San Clemente : Group Seeks Ballot Item to Limit New Homes

A group of homeowners, hoping to limit new home building to 500 units yearly in backcountry areas, submitted initiative petitions with 3,827 signatures Friday to the city clerk.

The group, named San Clementeans for Controlled Growth, only needed 2,602 signatures, 15% of the city’s 17,000 registered voters, to qualify the initiative for a special election.

The validity of the signatures will be checked by the Orange County registrar of voters for duplication, names of people not registered to vote and other possible discrepancies, a process expected to take about 10 days.

If the measure qualifies for the ballot, a spokesman for the group said, a special election could be held in January or February.

Had the group wanted to wait until November, 1986, when the city’s next regular election takes place, signatures from only 10% of the city’s electorate would have been required to place the initiative on the ballot.

“We didn’t want to wait that long, not with the development that’s (already) taken place,” said Brian Rice, a San Clemente dentist and homeowner and co-author of the growth control initiative.

The group, which consists of about 15 people, “is not anti-growth or no-growth,” said Rice, who has lived in San Clemente since 1974. “It’s for controlled growth. And right now we have a downtown Anaheim situation developing. Most of us didn’t come down here to live with this type of growth situation.”

Rice said the petition drive began at the end of August and seeks to limit to 500 the number of residential building permits the city can issue each year.

He cited forecasts that San Clemente will double in population by the turn of the century and said the city expects 15,000 new residential units by then.

“We don’t think the town has the facilities to maintain this type of growth rate,” Rice said. “And, obviously, a lot of people agree with us.”

City Manager Jim Hendrickson does not.

“The thrust (of the initiative) is that the city has not exercised sufficient controls over growth and that this petition will rectify this,” Hendrickson said Friday. “My feeling is the city has growth management policies in effect that sufficiently address growth (concerns).”