Bill Horn, who served on the county Board of Supervisors for 24 years before dedicating the last decade of his life to building and supporting a school in Uganda, died Friday in Escondido, surrounded by family. He was 83.
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Inland North County voters first elected Horn to the Board of Supervisors in 1994, returning him to the dais for six consecutive terms before term limits ended his run in 2019.
Despite periods when he found himself under fire, especially from environmental groups who objected to his pro-development bent, voters in his district repeatedly supported their champion from Valley Center.
Born on Feb. 18, 1943, William George Horn III graduated from Mission Bay High School, earning a degree from San Diego State University before the draft sent him to Vietnam. He was in the Marine Corps for four years, serving as a captain and earning a Purple Heart.
He worked as a supermarket manager, insurance salesman and real estate broker, and joined the Escondido school board in 1989. Appointed to the position to fill a vacancy, he faced a recall after refusing to ban books that some considered inappropriate, including Arthur Miller’s classic “Death of a Salesman.”
Not enough signatures were gathered for a recall, but a petition drive to nullify his appointment led to a special election, which he won handily, eventually becoming board president.
While that victory presaged a long string of wins at the county level, it did not predict a career in national politics. Horn’s U.S. Senate bid against Dianne Feinstein in 2000 failed.
He had decided to run for supervisor after dealing with an issue in his own backyard. The county had wanted to build a trail through his citrus and avocado ranch in Valley Center. The proposal made him so mad, he recalled in 2005, that speaking against it left him “shaking at the podium.”
The unassailability of property rights was a constant theme in his work, and that focus started early. Horn once told a reporter he bought his first house at the age of 18.
While many saw a gruff exterior, especially when Horn clashed with his colleagues or others coming before the supervisors on controversial agenda items, Dustin Steiner, who served as his chief of staff for a decade, said Sunday that Horn had surprising depths.
Although he could be combative in the political arena, he was much less so in private. Once, Steiner recalled, he was on a flight with Horn to Washington for a lobbying trip and noticed he was reading a book from right to left instead of left to right. It turned out the boss was reading a book in Hebrew.
“I found out that he could read, write and speak Hebrew,” Steiner said. “When he became a Christian, he wanted to read the Bible and in Hebrew, so he went to a temple in Orange County, and they said ‘we’ll teach you, but you have got to come to class.’
“It’s not something he ever talked about, but he did have many layers.”
Another that came to the fore after his departure from the Board of Supervisors was a fascination with building a school in Uganda.
Geoff Horn said after his father met a missionary visiting friends in San Diego County, he became fascinated with the project. He eventually spent $14,000 to buy 10 acres of land.
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Donations of $5,000 per month have gradually built the Emmaus Schools, which now have a nursery and primary and secondary schools with 1,200 students and 75 staff.
Geoff Horn said his father felt called to build the project, which he visited eight times. What started as a blue-sky leap of faith is now supported by its own nongovernmental organization, Omuto Uganda.
“My dad had a stroke in 2022, and his motivation to rehab was to be able to be healthy enough so he could travel back to Africa one more time, which we did in the spring of 2023,” Geoff Horn said. “He felt God had put it on his heart to help, and it has just become something that is way bigger than us.”
Former county Supervisor Greg Cox, who left office two years after Horn, said that the Uganda work was another quiet deed that took those who knew him somewhat by surprise. He said he learned about the project after running into Horn as he was renewing his passport.
“He was getting his passport because he was doing just tremendous things in Uganda,” Cox said. “He never said anything to anybody about that.”
Horn’s decades in the San Diego political spotlight were often turbulent.
His website once listed the Silver Star among his honors, by mistake, he said, and he was quoted about gay people in the military as saying: “I want the people defending me to be the best there is. I don’t want any other ancillary kind of problems, whether or not they use their pinky finger.”
Those comments, and significant cost-cutting during his time on the board, brought strong criticism, especially a remark he once made about a proposal to increase supervisor salaries by $28,000. “It is true that we are elected,” Horn said, “but nobody who got elected took a vow of poverty. We’re not Franciscans.”
Fellow Supervisor Dianne Jacob, who served with Horn for most of his term, said that the public simply could not understand what it was like in the early 1990s when the supervisors were faced with a budget crisis connected to a boondoggle project that tried to generate electricity by burning trash.
In recent years, the county’s obsession with building solid, some have said overly large, reserve funds has come under criticism. But that’s easy to say, Jacob noted, if you’re not the one tasked with staving off bankruptcy for an entire county with millions of residents.
“Bill was a staunch ally in bringing us from the brink of bankruptcy to fiscal stability and then to a AAA credit rating,” Jacob said. “That enabled us to build all of those parks and libraries and trails and all of the amenities that really help with the quality of life that we enjoy in San Diego.”
He was preceded in death by his parents, William Horn Jr. and Elizabeth (Chance Pardue) Horn.
He is survived by his wife, Kathleen Horn, his sister, Alyce Hattan, his daughters, Julie Romero and Angela Horn, his son, Geoff, and eight grandchildren.
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