Goodbye Horses, Hello Soccer Tournaments?

Media
Nov 21
2 min read

Way over on the other side of Chula Vista, at the city’s northeastern border with the unincorporated community of Bonita, a very different part of the Rohr legacy is also undergoing transformation.

Not everyone is happy about it.

City park staff are planning a major overhaul of Rohr Park, a 60-acre multi-use park once owned by Rohr Industries and used as an employee recreation center. Frederick Rohr was a firm believer in the value of outdoor exercise and bought the park for that purpose in 1955.

Rohr died in 1965. A year later, Rohr Industries sold the park to the city of Chula Vista.

Generations of residents have grown up riding Rohr Park’s miniature steam train, playing soccer and softball on the park’s athletic fields, walking a network of paths and nature trails and gathering for family picnics.

City officials now want to upgrade the park to modernize equipment, rehab restrooms, enhance sports facilities and potentially add new features, including pickleball courts, an amphitheater and an archery range.

Chula Vista residents endorsed many of those changes in a recent series of community meetings.

But there’s a catch.

Rohr Park forms a kind of peninsula jutting into the middle of Bonita. Many users and neighbors of the park live in Bonita, not Chula Vista. Those neighbors are worried the city’s planned changes will clog their roads with traffic, sacrifice nature areas to soccer fields and – worst of all – possibly eliminate an equestrian arena that many semi-rural Bonita residents use to exercise their horses.

Susan Heavilin, a Bonita resident who writes an up-to-the-minute local news blog, summed up her community’s conundrum: “We don’t own the park, but it’s surrounded by Bonita.”

“The Bonita people want the peaceful walks and the nature and the wildflowers,” Heavilin said.

“[Chula Vista’s planned] activity hub will be wall-to-wall activity and baseball fields and soccer fields…The horse people are upset. People on Sweetwater Road are upset. People with traffic issues are upset.”

Frank Carson, Chula Vista’s parks director, stressed that city officials are still gathering community feedback and have not settled on a final plan or set a date to present plans to the City Council.

“The city is currently in the process of receiving public input,” Carson said in an emailed statement. “Concerns about the equestrian center, traffic and noise are part of the public feedback we are reviewing.”

That is no doubt true. But the top three goals listed in a recent city presentation on park improvements do not sound auspicious for horse owners. The goals are:

“Promote sports equity for all youth,”

“Enhance recreational infrastructure and safety” and

“Improve parking and regional access.”

There is no mention of giving horses a good gallop.

What would Frederick Rohr have thought? Judging by his purchase of Rohr Park in the first place, and by the generations of Chula Vista residents he helped to catapult into the middle class by providing them with good, steady jobs, I have a feeling he would have favored whatever option benefits the greatest number of ordinary people.

Want to make your voice heard on the issue? The city will hold one of the last of its park-planning community meetings at 5:30 p.m. this evening at Rohr Park, 4370 Sweetwater Rd.

The entire article about Frederick Rohr may be read at Rohr Legacy Keeps on Giving.