By J. Harry Jones
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
December 7, 2008
POWAY – Last week, Bob Emery, one final time, cast a series of votes in his role as a member of the Poway City Council.
“It will be a change to go from somebody with status to somebody with none,” Emery said later.
But Emery, 67, a former middle school teacher who has been a member of the City Council since Poway incorporated in 1980, will always have status in the city he has had so much influence in shaping.
He moved with his wife, Suzanne, to Poway in 1967, and was a member of a county planning advisory committee beginning in 1970. Its members were sick and tired of county planners ignoring their suggestions and allowing Poway to develop haphazardly.
In 1980, Emery and many other community leaders backed a ballot measure calling for Poway to incorporate as a city. Twenty-seven people ran for positions on a new City Council that wouldn't exist if the measure failed.
It passed 52 percent to 48 percent, and Emery was the top vote-getter for one of five seats. And there he stayed, easily winning re-election again and again.
At the council's meeting Tuesday night, Emery will step down from his seat in the council chambers, which were named after him in a vote last month. He chose not to seek an eighth term.
It will be the end of 38 years of continual service to Poway, although Emery still will be a volunteer reserve park ranger, a program he brought before the council in 1992.
Jan Goldsmith, elected San Diego City Attorney on Nov. 4, was mayor of Poway for a short time in the early 1990s.
“He is indeed Mr. Poway. He's always put Poway first,” Goldsmith said of Emery. “I love the guy.”
The original council had a vision for the city. Three years after incorporation, it developed a general plan that called for keeping “The City in the Country,” as Poway calls itself, as rural as possible while dealing with inevitable growth.
Today that plan is intact.
“If you were in the space shuttle looking down on Poway, you would see that the plan adopted in 1983 is almost identical to what the city looks like now,” said Jim Bowersox, Poway's first city manager, who retired in 2005. “Bob has steadfastly defended that plan.”
Poway has long enjoyed a reputation in the county as a well-run and financially healthy city. Emery and Bowersox are two of the reasons why.
“There are only two things that have happened that I wouldn't have expected on the day we incorporated,” Emery said in a recent interview.
The first was the creation of the Poway Business Park in the southern part of the city, which has brought 20,000 jobs and about $3 million annually in sales taxes to the city. The park was conceived a few years after incorporation, “and was the smartest thing we ever did,” Emery said.
The second, Emery said, is the way northern Poway has developed. The city always envisioned large lots where people could build bigger houses and keep horses. But north Poway became a wealthy area filled with “incredible mansions,” many built behind gates, Emery said.
“None of us saw that coming,” he said.
There were a few mistakes made early on, Emery said.
Shortly after incorporation, the council, thinking it had all its legal i's dotted and t's crossed, ordered five large billboards removed from Poway Road.
That led to a lawsuit, during which a judge threatened to jail the entire council.
“They worked it out, and the billboards are gone and Poway Road is much better for it,” Emery said.
The other was a “rather Draconian” council decision in the early 1980s restricting development in various floodplain areas. The ordinance had the effect of denying many landowners the ability to build on their property, and residents made it clear they were unhappy.
“We turned that one around real quick,” Emery said.
Emery is proud of the council he has served on. He takes pleasure in the fact that unlike the factionalism and infighting evident in some other cities – with council majorities that seize power and silence minority members – Poway has largely avoided that.
“It hasn't always been a bed of roses, but when the crunch came everybody has always voted for what is best for Poway,” he said. “Everybody I've served with on the council has had the best interest of the city at heart.”
Bowersox first met Emery in 1981 during his second interview for the city manager's job. It was Emery who called Bowersox to let him know he had been hired.
“How do you summarize a guy whose been around for 28 years?” Bowersox said. “I have a lot of respect for him and consider him not just to be a former boss but a good friend, too.”
Don Higginson, who has served on the council since 1986 and will now become its longest-serving member, said that if you were to cut Emery's vein open, “little P's for Poway would come out.”
“Bob is as consistent as you can get,” Higginson said. “You know how Bob philosophically feels about anything and everything and he never varies. He's big on personal property rights and zoning and planning.
“He's been a great comrade up there.”
Source from:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20081207-9999-1mc7emery.html
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