As mayor, head cheerleader and bare knuckle political advocate, Randy Voepel pushes a pro-growth strategy in Santee. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

Randy Voepel, the Santee mayor who grew up in Missouri without indoor plumbing and earned money as a kid busting bones for a crematorium, is on a roll. Extolling his city’s virtues as home to a future technology campus, he veers off into a discussion of public safety. Santee, he assures, is very safe, although he cannot say the same about other places he visits. So a potential robber won’t be disappointed, he always carries a wad of cash, emphasizing that by pulling out his money clip. Keith Till, standing a step back from the conversation, grins. Charged with delivering on the vision of Voepel and the other four part-time members of the Santee City Council, the city manager well knows how boisterous this boss can be. Even Voepel concedes he can get carried away, declaring Till his alter ego. “I think his favorite words are, ‘What the mayor really meant.’”

Mayoral style aside, it is clear to anyone who has not visited Santee for a while that the city is not just preparing for change, but rather in the midst of a major transformation. The geographic center of town, once a mostly vacant 706-acre site split by the San Diego River, is now a bustling collection of retail and transit, teasing with the beginnings of a 108-acre corporate office park that would deliver as many as 4,800 high-paying jobs to a city that already ranks seventh in the county for household income ($73,846), just behind Encinitas. Roughly envisioned by city planners 21 years ago, this acreage is turning Santee from a sleepy bedroom community to one with an active center and a host of new housing options, from tightly bunched mid-scale townhomes across the street from a huge new park and recreation center to new executive hilltop housing where Downtown San Diego and the ocean beyond are easily visible on a clear day.

Attracted by the opportunity to be part of converting what he called “an empty canvas” in the center of town into a mixed-use development replete with a river park, Till sought out the Santee job and was hired in 2000. At the time, the centerpiece retail project was again faltering, this time when a deal for an anchor tenant movie theater evaporated. Those actions came on the heels of voters rejecting a major local housing project, threatening to stall the city’s pro-growth agenda. The first citizen phone complaint Till took was about a huge tumbleweed about to blow into traffic on busy Mission Gorge Road. Today that complaint is likely to be about an SUV blocking traffic trying to get into the site, which now is Trolley Square, a 50-acre, 454,000-square-foot shopping center that doubles as the last eastern stop on the regional red car line. Till gets widespread credit for working with the developer to restructure the deal and bring in Target as an anchor. “We were in a crisis mode (over Trolley Square) and he saved it,” says Pam White, the city’s longest serving economic development official.

White, whose title today is assistant to the director, has been working on developing Santee’s economic base since 1985. Among the many projects where her efforts played a key role were the additions of Lowe’s and Kohl’s to the retail scene. Former Mayor Jim Bartell, who worked with White for 15 years, says she seemed to always be on the job and ready with just the right information. Indeed, she seems as comfortable walking around with a binder bulging with Santee materials as most women are with a purse. Paying White the ultimate compliment is Voepel, who estimates he has made 52,000 cold calls while developing his corporate insurance practice. “She is one of the few salespeople I have ever met who probably is better than me,” he says. “She really has sold this city.”

“I don’t believe that a city should ever stop marketing itself or believe that its job is done,” White says. “In economic development, you have to understand that cities are almost living organisms. Cells die off and need to be replaced or rejuvenated. If it isn’t in a state of growth, it stagnates.”

Retail Pursuit

With her ever-present binder of information, Pam White has driven Santee’s successful effort to bolster an anemic retail scene and keep more sales tax revenue in the city. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

It was White who secured Santee a slot on the leasing mall at the annual International Council of Shopping Centers spring conference in Las Vegas. The event attracts more than 50,000 retailers and brokers. Voepel, who along with Till represents Santee at the gathering, says White’s dedication includes staying up until 2 a.m. wrapping candy in a city logo to hand out at the booth. White sees it as a way of introducing retail brokers to Santee, including those already working the San Diego market. Participating has paid off, with both structured and random connections. As to the latter, city officials like to cite Voepel’s conversation with a seatmate on a flight back to San Diego several years ago. The passenger, who also had attended the conference, was a relocation executive for Mimi’s Café. Santee now has its own Mimi’s.

Despite its trophy-project status, Trolley Square is not perfect. Critics say as a transit terminus it should be denser and offer more housing. It also has a large swath of parking. Santee officials respond the density is higher than average and multi-family housing, upon which residents have generally frowned, is in the mix for adjacent expansion, as is a 30,000-square-foot library. And everything is within easy walking distance of the business park. As for the parking, they note a nine-foot-wide path for walking and bicyclists connects all the shops.

Trolley Square and the recent rush of new retail have helped Santee stem a bleed of sales tax revenue, one sustained for decades as its residents shopped and ate in neighboring cities. They did so not because the goods and services were better, but because there were few local choices.

In 2002, despite some significant retail successes, sales tax leakage was a relatively high 38 percent. By 2005, the most recent year data are available, it was down to 15 percent. At the same time, sales tax revenue has grown 33 percent, from $4.8 million in 2000 to a projected $6.5 million in the 2007 city budget.

Job Hunting

But for Santee to complete the smart growth grand slam of bundling transit, housing, retail and high-paying jobs, it needs a business park. And that is where the RiverView Professional Center comes in.

RiverView’s first phase was completed when Hartford Insurance Co. moved into its 77,000-square-foot regional headquarters in 2003. The developer, The Ryan Cos., now is offering for sale in the second phase six office buildings of one and two stories priced at $245 to $270 a square foot. This phase also includes plans for that longed-for cineplex (Santee is home to one of the county’s last drive-ins) and residential condos. The third and final phase would include four two-story buildings of 55,000 to 75,000 square feet in size and a three-story, 103,000-square-foot structure.

Market conditions and political decisions will affect the timetable for RiverView’s success, which likely is a five- to 10-year project. From a marketing standpoint, the development will become more desirable in late 2010. That is when the long-promised Highway 52 eastern extension will finally be complete, offering a ramp into the development area and providing freeway connections for travel in all directions.

Politically, Santee is battling with the county over plans to expand Los Colinas Women’s Jail from 15 acres to a 45-acre campus snuggling up against the business park. Santee, which pegs the property’s value at $2 million an acre, favors a new jail be built in Otay Mesa and for the county to develop the Santee property as residential. Voepel promises to use his military-trained “warrior” mindset and “outwork your opponent” sales skills to defeat the project. “It if happens, 43 percent of Santee’s downtown will become jail,” Voepel says. “That will not stand. That will not happen on my watch. I will fight it with everything we have, and the city council will too. We are of a like mind on this.”

Overseeing RiverView’s marketing is Chris Pascale, a senior vice president with CB Richard Ellis. Asked about the state of Santee’s existing commercial market, Pascale is frank. “There isn’t much of one, but that is OK,” he says. “The master plan for Santee is strong. This project is transit oriented. It is in the center of town and long term it is going to be a very good value.”

Since joining Santee in 2000, City Manager Keith Till has refined the city’s smart growth strategy and cut the red tape for commercial developers. (photo/alandeckerphoto.com)

RiverView’s target audience are professional services, medical offices, financial services, technology companies and engineering firms. “Those are the drivers of San Diego’s economy and a lot of those people live in Santee and the surrounding communities,” Pascale says.

Belying Santee’s semi-rural image, Voepel and others tout the commute. “I remind you we are only 14 minutes from La Jolla in the morning with an empty freeway coming out and going back in the evening.”

Other benefits, Pascale says, are space up to 20 percent cheaper than comparable locations on the Interstate 15 corridor and the abundance of retail in the adjacent Town Center. “People can be very efficient in their off time,” he says.

Till points to the city’s can-do attitude when working with potential developers. “One of the biggest obstacles to a business is the red tape and getting a project approved quickly,” Till says. “The city already has a general plan blueprint that says we welcome this, has the zoning in place and has an EIR already done. That removes a big headache.”

A Biotech’s Perspective

Those looking for practical advocates of doing tech business in Santee can start and stop with Scantibodies, a profitable, 500-employee biotech headquartered there that its executives testify is a 45-minute drive from its 4-year-old manufacturing plant in Tecate.

Asked what she would tell a prospective business interested in moving to Santee, Anna Marie Cadenhead, the firm’s human resources recruiter, starts her list with the easy commute, especially from the East County and communities near Route 52. “It is a quality of life thing,” she says. “People start to do that math. ‘Do I want to spend two hours on the freeway?’ We draw from the San Diego area and (those employees) are going against traffic. My focus has been on people who live in East County. We have oil over $90 a barrel, which means gas prices will hit $3.50 a gallon. Here, we have everything that we need, from going out to lunch to getting your nails done at lunch, stopping at the grocery store on your way home or going to 24 Hour Fitness.”

La Jolla Inspiration

It was Voepel who coined “La Jolla of the East County,” a phrase he says is based on a love for seaside La Jolla developed when he surfed its beaches while in San Diego during a nine-year Navy career that ended in 1978 and included combat aboard the storied USS Buchanan.

“When I first got elected to the city council, people laughed at me, really derided me for saying that,” says Voepel, whose day job is as a vice president with California Corporate Benefits in Rancho Bernardo. “But I doggedly, doggedly sold Santee. I have sold the dream. People buy into it and now we are successful.”

As a barometer of that success, Voepel harkens back to a promise to voters that if they supported his pro-growth candidacy, one day they would find luxury cars parked side-by-side outside the city’s shops and eateries.

“Just last month my wife and I went to my favorite restaurant and we saw a Beemer next to a Mercedes next to a Lexus,” Voeple says. “She looked and me and I looked at her and we just smiled. We knew what that meant.”