’s being asked to give that up and pay $7,000 to hook up to a public system that he and all his neighbors would help pay off in yearly assessments for the next two decades. Tom Hom is the man who plans to build it.

“Then I would be charged $200 a month to flush my toilets. And it goes on and on,” said Skinner, 38. “I have a septic system now, and I have a well. It’s just basically that large developers need this sewage district to be able to break their property up so they can sell it.”

The county Board of Supervisors is scheduled to decide Wednesday whether or not to approve Hom’s application to build a sewage treatment plant, aeration tanks and percolation ponds that would compose the heart of the public sewer and water district, financed by area property owners.

The permit was denied in December by the county Planning and Environmental Review Board, and again in March when Hom appealed that decision to the county Planning Commission. This appeal marks the last rung of the bureaucratic ladder.

If approved, Hom will take his fight to the Local Agency Formation Commission, which will evaluate the proposal and decide whether to put the sewer and water district to a vote of landowners.

Hom has applied for a California Water District, a public entity, but one in which the weight of voters participating depends on the assessed value of their land: the larger the landholding, the greater the voting power. That fact has left small property owners like Skinner wondering if they’ll be financing an operation they are powerless to influence.

Hom’s proposal has catalyzed strong feelings in Tecate--a sliver of stores, junk-laced lots, and a smattering of homes that hide a reclusive population of about 100, in stark contrast to its swollen sister city of about 75,000 across the Mexican border.

Hom, a former San Diego councilman and state assemblyman who launched the Gaslamp Quarter with development dollars in the 1970s and has numerous investment projects going in the county with his family partners, says he’s no villain. He owns a decrepit water system that serves 12 hook-ups. He also owns about 140 Tecate acres he purchased with his family in 1979, and says the county won’t allow him to develop until a district goes in.

“It seems like kind of a selfish goal, but then again I think it might be a noble one,” Hom said. “My intent really is ‘Hey, here’s a community that’s going to grow, regardless, and we have no control. We might as well fix it so we do have some control.’ ”

As for the people who fall within his proposed district, Hom says there really aren’t any.

“If we had a lot of residents in the area, it might be a different matter. I don’t think we have a dozen voters out there, if we have half a dozen,” he said.

That’s just one of Hom’s opinions people who live and work in Tecate are contesting.

As in any remote community, some feel any development is a threat to the desert whispers they came looking for in Tecate’s hills.

Others say growth is inevitable in their ramshackle hamlet--and better that it be orderly than haphazard. The federal government is in the final planning stages of an $11-million border crossing expansion designed to handle heavy commercial truck traffic, and sure to set off some changes in the four-street town. And when the county plan for the region was updated in 1986, planners stated any substantial commercial or industrial development in Tecate should be preceded by a sewer and water district.

Nevertheless, even Tecate residents and business people who embrace the notion of orderly development complain they’re being railroaded into a costly water district for the benefit of out-of-town speculators eager for strong returns on their souring investments.

Some fear the financial burden will ruin them. Hom has said the few residents whose homes fall within the district’s proposed boundaries won’t have to hook up if they feel they can’t afford it, but concedes that once their wells run dry they would not be allowed to drill new ones, and they’d be better off selling than sticking around. One elderly woman--afraid of the burden on her fixed income--has already done just that and headed to a retirement community in El Centro.

Eddie Elguea, a soft-spoken man who worked as the caretaker for Tecate’s small shopping complex for years and is now retired on a Social Security pension of $438 a month, doesn’t trust the promises he has heard secondhand. For him, Hom’s plan will do nothing but undermine the investment he has made in his property and eventually force him out.

“It was like a big secret to me, because I just found out in May,” Elguea said. “I got a little scared about it. I got my well about 10 or 11 years ago. We used our money to put in these wells.

“What are we going to do with them?” he asked. “We just live right here in this nice community. We don’t need another big bill on the property.”

Ken Bourke, a real estate broker who sold Hom his land in 1979, owns three acres on a rocky outcropping at the border that he purchased years ago for $11,000. In 1986, much to his surprise, his land was rezoned industrial. If the district is approved, he says he would have to fork out $15,000 in the next three years.

“It’s been costing me $100 a year (in property taxes). Now, all of a sudden I’m faced with water connection fees that exceed the value of the land, practically,” Bourke said. “I don’t have an ax to grind with anybody. But if Mr. Hom has a water district, why does he need to form a taxing entity with taxing powers to take away everybody’s power?”

The community voices are varied, but most betray suspicion.

“All of the people we know who own property and have lived here for years feel like they’re being jeopardized,” said Jack Benson, a retired contractor who lives with his wife just outside the proposed boundary of the sewer and water district. “My personal opinion is I have a wonderful place to live and it’s not going to be as wonderful when all this is through.”

Unlike most border towns, this one is clearly outdone by its Mexican neighbor. Shoppers at Skinner’s T.C. Worthy store are mostly from Mexico, and the red plywood bulletin board that stands outside the store’s doors advertises mostly homes for sale on the Mexican side.

The terrain has changed little since 1979, and one constant has been the voice of developer Tom Hom--as harbinger of change and promise.

When Hom’s eight-member family partnership bought the land, Hom announced his development plan to build a motel, shopping center, lots for commercial and industrial property and a mobile home park with 150 to 200 homes on the tract.

He got as far as the lots, but over the years, the announcements of imminent change kept coming. When Hom applied to LAFCO for a sewer and water district in 1983, he got a letter back stating that no district was necessary because there was nothing out there.

There is still no there there, but since then plans for the new border crossing have emerged, as has a county plan laying out the zoning for the area and stating that a sewer and water district should go in before any serious commercial and industrial development.

Hom also has toned down his plans, and now says a 200-home development is preposterous.

“My vision for Tecate is that it will be a clean, environmentally aesthetic, well-planned community. Maybe that Tecate, Mexico, and Tecate, U.S.A., would be the best window between two countries,” Hom said. That would consist of about 40 developed lots, and some commercial and industrial activity, road improvements to California 188, and some highway lighting, he said.

The sewer and water district would allow for 270 water taps, he said, well within the availability of the aquifer. An environmental impact report prepared for Hom says that once the district goes in, the county should expect more than $850,000 a year in additional property taxes from the area. The money would help offset the increased demand for such services as schools and police.

A supplement to the EIR says the district will eventually create about 200 jobs, from maquilas, the construction industry and the massive border expansion being planned by the federal government.

But others say the benefits to the community are hyped: Water constraints and the hilly desert scrub topography, combined with an already saturated maquila industry on the Mexican side of the border, limit the potential for growth.

When the project was denied in December and March, planning commissioners and members of the Planning and Environmental Review Board questioned the impacts on biology, the ability of public services to keep up with the development the project implies, and the nuts and bolts of the benefits Hom said the project would bring to the region. They sent him back to the drawing board.

Some officials of Tecate, Mexico, oppose the project, because it would locate the sewage plant right at the border, opposite a residential neighborhood, said LeRoy Russell, former president of the Tecate Chamber of Commerce.

Water is scarce in Tecate, and residents outside the district are concerned Hom’s project will leave them with a depleted aquifer.

More than the philosophy of the project, however, many residents in Tecate have taken issue with the financing.

The district will be financed by floating public bonds, which Tecate landowners will pay off over the next 20 years in proportion to their assessed land value, Hom said. Hom placed the cost of the project between $4.5 million and $5 million. But at a January meeting of he Tecate Chamber of Commerce, Hom’s engineer, Bill Parker, said they’d be selling more than $10.5 million in bonds, Russell said.

“The people either pay off the bonds, or they lose their property,” he said.

The financial benefits to Tecate residents are vague, however.

Hom formed a steering committee to promote the project with four other property owners and hired Parker, of Parker Engineering Consultants in San Diego, to estimate the cost of the project. A letter from the steering committee on Parker stationery went out to Tecate residents in December, telling them what their assessed land value was.

A sewer and water district would increase the land values more than 400%, from $4.5 million to $18 million, the letter said. Now Hom, who pointed out that Parker is not an assessor, says those figures may have been high.

The Parker letter also told them a California Water District was the recommended type of agency.

“It was the decision of the Steering Committee and the San Diego Local Agency Formation Commission that a California Water District would be the appropriate public agency,” it said.

Jane Merrill, executive officer of LAFCO, said that’s simply not true. That is the type of district Hom has applied for, and the only district where voting power is tied to assessed land value rather than giving each registered voter an equal vote, she said.

Many Tecate residents are increasingly feeling that their fate has been orchestrated by out-of-town interests they cannot control. And the county’s forum for community input in the backcountry--a supervisor-appointed sponsor group--has been stacked in favor of those interests, they say.

Supporters of the project insist the large landholders will bear the brunt of the financing.

“The ones who are risking the most are the three major property owners,” said Paul Jones, who heads a Tecate mission and chaired the Tecate sponsor group that reported to county officials for 14 years. “The major tax burden would be borne by the largest property owners. They have the most to lose. They have the most to gain. We’re trying to promote jobs in a part of San Diego County that has been neglected for 40 or 50 years.”

But most smaller landholders feel the planning on the part of outside property owners has been paternalistic and exclusive.

If their interests are poorly represented, however, they are in part to blame for it. In this loose gathering of structures--dubbed a Country Town in county planning parlance but easily mistaken for a border station road stop--political activism has been virtually absent from the local lexicon.

Those who have been motivated to gather together and actively plan the town’s future are driven by a commitment to development.

Members of county sponsor groups--set up as information links between the community and the county on issues of development and land use--need not live in the area they represent if they own land. In Tecate’s case, only one member of the five-seat group lives there, and she rents from Tom Hom. Two of them--Tom Hom and Louis Schooler--bought large land parcels in order to develop them.

While the group has submitted a handful of agendas and recorded minutes to the Department of Planning and Land Use, there is a gap of missing records between 1986 and 1991, and many residents say the meetings were rarely posted.

Karl Sanders--a wiry, white-haired recluse whose ranch lies west of the proposed water district--has teamed up with La Mesa legislative analyst Eugene Sprofera in calling for a grand jury and District Attorney’s investigation of members’ alleged conflicts of interest.

Most residents have taken a milder approach to the issue, but nevertheless feel helpless.

“The sponsor group is a joke,” said store manager Skinner. “It consists of Tom Hom and other large property owners.”

“Many of the meetings have been almost laughable. There’s a meeting but you don’t hear about it until this afternoon or next week. You don’t know about it until it happens,” said Jack Benson.

Jones served as chairman from 1978 until this year, when he resigned after allegations of conflict of interest were presented to county officials. Those include charges that he had a financial interest in the sewer and water project because he works for Hom, that he took liberties to stump for the district on sponsor group stationery and lobbied the federal government for an expanded border crossing that would benefit Hom and other large landowners.

The group also met without a quorum, and was out of bounds when it promoted the expanded border crossing and repeatedly met with Mexican officials, critics say.

But Jones, a reverend who heads a mission in Tecate, says he resigned because he’s getting old and was merely taking the community’s interests to heart. All the letters he wrote were approved by the group, he added.

“I’m just trying to help the people in the community. . . . Occasionally I lease some of Tom Hom’s properties and accept a commission. But it wouldn’t benefit me in any way if it failed or was approved,” he said of the district.

Nevertheless, county officials responded to the charges by monitoring the meetings, and Rose Garduno, who monitors the county sponsor group for the Department of Planning and Land Use, gave members a refresher course on conflict of interest and group proceedings when she attended their meeting in July.

The sponsor group did take the initiative to lobby the federal government for the expanded border crossing, meeting with Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Coronado) to get the project off the ground, Jones said.

The crossing will be expanded to four primary and twelve secondary inspection lanes by the end of 1994, expandable to 12 primary and 36 secondary lanes, General Services Administration spokeswoman Mary Filippini said. There also will be a new commercial lot to handle 20 trucks by the end of 1994, and eventually 50 trucks.

No environmental impact report or study is required for the multimillion-dollar project, because it is an expansion of a current facility, Filippini said.

Even so, she conceded, “It’s more than just a widening. Right now, Tecate is pretty tiny, I’ll have to admit,” she said. While the whole site sits on little over one acre now, the GSA is currently in the process of purchasing an additional 22 acres, most of it from Hom.

Supervisor George Bailey sticks by the members he appointed to the sponsor group. Owning large parcels of land for development purposes is not a disqualifying factor, he said. As for the crossing, a spokeswoman in Bailey’s office said that making recommendations to a federal agency was beyond the scope of the sponsor group’s duties.

Residents who feel they’ve been closed out of the county planning process by a sponsor group dominated by Hom and people tied to him financially would like to see Hom develop his land the way they developed theirs: with their own financing. Nobody says that louder than developer John Turk, who owns three maquila warehouses in Tecate.

“I cut all this down and filled it,” said Turk, an imposing man who says he’s against the sewer and water district because it will hurt his elderly neighbors. Then there’s the quarter of a million dollars he spent on his own water system, which includes sprinklers, fire hydrants and a 110,000-gallon water tank, and the high assessments he would have to pay to Hom’s proposed district because his property is zoned industrial.

“I pay for my own water, my own sewage, electricity, and I don’t impact nobody,” Turk boomed. “Tom Hom has been here (13) years, and he hasn’t done anything. I said to him, ‘I never came to you and asked you to help me build my buildings.’ ”

But Jones and Hom say no one can do now what Turk did in 1984. The county plan for the region, updated in 1986 with the input of Hom and Jones as sponsor group members, stated that commercial and industrial development should be preceded by a public sewer and water district.

While water systems may be manageable for private owners to construct, private sewage systems are riskier and frowned upon by the Health Department, county planners say.

And, Jones adds, even the wells Tecate residents have dug will not last as long as a proper system.

As for speculation that 200 maquila jobs will come to Tecate, Turk, Russell, and Tecate businessman Ron Muir, who all work in the industry, say that’s simply not possible. Half of Turk’s warehouse space in Tecate is empty, and the maquila industry in Tecate, Mexico, is saturated, they say.

Despite their criticism, all said they would like to see a sewer and water district come to Tecate, but financed differently. There are other options, Russell said.

“I made a promise to Tom. I said, ‘Hey, look, if this thing is defeated, I promise you I’ll give you 100% cooperation. But I want to do it with low-interest loans from the government for underdeveloped areas,’ ” said Russell, who was a sponsor group member for a short time years ago. “I went to one meeting and listed 13 different grants, and low-interest loans for underdeveloped areas. He’s not interested in getting government funding.”

Hom borrowed $1.8 million from the Bank of San Diego against the Tecate land, when he was a director of the bank and its BSD Bancorp holding company. The bank renewed the loans to Hom when they came due last year, but the loans were criticized by regulators. Hom resigned as director shortly after a joint state and federal examination of the bank and its two sister banks.

The financial difficulties have left some Tecate residents wondering what would happen if Hom defaulted.

“If he isn’t really financially sound, that would have a definite impact on seeing this project through and leaving us holding the bag,” said Muir, who owns the Tecate shopping center and an electronics maquila on the Mexican side.

“My objection is the open liability to the people who are here. They’re asking me to give up something I already have. I have plenty of water, a nice yard, and no breaks in my leech lines for 50 years,” Muir said. “And these bonds. Who’s responsible, and how much are they responsible for? If Tom Hom, an entrepreneur, wants to develop this, fine. But not with my money and my future.”

Hom said his family has plenty of other holdings. If he were to default, someone else would pick up the project, he said. But rejecting his proposal may jeopardize the little town’s future, he warned.

“If the board rejects it, I think Tecate will be the shame of the border towns along the U.S.-Mexico border,” Hom said. “This will be the only border town that does not have infrastructure for its people.”