Bob Jones wasn’t only visionary behind SLO city-to-the-sea bike trail. Meet John DeVincenzo
A public trail from San Luis Obispo to Avila Beach had modest origins.
A portion of what was initially named the Avila Valley Bike Trail dates back to 1981.
When San Luis Bay Estates was constructed, a public trail along the creek was a condition of approval.
In 1997, negotiations were being finalized to link with a section through the Avila Beach Resort Golf Course. An April 19, 1997, story said the trail was popular from the start when it had opened in December the previous year.
On Oct. 31, 1998, the trail was renamed in honor of Bob Jones.
He had been active in land conservancy throughout the state, worked for the California Department of Fish and Game, and had served on the County Parks Master Plan committee envisioning an expansion of the trail to San Luis Obispo. Jones retired in the Avila area and was a regular writer of letters to the editor.
Bob Jones died in November 1994, at the age of 77. He was a former president of the Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County and remembered in a letter to the editor from Pat and Jack Fraser.
“Throughout his life he was an unselfish sharer of the results of his tireless search for better ways to solve a problem,” they wrote. “He was a man of great honesty and integrity, qualities we especially value.”
“Bob was one of the really good guys of this world.”
Another visionary along the trail was orthodontist John DeVincenzo who owned several parcels of land in the area, including Gopher Glen apple farm in See Canyon, Avila Valley Barn and an apple orchard he planted along San Luis Creek.
DeVincenzo died in September 2009 at the age of 73.
Now four decades after the first section of trail was approved, it is still in the process of being completed.
Silas Lyons wrote this profile of DeVincenzo and status of trail as part of a series of stories on changes in Avila Valley on Aug. 30, 1999:
His dream is a stretch of open space
From the city to the sea: A visionary developer is buying up land to create a greenway linking SLO and Avila
John DeVincenzo, a respected orthodontist and one of the Avila Valley’s largest landowners, is pushing impatiently through heavy brush in the gathering twilight, his scuffed work boots pulled up against brown dress slacks.
Emerging into a small clearing, he gestures across what appears to have once been a small field bearing some kind of vegetable crop.
DeVincenzo is imagining green grass and benches, a natural way station along an elaborate trail system.
“Hardly anybody knows anything about this, so there’s no effort to do anything about it,” he says. “It’s owned by the county for a park.”
DeVincenzo would like to see that park become part of an approximately six-mile-long bike and pedestrian parkway connecting the city of San Luis Obispo to the town of Avila Beach, with a side-arm reaching from the main trail toward the hills of See Canyon.
By virtue of his passion and his ownership of much of the land it would pass through, DeVincenzo is at the forefront of the effort to make the project a reality.
The concept of a long, thin park providing a natural corridor along the banks of San Luis Creek, called the City to the Sea Greenway, is backed by the county and The Land Conservancy of San Luis Obispo County.
The county opened a mile-long portion through the Avila Valley, named for Land Conservancy pioneer and Avila resident Bob Jones, in December 1996. County staff is close to an agreement with private property owners to allow public access the rest of the way to the beach through San Luis Bay Estates, said Jan Di Leo, county parks planner.
Now, the missing link is the approximately four-mile stretch between Ontario Road in the Avila Valley and a historic barn on South Higuera Street.
“This corridor right here, from Pismo to San Luis, is really, from the Land Conservancy’s point of view ... one of the most important open-space areas in the county,” said Ray Belknap, the organization’s director.
“It is a community separator to prevent the communities from coming together.”
Belknap and DeVincenzo believe that a bicycle path along that route, coupled with small parks along the way, could play an important role in preserving the agricultural and open land just south of San Luis Obispo.
The Land Conservancy is restoring the Octagon Barn on South Higuera at the southern edge of city limits and considers that an ideal starting point for the greenway.
While the Land Conservancy negotiates with property owners, the county is preparing to conduct an environmental study on the project and begin applying for grants to pay for it, Di Leo said.
DeVincenzo is more than just a proponent of the path project. He has spent the past 20 years patiently buying large chunks of land as they became available with the goal of controlling the route of the path so the way could be paved for it to be acquired by the county for recreation.
“The City to the Sea Greenway would be to the county of San Luis what the Mission Mall is to the city of San Luis,” DeVincenzo says.
“I would like this valley to be kind of like an open space corridor that separates San Luis Obispo from the ocean, but has a (cyclist or pedestrian) access to the ocean. It needs to be preserved, as I see it, along the freeway.”
DeVincenzo, a wiry man with thick gray hair and unassuming mannerisms, readily acknowledges that he is a businessman as well as a visionary. As he has acquired property, he has subdivided and sold home lots and built a barn-style store that maintains a comfortable profit margin selling produce, baked goods and gifts.
He has planted hundreds of acres of fruits and vegetables, mostly apples.
The 13 home lots alone sold for about $200,000 each, according to records kept by the San Luis Obispo County Assessor’s office. DeVincenzo declines to name revenues or profits for the Avila Valley Barn, situated at the intersection of Avila Beach Drive and Ontario Road, but says the business is firmly in the black.
Also on the horizon is a proposal to build a 130-room hotel and restaurant on the hill directly across from the barn.
A farmer by birth and orthodontist by education, DeVincenzo made a first foray into developing when he and his wife first moved to the county in the 1970s.
With $10,000 in savings, he says, he talked his parents, his mother-in-law and six graduate students he had been teaching in Southern California into contributing. They scraped together $60,000 to buy Islay Hill, 260 acres at the southern end of San Luis Obispo where the city meets Edna Valley.
DeVincenzo had plans for an elaborate housing and community development on that property, but became frustrated with city restrictions and eventually sold it without developing.
“By 1980, what we said is we want a city-to-the-sea corridor along San Luis Creek,” he said.
“The only way we were sure we were going to get it was to buy up all the property that was available.
“With partners Richard and Jaymie Noland and Paul and Dixie Cavigli, DeVincenzo’s Creekside Farms partnership now owns 160 acres on the east side of Highway 101. That property will be pivotal to the greenway, since it would provide much of the remaining right-of-way needed to complete the path.
As compensation for giving up that land, he and his partners would expect to be granted permission to build “one or two” homes on each of the large lots the path would pass through on the east side of Highway 101, he said. The property is currently zoned to allow only agriculture.
The Land Conservancy has less enthusiastic property owners to negotiate with for the rest of the needed right-of-way. While DeVincenzo and his partners own more than a mile of the route, that accounts for only about a third of the distance between the current trail in Avila Valley and the Octagon Barn.
There are multiple owners along its course to both the south and north of his holdings.
“Each section of this trail may not be available at the same time,” Belknap said. “We just find a way to live with detours until they can get it pieced together.”
DeVincenzo will be the first to say the vision for the bike path is long-range.
“I don’t think it’s very important right now because there’s plenty of open space around,” he says.
“Let us suppose that in 50 years the city of San Luis Obispo is at 150,000 people. Then open spaces become more valuable. And linear parks for travel and movement become a gem.”
