Copyright 2006, The San Diego Union-Tribune.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20060317-9999-1mi17redd.html

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Mayor of Escondido, California, Lori Holt Pfeiler:

[email protected] or 760-839-4610

Escondido City Attorney Jeffrey R. Epp: [email protected] [email protected] or 760-839-4608 / 760-740-9093. Fax: 760-741-7541

http://www.ci.escondido.ca.us/depts/at/index.html 

Top Escondido officials get pay raise

September 20, 2005

By David Fried [email protected] or 760-740-5416

The North County Times

207 East Pennsylvania Avenue

Escondido, California 92025

760-745-6611

Fax: 760-432-6582

http://www.nctimes.com

To submit a Letter to the Editor: [email protected] (200-word limit) 

Escondido, California - Welcome to the big leagues.

Beginning this fiscal year, City Manager Clay Phillips and City Attorney Jeffrey Epp each received an annual raise of $45,504, pushing their total compensation packages up to $215,504 and into the top tier of public employees in the county.

While the 28 percent increases quietly went into effect last month, they were negotiated as part of new work agreements the City Council unanimously approved in July 2004.

Beginning this fiscal year, the contracts tie the officials’ wages to the average of the three highest salaries for city managers in the county, excluding the city of San Diego. Escondido is San Diego County’s fourth largest city in terms of population.

As a result, Phillips -- who previously ranked 10th among the region’s 18 city managers -- now ranks third on the local pay scale, behind San Diego’s Lamont Ewell and Chula Vista’s Dave Rowlands. Chula Vista is the county’s second-largest city, followed by Oceanside.

Epp, who was appointed in 1996 and whose salary is tied to that of the city manager’s, becomes the highest-paid city attorney in the county.

Before the raise, Epp, who manages a team of five attorneys, ranked last. He now rakes in $12,000 more than San Diego City Attorney Mike Aguirre, an elected official who oversees an office of 130 attorneys.

Both Epp and Phillips said that the pay hikes make up for several years without a raise, and that in the future, the increases would probably not be so large.

“We needed to play catch-up, that’s the reason for the bigger boost,” Epp said, adding that the council can re-evaluate the new benchmark with each annual contract cycle.

Neither official received a raise last year, but the contracts included the formula for determining the new salaries, although they did not specify how much the raises would end up being.

The 2005-06 fiscal year budget the council approved in June did not include the raise amount either, and lists Epp’s and Phillip’s salaries at $165,025 each.

The new salaries will be paid from a contingency fund and won't show up in budget documents until next year.

Phillips said that the final survey of local salaries was not completed until this summer, but that ballpark figures were available for anyone who looked at the contracts and paid attention to the formula.

“All this stuff can't be done without public approval,” Phillips said. “And the contracts were approved publicly.”

Based on last month’s survey, Epp and Phillips receive a base salary of $206,504, as well as a car allowance of $9,000 each.

Previously, they were paid $161,000 as well as a car allowance, which was increased 67 percent as part of the 2004 contract. Under city policy, the new car allowance applied to the council members, as well.

City officials said the pay increases were recognition for a job well done, and were needed to keep Escondido competitive with neighboring jurisdictions.

Mayor Lori Pfeiler said the council understood what the final value of the Epp’s and Phillip’s raises might be when it approved the contracts.

“We expect a lot from our city manager and city attorney,” Pfeiler said. “And if we expect a lot, we have to be on a level of compensation that is commensurate with that sophistication.”

Richard Rider, who heads San Diego Tax Fighters, a libertarian watchdog group, called that argument “utter nonsense.”

“Government pay in general has nothing to do with performance or retention,” Rider said. “It’s just whatever they can get away with.”

Moreover, Rider said that the raises will probably have a “leap-frog effect” as the city’s labor unions begin clamoring for similar deals the next time they're sitting at the bargaining table.

The notion of tying Escondido officials’ salaries to those of their counterparts throughout San Diego could also result in increasingly hefty compensation packages all around.

“If there’s more than one jurisdiction that benchmarks to the highest salaries, that can be problematic,” said Steve Jepsen, Oceanside’s city manager, who makes $174,800.

Epp’s and Phillip’s raises are the third major compensation boost for city officials this year.

The council received the same $3,600 car allowance increase as Phillips and Epp, giving the elected officials the highest such reimbursement of any North County city.

And last week, the council approved a 30 percent raise for elected officials, after five years without one. That raise will not take effect until after the 2006 elections, and many on the council pointed out that nearly half of the $3,150 increase will be offset by a state-mandated cut in payments for some ancillary council duties.

Councilman Ron Newman has criticized the increase in auto allowance and the recent vote to raise council pay. In this case, however, Newman said he supported the raises for the two city officials. But he felt that the final amount should have been divulged as part of a public dialogue at the time it took effect.

“The worst thing about this, it’s not the money,” Newman said. “When we do something like this, it brings public trust down a couple of notches.”

Copyright 2005, North County Times.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2005/09/20/news/inland/escondido/91905194723.txt 

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Family wants its Escondido land back

March 4, 2006

By David Fried [email protected] or 760-740-5416

The North County Times

207 East Pennsylvania Avenue

Escondido, California 92025

760-745-6611

Fax: 760-432-6582

http://www.nctimes.com

To submit a Letter to the Editor: [email protected] (200-word limit)

Helen Redding's fragile 94-year-old frame has difficulty navigating the soft soil of the steep slope that was once an avocado grove and the pride of her family.

But with the help of her daughter, she is scrambling in a race to buy the 10-acre site at the end of Puebla Street from the city, which purchased it from the Redding family for $345,000 as part of an eminent domain proceeding in 1995.

The city is now selling the land and the Redding family says it should be the first in line to buy.

The Reddings sold the property to the city after the City Council declared the land was part of a new water reclamation system. That project, however, never came to fruition.

"We had never had any hope of getting (the land) back," Helen Redding said. "It's amazing. But it was a doozy, because they've had it for (10) years and never did anything with it."

Actually, the city did do something with it. After receiving a purchase offer from a local developer last year, it decided to sell the land -- a plan that didn't sit well with Helen Redding's daughter, Jane.

After a former neighbor informed her of the pending sale late last month, Jane Redding, who lives in Nebraska, immediately contacted Escondido officials crying foul play and flew to San Diego to deal with the matter.

"They were going to make a huge profit on it," said Jane Redding, who serves as secretary of M.D. Redding MD Inc., her family's medical business, which once owned the site.

How much to pay


City officials said they had decided to accept the developer's offer because the land wasn't needed. But making a huge profit wasn't part of the equation.

And once they learned of the Redding's interest, city officials immediately started working with family members to sell them back the land, at a rate below market value.

"We didn't build the public improvement," said Mayor Lori Pfeiler. "And the best and most we can do is to let the ones who care about (the land) have it back."

This week, the city agreed to sell the land to the Reddings for $596,000, a price that includes the original purchase price, $13,500 in property taxes the city has paid, and $238,000 to compensate for lost interest returns had the money been placed in Escondido's investment portfolio.

But the Redding family has balked at the offer.

Jane Redding said she has no problem covering the taxes -- something her family would have had to pay, regardless. But she rejects the idea of covering the city's losses had it simply kept the money in the bank.

"They are the ones that sat on it," Redding said, adding that she intends to put forward a counteroffer. "Why should we be paying for the appreciation?"

Selling the family land


After all, for the Redding family, the expansive parcel was meant to be their heritage.

Marion Redding, a San Diego surgeon, had purchased the hilltop land in the unincorporated area in 1957, with the hopes of passing it down through the generations, said daughter Jane Redding.

For decades, the family would while away their weekends picnicking beneath the avocado and orange trees they had planted. They regularly sold some of the fruit to markets, but mostly they just gave it to friends and neighbors, Jane Redding recalled.

"More than an income-producing thing, it was a great joy for the family," she said.

Redding said the family believes the City Council's move to adopt a "Resolution of Necessity" that cleared the way for the city to acquire the property contributed to the death of her father, who was battling cancer at the time.

In 1995, shortly after the family patriarch passed away, the Reddings agreed to sell the land, on the advice of their lawyer.

After that, the story of the land is told in the brown tree stumps, dried grass and blossom on nine remaining orange trees that line portions of the roadside.

A plan abandoned


Escondido had gone after the land in order to house storage tanks as part of a water reclamation project it had proposed in conjunction with the city of San Diego. The project would have nearly doubled the city's reclaimed water capacity and piped water to San Pasqual Valley, parts of southern Escondido and other areas.

But shortly after the city purchased the land, San Diego backed out of the project, said Pat Thomas. the city's public works director.

Even without San Diego's participation, Escondido officials still felt they could move ahead on the project, Thomas said. But around 2001, the city dropped those plans for good.

The city cut off water to the site a couple of years after the sale, and for the last decade, the land has lain fallow. Neighbors said they later cleared dying trees and regularly cut down the brush that would grow on the slope, presenting a fire hazard to the community.

"The city was genuine at the time," Councilman Ed Gallo said. "And things change over time, and it became surplus (property)."

Changing the law


That surplus property is now valuable land.

After receiving an unsolicited offer for the property, the city decided to advertise the sale of the property last spring and received just two offers. The highest was from Clifton C. Morgan Construction Inc, the company that first inquired about the land, said Tom Nutt, the city's real property negotiator.

After further investigating the land, Morgan Construction began renegotiating the sale price, dropping the company's initial offer of $1 million to roughly $775,000 -- well above the $700,000 appraised value, according to Nutt.

In general, cities and other California entities that exercise eminent domain have seven years to make use of properties they condemn.

City Attorney Jeffrey Epp said that, in this case, he did not believe the clock was ticking, since the property was ultimately purchased outright and not condemned.

State law does not provide former owners any recourse if the land seized from them is not used for its intended purpose or is later put up for sale.

However, a proposed amendment to the state's constitution would provide that right if a government entity abandons the intended use or doesn't develop the property within 10 years.

The amendment, authored by Tom McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks, is one of many such measures being drafted around the nation, in the wake of a Supreme Court decision last year upholding governments' right to exercise eminent domain to further private development.

Bringing back family history


Today, the only remnant of the Reddings' family retreat at the end of Puebla's cul-de-sac is a rusted chain-link gate that once led to lush avocado groves that lined the slope and still yield a panoramic view of the Escondido valley.

The view would no doubt be a selling point to anyone who built on the land, which is zoned for up to four single-family houses.

Jane Redding, however, has other plans.

A self-described conservationist, she said that she would like to build one house for her aging mother, and a guest house for herself and her sister, who lives in the Los Angeles area.

And while the glory of the family's grove is probably lost for good, Jane Redding said she intends to replant the hillsides, perhaps with native California vegetation.

"It looks like a dust bowl," Jane Redding said. "We want to beautify it and bring it back."

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Copyright 2006, North County Times.