Developer Smackdown in San Diego

"It's not every day that one real-estate developer bankrolls a public offensive against another real-estate developer, but that's what's going on in Mission Valley, where two San Diego-based firms are engaged in a high-stakes battle over 230 acres of land north of Friars Road.

For more than six years, Sudberry Properties has been working on an ambitious plan to develop land currently used for rock mining into a new community called Quarry Falls."

"But seemingly out of nowhere, in early 2007, came the H.G. Fenton Company, long a major player in the Mission Valley real-estate game, with complaints about traffic.

The conversation started with a voicemail left on a Sudberry telephone and turned into face-to-face talks, said Marco Sessa, Sudberry's vice president for development.

"We thought we were at a good place," Sessa said. But then nine months later, the day before Sudberry was scheduled to make a presentation in front of the Mission Valley Unified Planning Committee's Design Advisory Board, Fenton "showed up with consultants, with PR guys, attorneys-you name it-coming after us. We've been at odds ever since.""