Battle Rages Over Size of Proposed Center : Mission de Alcala Saviors Forced Into a Double Take

Members of the Committee for the Preservation of Mission San Diego de Alcala were jubilant last month when the city’s Historical Site Board rejected a proposal by the Catholic Diocese to build a multipurpose center on mission ruins.

That triumph, however, may prove to be temporary. The diocese has retained a renowned land-use attorney who is arguing that the board erred in its April 24 decision. In response, the archeologists and historians opposed to building on the ruins have hired a land-use attorney of their own. The two will square off at Wednesday’s Historical Site Board meeting.

“The battle of San Diego Mission rages on,” said Ron Buckley, the Historical Site Board’s secretary. The technical point of this battle is whether the project currently proposed by the diocese is “substantially in conformance” with the plans approved by the board in 1980.

Buckley said the city’s planning staff has found little difference between the revised plans and the original proposal. But at last month’s meeting, the board held that current plans call for a building more than twice as large as the 4,000-square-foot structure studied in a 1980 environmental impact report.

Although architects for the diocese insisted that the discrepancy was the result of an error in the 1980 report, the board said a new environmental review would have to be completed before the “new” project could be approved.

Enter Don Worley, an attorney with a track record for enabling landowners to develop their property despite objections by the Historical Site Board. In 1979, Worley paved the way for owners of the Klauber Mansion, built in 1909, to raze the structure to build an apartment complex. A year later, he did the same thing for the owners of the land containing the old San Diego trolley barn.

Now Worley is representing the diocese, arguing that the discrepancy between the size of the building in the current site plans and the 1980 environmental impact report did not constitute sufficient grounds to deny the proposal for the building.

“(The board) kept repeating over and over again that the applicant had doubled the size of the proposal,” Worley said Monday. “I don’t think they knew that the 4,000-square-foot proposal was not part of the applicant’s proposal.

“The EIR is the city’s document, not the applicant’s document. If it isn’t accurate, it’s the city’s mistake, not the applicant’s.”

Buckley, who was present when the board approved the original project in 1980, agrees.

“I recommended to the board that they find the project to be in conformance with what was approved in 1980,” Buckley said. “The question of 4,000 or 8,000 square feet is not germane.”

However, Bill Schwartz, attorney for the mission preservation committee, claims that the discrepancy between the two building sizes is not just a technicality.

“It’s not like it was a just a typo in the EIR,” Schwartz said. “It wasn’t just the one document that contained the 4,000-square-foot figure. It was in the environmental review process from beginning to end.

“Had the size been 8,000 square feet (in the environmental review documents), some of the people who didn’t come out (at the public hearing) may have done so.” He suggested putting out notices for a new public hearing “with everyone understanding what the size of the building is.”

Worley will ask the board to reconsider its ruling in the matter Wednesday so that construction may proceed at the mission.

But opponents of the project say the board cannot take any action on the diocesan request until next month so that interested parties may prepare their cases.