San Marcos sued for blocking community gatherings

Fear of insurrection? Had enough of that whole free speech thing? Don’t like people getting together for social interaction, fun or education?

A controversial San Marcos conditional use permit requirement barring community group gatherings came under legal challenge this week at San Diego federal court.

Shera Sandwell, owner of non-profit Bheau View Ranch, which she founded in 2000, represented by litigation attorney Jeremiah D. Graham, filed suit against the city of San Marcos. The suit alleges city officials violated her civil rights under the U.S. Constitution’s 1st and 14th Amendments by refusing to allow her to hold even small community gatherings at her 10-acre ranch, one of the few remaining rural parcels at San Marcos.

Sandwell asked U.S District Court, Southern District of California, for unspecified “damages, declaratory relief, and injunctive relief” as a result of pernicious code enforcement denying her the ability to host small community gatherings. The filing requested a trial by jury.

The suit also asks the court to prohibit city officials “from imposing burdensome or arbitrary conditions on Plaintiff’s nonprofit gatherings that effectively deny or chill her right to peaceable assembly.”

“We do not comment on pending litigation.  Best regards,” said Helen Holmes Peak, who is part of San Marcos’ legal team, through email. Peak, along with her her Escondido firm of Lounsbery, Fergusen, Altona & Peak has represented San Marcos since at least the early 2000s,

Sunset at Bheau View Ranch, June 29, 2019/Escondido Grapevine

A Tyranny of Permits: The City’s War on a Quiet Farm

It is an old American custom, as deep-rooted as the Republic itself, that a citizen might peaceably gather with his neighbors, till a little soil, instruct the young, and find, in such wholesome toil, a respite from the manifold absurdities of modern life.

Yet in San Marcos, this ancient liberty has found itself ensnared in a morass of municipal red tape, a victim of that uniquely American phenomenon: the bureaucratic appetite for meddling.

For years, the good citizens of this otherwise unremarkable town found respite in the rustic embrace of Ms. Shera Sandwell’s land, a patch of earth romantically styled Bheau View Ranch.

Sandwell had long opened her farm to families and community groups for planting, animal care, art projects and other activities. The gatherings, held on her property at 424 Cox Road, were modest but a cherished local tradition.

Bheau View Ranch was a hallowed place where children learned to coax green life from the soil, where adults dabbled in the arts, where honest folk could gather under the sun without the baleful eye of bureaucracy looming over them.

The local authorities, ever eager to remind the governed of their place, once saw fit to acknowledge the ranch’s contributions. Bill Horn, a former county supervisor, sent along perfunctory letters of appreciation, no doubt penned in the waning hours of a slow afternoon. But as with all things pleasant and unregulated, this agrarian idyll could not last.

Bheau View Ranch, San Marcos/Escondido Grapevine

On Oct. 1, 2024, Ms. Sandwell, a woman evidently unaware of the perils of engaging with government functionaries, inquired whether she might continue these gatherings—small, infrequent, and wholly innocent of commerce. The response, arriving with bureaucratic efficiency the very next day, was as cold as it was predictable: such activities, she was informed, constituted a “place of assembly.”

In the twisted logic of San Marcos zoning law, this meant her farm was now an institution of sufficient menace to warrant a Conditional Use Permit—a bureaucratic contrivance that places one’s fate in the fickle hands of city hall.

To satisfy the capricious gods of local governance, Ms. Sandwell would be required to submit exhaustive plans, endure the financial extortion of permit fees, and subject herself to hearings where officials could judge whether her quaint pastoral gatherings aligned with the nebulous doctrines of “compatibility” and “neighborhood impact.”

These are the sort of words that give small men great power, allowing them to grant or deny, to approve or obstruct, as the mood suits them.

For years, she tried to comply. From 2017 to 2022, the City pursued Ms. Sandwell with a vigor more befitting the inquisition than local governance. She hemorrhaged money—tens of thousands of dollars handed over to lawyers, engineers, and consultants, all in pursuit of a permit that never materialized. The city, content to bleed her dry, took its campaign a step further in 2019, dragging her into court.

A lawsuit in 2019 compelled her to shutter her modest operation, and the subsequent years saw her hemorrhaging tens of thousands of dollars in a futile attempt to secure a CUP. No approval was ever granted, no clear conditions ever set forth. The process, it seems, was its own punishment.

The legal ordeal, concluded in 2022, left her bankrupt and the farm dormant, a testament to the state’s ability to smother even the simplest of human gatherings under the weight of arbitrary decree.

Bheau View Ranch owner Shera Sandwell, right, and the renowned Jamie Sams, a key member of the Wolf Clan Teaching Lodge, retreat leader, and writer on American Indian spirituality, at Bheau View Ranch in 2019/Escondido Grapevine

Here, of course, lies the constitutional rub. The First Amendment, that tattered banner of liberty, explicitly defends the right to assemble peaceably. And yet, in San Marcos, one must first seek permission—permission.

But in the autumn of 2024, Ms. Sandwell made the grave error of again seeking official permission to continue these gatherings—an act of deference that, predictably, led only to her undoing. On October 2, 2024, the City’s Planning Division Director delivered his decree: these gatherings, being of a public nature, were deemed a “place of assembly” under the city’s agricultural zoning laws.

Such a classification, it seems, requires a Conditional Use Permit (CUP), an albatross of an application process fraught with fees, hearings, and other rituals designed chiefly to discourage.

The legal foundation of this municipal chicanery rests on San Marcos Municipal Code §§ 20.210.040 and 20.520.020–.040, provisions that afford city officials sweeping discretion to approve or deny permits based on nebulous standards of “compatibility” and “neighborhood impact.”

Such vague criteria, as the Supreme Court has long warned, are the natural breeding ground for governmental caprice. Indeed, in Shuttlesworth v. City of Birmingham (1969), the High Court struck down a similar scheme where public officials were endowed with “unbridled discretion” over the granting of permits.

In practice, this legal contraption has functioned precisely as one might expect: as a cudgel against the hapless citizen who dares to make productive use of his own land.

Such a system, in addition to being an affront to common sense, is an evident violation of the First Amendment, which forbids laws “abridging the freedom of speech … or the right of the people peaceably to assemble.”

The Supreme Court has been unequivocal on this point: permit schemes laden with “unbridled discretion” are inherently suspect, if not outright unconstitutional.

And yet, here in San Marcos, a woman cannot host a handful of children on her farm without first navigating an administrative gauntlet designed to frustrate at every turn.

This, then, is the state of affairs: a city government, vested with sweeping powers to regulate and restrict, has chosen to wield that power against a harmless communal gathering, transforming a space of learning and leisure into a legal battleground. In so doing, it has not merely trampled upon a citizen’s rights but has struck at the very spirit of local community.

It is a small tyranny, to be sure, but no less worthy of contempt. And if the Republic has any sense left in it, such absurdities shall not stand.

Kids hit the natural pond at Bheau View Ranch, Twin Oaks in undated photo/Escondido Grapevine

Lawsuit in a nutshell

I. For many years, Ms. Shera Sandwell has opened the gates of her farm to the community—a place where families, children, and local residents have found the simple joys of rural life. They have planted modest gardens, tended to small animals, and engaged in creative endeavors, all in peaceful assembly—a practice long cherished as an exercise in both education and free expression.

II. Yet now, despite the time-honored right to assemble peacefully, the City of San Marcos insists that Ms. Sandwell must secure a Conditional Use Permit (CUP) before such gatherings may occur on her own land. Under the city’s ordinances, the power to permit or forbid these humble activities lies almost entirely at the whim of municipal officials. Such unchecked discretion, we are told, amounts to a prior restraint—a prohibition that flouts the clear protections afforded by the First Amendment, and does so without any narrow, precise standards.

III. In effect, the permit regime imposes a heavy-handed check on free assembly, bestowing upon the City an almost unbridled authority that runs afoul of constitutional guarantees.

IV. Ms. Sandwell, acting in earnest, endeavored to comply with this onerous process. She expended substantial sums on professional counsel and expert advice, only to be met with silence and delay. Thus burdened by cost and frustration, she has been deprived of her right to host gatherings on her property—a right that the Constitution holds dear.

V. Accordingly, Ms. Sandwell brings this suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, asserting that both the letter and the practice of the City’s permit scheme infringe upon her First Amendment right to assemble freely.

VI. The parties before us are as follows: Ms. Shera Sandwell, a resident and owner of a modestly zoned agricultural tract at 424 Cox Road in San Marcos, and the City of San Marcos, a municipal body entrusted with regulating the use of property within its borders. In addition, there are several unnamed parties—Does 1 through 25—who are implicated in this administrative procedure, each allegedly acting in concert with or as agents of the City.

VII. Finally, this matter comes before the United States District Court for the Southern District of California, a body vested with authority under 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331 and 1343, to redress grievances where constitutional rights have been trampled upon. Ms. Sandwell seeks both monetary damages and orders that would prevent further infringement of her rights, as well as a declaration that the current permit system is, by its very nature, unconstitutional.

In sum, the case before us asks whether the City’s discretionary permit process, in its breadth and application, has unconstitutionally curtailed a fundamental right—the freedom of assembly—a right that our tradition of liberty deems sacrosanct.