by Logan Jenkins
SignOn San Diego

A bouquet — the Keep Us Guessing Wrong to the Last Minute award — to Supervisor Ron Roberts for flabbergasting North County by voting against Merriam Mountains, the bitterly divisive mega-development north of Escondido.

Everyone I consulted assumed Roberts would vote for the controversial, general-plan-busting project. Otherwise, why ask for another hearing after the 2-2 deadlock in December that de facto killed the 2,700-home project?

As Roberts explained after the exhausting meeting Wednesday, no important vote had ever been decided by what was, in his opinion, a tainted non-decision. He chided those who assumed he was going to support the quantum leap in rural growth.

While his colleagues expressed their differing rationales for voting for or against — boiled down, it was jobs vs. good land-use — Roberts took a somewhat different tack, as befits a former architect and planner.

In his view, Merriam Mountains was a 20th-century project inconsistent with where the county should be going.

In the 21st century, he suggested, growth should be closer to urban centers and mass transit. Though he didn’t say so in so many words, he colored Merriam Mountains as leapfrog development, a resource-wasting anachronism in the modern age.

Roberts’ view of the future must throw a bolt of fear into the hearts of developers in North County banking on the eventual approval of other large-scale projects: one in northwest Valley Center; several north of state Route 76 (east of Interstate 15); and another at Guejito Ranch near Lake Wohlford.

Roberts’ tiebreaking vote no doubt hinged on a variety of technical issues involving air quality and water supply. Important stuff.

But in the end, it came down to an architect’s vision of what the world should look like in the next hundred years.

Supervisor Bill Horn, a staunch supporter of job-creating projects, was understandably unhappy.

It’s been long game of hardball. Horn has been accused of unethical contacts with Stonegate Development Group, the would-be developer of Merriam Mountains. He believes Blackstone Group, which owns the Golden Door Spa, used dirty, bullying tactics.

Well, frankly, those sorts of charges from a politician on the losing end seem like politics as usual.

Roberts’ vision, on the other hand, struck me as truly unusual.

And admirable.