Greg and Cheryl Cox entertain many forms of encouragement as they tackle their respective jobs, he as county supervisor and her as Chula Vista’s mayor. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

Greg Cox is relaxed and in a teasing mood, ever so comfortable in the environs of the Chula Vista Nature Center, a preserve he led the creation of more than two decades ago, partly on the anticipation of future bayfront development taxes to underwrite its costs — but that’s another story. At this moment, the subject of his joshing is Cheryl Cox, his wife. “Three. Can you count to three?” asks the county supervisor. “I can count to five.” Cheryl, Chula Vista’s newest mayornamed Cox, gives him a weary half-smile. She’s facing a testy budget tussle at that night’s council meeting and realizes this is her husband’s way of providing encouragement. (She only needs three votes for a majority.) Later, during a break in a photo session, he innocently asks if she’ll be joining him that evening for a friend’s surprise party. “I have a council meeting,” she says. He knows.

At a time of both great economic promise, and some peril, Mayor Cox and Supervisor Cox are a powerful political pairing in a part of San Diego County that has mostly shed its “Chula Juana/Illegal Immigration Central” image. Rather, the South County — a moniker considered an upgrade from South Bay — is home to a new freeway with more coming, an ocean of new housing, the Olympic Training Center, the region’s finest amphitheatre (Cricket Pavilion), the largest shopping mall to open in 20 years, and is ticketed to add nearly 100,000 jobs by 2030, many of the blue collar variety.

“This is our time,” says Alejandra Mier y Teran, executive director of the Otay Mesa Chamber of Commerce, which represents the area’s teeming border-hugging industrial sector with its 1,200 companies and 25,000 employees. “Everything seems to be pointing in the right direction,” she says. “With the opening of the South Bay Expressway, it has really created opportunities. In the last 18 months, we have added 12 new manufacturing companies. Some have already moved in and some will be moving in. In an era where manufacturing has declined, that really says something about Otay Mesa.”

While the city of San Diego controls the western portion of Otay Mesa, the eastern section is county land, in the jurisdiction of Supervisor Cox. There, a 1,000-acre technology park is drawing interest from top-drawer tenants, including a Fortune 500 whose name, says Cindy Gompper-Graves, chief executive of the South County Economic Development Council, for now must remain secret.

Chula Vista’s Nature Center attracts thousands of school children each year to explore the wonder of the tidelands.

Anchoring everything is California’s largest commercial land border port and one of the busiest commercial land border crossings in the United States. It is so busy, and such an economic positive, regional leaders have banded together to use local money to build for the federal government a third crossing, with that expense reimbursed by revenue from a new toll highway.

At the heart of the South County is Chula Vista, the region’s second largest city with 227,723 residents, 76,738 homes and a 50.9-square-mile footprint.

Back In Time

The clock tower at Heritage Towne Center in Otay Ranch, one of Chula Vista’s major developments.

When Greg Cox was first elected to the Chula Vista City Council in 1976, and Cheryl was fresh into a 30-year education career, there was no Otay Mesa border crossing. That didn’t come until 1985. What did exist was an image of Chula Vista as a border community — misleading in that its borders are miles from Mexico — and the South Ba as a fine grand station for undesirable uses. True, if an animal rendering plant, low-level waste radiation storage and other uses fit the description. “It seemed like whenever there was a less desirable land use, the answer was “let’s put it in South County,” says Greg Cox. “You name it, we had it.”

Both members of the Cox political household grew up knowing the fact and fiction. Cheryl, 59, was born into a Navy family in Florida and moved to Chula Vista in 1963 when in high school. Greg, 60, was born in Mercy Hospital and is the son of a man who moved with his family to Chula Vista in 1918 and the grandson of a man who worked at a Sunkist packing plant and was drawn to the city by its then-new library and F Street elementary school, where a library now stands.

The couple met in 1971 when working on Assemblyman Pete Wilson’s campaign to be mayor of San Diego. When Wilson and Greg Cox needed help to distribute some literature, Greg drove his Karmann Ghia, with Wilson riding shotgun, over to pick up a volunteer from Chula Vista, Cheryl Willett. Wilson hopped into what amounted to a back seat in the VW, Cheryl sat next to Greg and a romance was born. The couple married in 1975.

Greg balances fond memories of growing up in a one high school town — “I remember going target shooting out past where our home is now (they’ve lived there since marrying) with some less pleasant realities, like few good times on the bayfront. “The Chula Vista waterfront was something you didn’t pay much attention to,” he says. “A station at the end of J Street pumped sewage right out into San Diego Bay. It was kind of a foul-smelling area.”

Perhaps that olfactory awareness explains his relentless push to restore and develop the city’s bayfront. Cheryl tells a story about the birth of their second child. When she informed Greg she was in labor, he told her he had a bayfront presentation to give. They solved the dilemma by stopping on the way to the hospital to give the projector and materials to a different presenter.

“What has been lacking in this community is a large enough facility to accommodate proms, installations for business groups and large gatherings,” says Greg Cox. “Any time in Chula Vista when you want to have an event for more than 200 people, where do you go? Nowhere locally. Why shouldn’t we have a nice place for weddings, bar mitzvahs, receptions, all those things that are part of normal life?” Cheryl puts it more simply. “You can’t take your family down and buy an ice cream cone and walk along the bayfront,” she says.

Innovative ideas about the bayfront have long been Greg Cox’ purview. As a young councilman dealing with a lawsuit from the railroad company being stymied from turning the area into a switching yard, he listened to attorneys urge a negotiated settlement because the city had a weak case. Cox suggested going to court, losing, and then being forced to buy the property. He offered similar counsel a decade later as mayor, urging his colleagues to spend $16 million buying the land after a development deal imploded. “We could have planned our own destiny,” he says.

The bayfront journey has been frustrating. The nature center of today is a tranquil repository of environmental wonder. Its history is as a dump and gunpowder factory, the remnants of which still exist today. By the mid-1970s, non-native vegetation was doing nicely, as were the feral cats preying on endangered birds. As the Cox-led council of the 1980s kept upping the city’s contribution to clean the area, environmentalists kept shrinking what could be built, helped along by U.S. Fish & Wildlife actions that appeared to have political undertones. Ultimately, the city lost its prime developer in the 1980s and the project has stumbled along since.

Today the bayfront is again in play, this time with a $1 billion-plus plan by Gaylord Entertainment to build a self-contained resort and convention center south of where the original project was proposed. The project is attractive but problematic. Environmentalists and labor question it, primarily the commitment to union construction jobs, while a city making major budget cuts contemplates investing in a $300 million bond to underwrite infrastructure for the entire 550-acre bayfront and Gaylord’s convention center. Scott Barnett, a public affairs consultant and former executive director of the San Diego Taxpayers Association, has issued a report concluding Chula Vista’s financial position has turned precarious to support new bonds, pushed there by excessive use of bonding capacity on non-revenue generating public projects and swollen city staff rolls and pensions.

Chula Vista’s marina stands as a beacon of public access possibility on a mostly undeveloped, and inaccessible, bayfront.

It was the city’s declining fiscal position, even before the recent wave of foreclosures almost certainly large reductions in property tax revenue, that helped get Cheryl Cox elected. She defeated incumbent Mayor Steve Padilla, painting him as not minding the fiscal shop.

Mayor Cox says the Gaylord project will generate enough revenue to cover the city’s bonds and that projects that follow elsewhere on the bayfront also will reimburse the city for their share of the expense.

If you like hospitality projects, Gaylord’s is magnificent.

Costing nearly $1 billion, the 2-million-square-foot development will include 1,500 to 2,000 hotel rooms and a 400,000-square-foot convention center. More than 3,000 jobs would go into its building and it would take a staff of 2,000 to run. The project would be built on port property, much like the San Diego Convention Center and adjacent hotels. An environmental impact report will start circulating this month with responses due back in July. Politically, it will get ugly. Some in Chula Vista consider it too big, some prefer essentially a mostly development-free bayfront. And then there are the labor, fiscal and environmental questions.

Cheryl Cox argues Gaylord will jump-start development of the city’s entire western side, its older side. She notes Chula Vista is in a unique position for a coastal community in that as you get closer to the water, property values drop.

The outcome of this latest bayfront effort is impossible to predict. The only certain winners will be the consultants and lawyers on all sides.

Political Pathways

When Greg Cox left office as mayor in December 1990, he was a Republican golden boy with sky’s-the-limit political credentials. He started a government consulting business and then went to Sacramento for a year as Gov. Wilson’s deputy director for local government. When a 1992 bid for state Assembly ended badly, he restarted the consulting firm. After Supervisor Brian Bilbray was elected to Congress in 1995, Cox applied for, and secured, an appointment to the seat. Today he is an entrenched incumbent, likable, effective and impossible to beat. He is up for re-election this year and will win in a landslide.

Cheryl Cox faces a much tougher road as she enters her 17th month as mayor. The city’s budget is shrinking to the point where fire station closures have been part of the discussion. The city manager is projecting a 14 percent decrease in the fiscal 2009 general fund budget, putting it at $141.7 million. For perspective, consider the city of San Diego general fund budget, often portrayed in the media as a looming disaster, is proposed to increase 7.4 percent to $1.2 billion. Chula Vista already was forced to make mid-year budget cuts, accomplishing those in part by eliminating 60 positions last year through early retirements with another 20 to go away soon. She is in the unenviable position of having to deal with the consequences of the actions of others, and being scrutinized in the process.

Among those wary of her administration is Susan Watry, who with her husband, Peter, have long organized and led slow growth and government watchdog efforts in Chula Vista, primarily under the auspices of a group called Crossroads. Watry, who helped get Cheryl Cox elected, fears the new mayor is too fond of the San Diego Republican establishment and is bringing it into the local political mix, often behind the scenes. “The Republican club is now going to attempt to run our local politics,” she says. Watry also compares Cheryl’s style unfavorably to Greg’s, saying she governs from the dais while Greg was, and is, a man of the people. Such comparison is as unfair as it is legitimate. Greg Cox was born charming, a skill accentuated for most of his political career by a youthful face and an easy smile. Budget and bayfront critic Barnett says Greg’s persona is unique. “He is the most secure individual as a politician I have ever met,” Barnett says.

As mayor, Greg Cox also never had to deal with the budget declines facing his wife. His city manager at the time, John Goss, never wavered from strong reserves, and at times endured criticism from some council members that he was banking money that could better be used to help the community. It will take fresh tax revenue to reverse Chula Vista’s fiscal position, something Gaylord would help provide. The mayor also opposes Proposition E, a June ballot measure that would greatly restrict the ability of the city to build tall, dense projects in its prime older areas and collect the related taxes.

As she tackles her agenda, it is fair to explore, and conclude, Cheryl Cox benefited from her husband’s political connections in winning the race. But she already was entrenched in the community. Highly educated with a doctorate from USD, her local education career includes 12 years as a teacher, 10 as an administrator and eight in the central office. She spent six years as an elected school board member, 11 on Sharp Healthcare’s board and, before running for mayor, was a government and education consultant. It seems to be a recipe for winning political office, with her husband the cherry on top.

Economic Opportunity

The good economic news is that Chula Vista has a number of projects in the works that will boost tax revenue along with education and employment opportunities for South County residents. “When Greg was mayor, the city was preparing to grow and doing all the things that were needed,” explains Cheryl Cox. “Then the next 10 years were ones of phenomenal growth. But the city used the development impact fees as if they were sustainable. Now we are dealing with almost no growth. We need to diversify the economy from just residential to jobs because we know that growth in and of itself is not sustainable.”

To create those jobs, Mayor Cox is pushing hard for a University Park and Research Center in southeastern Chula Vista, an area once primarily used for dry wheat farming but today is on the edge of the breaking residential boom. Just last month Cox and the City Council secured 50 more acres for the park to go with 139 acres already in hand. “Having this land will allow us to go out and help recruit the universities,” she says. The goal is to surround the campus with what is being called a National Energy Center, an attempt to capitalize on the sustainability trend by getting related technology and R&D firms to cluster, much like the biotechs have around UCSD.

The 210-acre East Urban Center planned for nine years by the city and Corky McMillin Cos. will include more than 3.4 million square feet of commercial space and about 3,000 multifamily units.

The city also has spent nine years working with McMillin Development on what is called the Eastern Urban Center. It is a 200-acre development that blends dense residential with mid-rise office and commercial development aimed at professionals and manufacturing firms. Much as Eastlake and now Otay Ranch have been studied, and praised, by land planners from around the nation, this project has the potential to show how mixed-use clustering in suburban areas should be done.

When the region’s economy eventually turns around, Mayor Cox expects her city will be in the lead. “We were the first ones in and we think we are going to be the first ones out,” she says.

Touchdown, Chargers?

Chula Vista Mayor Cheryl Cox presides at the groundbreaking for High Tech High. (photo/Ryan Bethke)

Major league sports operations have caught the South County’s eye from time to time. About 30 years ago the area where Interstate 805 and H Street now intersect was touted by a developer for a basketball arena. National City ended its brief flirtation with the San Diego Chargers but its mayor, Ron Morrison, continues to envision that bayfront property as ideal for a sports arena.

But most prominent of them all is the idea of locating a stadium for the San Diego Chargers in Chula Vista, most likely where the power plant now sits on the bayfront near Interstate 5 and J Street. The city has for decades wanted to do away with the plant — an older, oil-burning version would put a nice sheen on nearby parked cars — and reclaim the land. Essentially, Chula Vista is carrying the hopes of the county, especially now with a Los Angeles developer seemingly getting close to offering the kind of deal the Chargers are seeking.

Mayor Cox lists the stadium as No. 5 on her Ten Point Action Plan. It shares a paragraph with a long-range plan to build a major off-road racing venue in the city. What she makes clear, though, is she will not advocate for the project. Rather, she is waiting to see what the Chargers propose, and what the team will pay. “My guess is it will be July or August before we sit down and talk with the Chargers,” Cox says. “We don’t have anything from them. They just said they were going to build this with private money and needed some time to go find it. We feel the PR about the Chargers has been good for us and I’d like to see them remain in San Diego County. But financing and locating a stadium are very complicated.”

Muted Victories

Even the financial wins for Chula Vista are complicated. Take, for example, the Otay Ranch Shopping Center, which is boosting sales tax revenue, but shy of projections.

The mall opened last year as the biggest shopping center in San Diego in decades, but traveling there was a challenge for those not living nearby. The adjacent toll road that makes the mall accessible even to those in East County was a year behind schedule. It is open now, but the economic environment is much changed. Tim Colby, the center’s general manager, acknowledges the slowdown has had its impact, but is upbeat about the future. “Clearly we view this as temporary, that all the fundamentals that made the housing surge occur are just taking a breather and will come back,” Colby says. “What (city leaders) have done in Chula Vista in the last 10 or 15 years, and what will happen in the next little while when the world improves, makes this the place to be in San Diego County.”

The Two-Politician Household

Asked what it is like for the South County’s two most powerful politicians to be married, the couple turns to jokes. “We have one rule at home, and that’s the county rules,” says Greg. “Somebody said to me that she didn’t think it was appropriate that the mayor be married to the supervisor because then government will work faster,” says Cheryl. When they carpool to evening events, they often end up at different tables, leading Cheryl to remind Greg not to leave without her. One issue of contention between them is a proposed resort on the east side of Otay Lakes. Greg wants it to stay in the county, Cheryl wants the property incorporated into Chula Vista.

As to her ability to count, Cheryl Cox did pass her math test that night. Her proposal to cut $200,000 from the combined $1.5 million budget of the council and mayor, and not have the entire amount taken from her $323,000 budget, passed 3-1. It was a small victory, perhaps the start of a trend.