Saturday evening, September 12, the Sunnyside Saddle Club arena in Rohr Park filled with the usual chaos that opens Bonitafest every year. Horses stood tacked and patient while their riders traded reins for one more photo. Dogs on leashes. A few goats. If tradition held, at least one llama and a potbelly pig or two, waiting for the Sunnyside School Mighty Bulldogs Marching Band to strike up and lead the one-mile Twilight Trail Parade around the Chula Vista Municipal Golf Course to the Bonita Museum and Sunnyside Library complex on Bonita Road.
It was the 54th year this has happened at that exact spot. What most people in that crowd may not have clocked is how close that spot came to not being available at all.
Ten months earlier, a draft master plan for Rohr Park proposed removing the equestrian arena entirely and turning that stretch of the northeast corner into expanded soccer, baseball, and pickleball space. The plan that would have erased Bonitafest's starting line was, for a few weeks, the city's preferred option.
A Draft Plan Nobody in Bonita Saw Coming
The Rohr Park Master Plan process began with community workshops in spring 2025 as part of a routine ten-year infrastructure update for the city's oldest and largest South Bay park, a 60-acre property built on the Sweetwater River flood plain and given to Chula Vista decades ago through the generosity of Fred H. Rohr. Planners ran workshops, pop-up events, and surveys through the year. In November 2025, the city presented what it called its preferred plan, and the preferred plan quietly dropped the equestrian arena.
The Sunnyside Saddle Club had operated that arena for 43 years by the time the draft plan surfaced. Members and neighbors who keep horses in their backyards, one of a handful of remaining pockets in South County where that's still common, showed up in numbers at the following public meetings. The city's own Parks and Recreation Commission did not back staff's recommendation to remove it.
Diana Kelly, a longtime horse owner, put it plainly at a January press conference held right at the arena: "I will be a horse girl till I die."
The Mayor Weighed In, and So Did the Other Side of the City
What happened next moved fast for a municipal planning process. Chula Vista Mayor John McCann showed up at Rohr Park in early January 2026 alongside dozens of equestrians and publicly told city staff he wanted the arena back in the plan. He called it "a highly valued community asset, including the horse arena." Councilmembers Michael Inzunza and Carolina Chavez, whose district includes the park, endorsed keeping it that same evening.
That is not the whole story, and a fair account of Bonita has to include the part that doesn't flatter the outcome. Rohr Park sits in Bonita but belongs to the City of Chula Vista, and not everyone on the council agreed that an unincorporated community's traditions should override a city with its own unmet recreational needs. Councilmember Jose Preciado, whose west Chula Vista district is comparatively short on athletic fields and green space, said it directly: "We are talking about a city of Chula Vista park, not a Bonita park."
Both things are true at once. Bonita residents built and maintained that arena for over four decades. Chula Vista residents outside Bonita pay the taxes that fund the park and have legitimate, unmet demand for soccer and baseball space elsewhere on the property. The master plan fight was never really about horses versus soccer. It was about whose priorities get to define a park that serves a wider area than the neighborhood it sits closest to.
What "Saved" Actually Means as of This Fall
The arena is staying, at least in the current draft. But staying in a draft is not the same as being finished. When the City Council met on April 14, 2026, it approved roughly $250,000 in additional consulting services to carry the master plan into what staff are now calling the CEQA and Golf Course Analysis phase, a formal environmental review required because the plan qualifies as a project under the California Environmental Quality Act.
That review has to happen before any construction plan gets financed. Completion of the whole master plan, originally forecast for winter 2025 into 2026, got pushed back roughly a year once the controversy hit. The city's own community input page confirms the process is still open, with a draft environmental document still to come and a formal public comment period still ahead of it. Residents who want a say in how the northeast corner of the park actually gets built, not just whether the arena survives on paper, still have that window in front of them.
What Bonitafest Week Actually Looks Like This Year
None of the planning uncertainty changed the shape of the festival itself. The 2026 lineup runs across most of September:
- September 5 to 26: "The Story of BonitaFest From the Archives," a companion exhibition at the Bonita Museum and Cultural Center tracing five decades of the event
- September 12, 6 p.m.: The 54th Twilight Trail Parade, starting at the Sunnyside Saddle Club arena in Rohr Park and ending at the museum and library complex on Bonita Road, followed by the Performing Arts Festival and street fair
- September 23 to 26: The Bonitafest Melodrama at Sweetwater Community Church, a musical-comedy tradition built around Sweetwater Valley history and billed as San Diego County's longest-running theatrical production
Anyone headed to the parade this year had the usual pre-show options along Bonita Road. Camellia's Brunch, which took over the old Oceanos space near the Bonita Centre shopping area, does breakfast and lunch through early afternoon. Romesco Mexiterranean Bistro, a few doors down, is known locally for a Tamarind Martini that regulars order before they order food. None of that changed because of a planning dispute at City Hall.
Why the Corral Still Matters on an Ordinary Tuesday
Step outside Bonitafest week and Rohr Park keeps doing what it has always done. The Chula Vista Live Steamers still run their scale-model steam train every second weekend of the month. The dog park still splits into a section for dogs under 20 pounds and a larger fenced area for everyone else. The 3.3-mile loop around the park still draws the same mix of walkers, joggers, and cyclists it always has, and the picnic grounds still fill up on weekends regardless of what the council decides about soccer fields.
That everyday use is exactly why the master plan fight landed the way it did. Rohr Park isn't an abstraction to the people who live near it. It's where a horse owner boards and rides, where a family reserves a pavilion for a birthday, where a regular walker measures their morning by whether the gate to the trail is open yet. When a draft plan proposed converting one specific piece of that daily geography into something else, the response wasn't really about zoning. It was about a place people already use every week losing the one feature that made it theirs specifically, rather than just Chula Vista's.
The CEQA review now underway will eventually produce a document the public gets to read and respond to. Whether the corral looks the same in five years depends on what that document says and how the council votes once it lands. For this September, at least, the arena is still where the Twilight Trail Parade starts, and the tradition that's been running for 54 years didn't have to change its opening scene.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like Bonita actually offers day to day, beyond a median price or a school boundary, this is the kind of thing worth watching. Parks, traditions, and the small civic fights that decide their future say more about a place than a listing sheet ever will. If you'd like a local's read on what's happening in Bonita this year, from the park debates to what a specific property might be worth in this market, the Leo Gonzalez Team is glad to talk it through.
