San Diego Measure Would Put Growth Decisions to Voters

Concern for the environment has long been a potent political issue in this oceanside community of clean air and green inner-city canyons, and on Nov. 5, voters will be asked to approve the most far-reaching measure ever proposed here for controlling urban growth.

The initiative, sponsored by a coalition of environmentalists, would wrest control of crucial development decisions from the City Council and throw them open to citywide votes.

San Diego is by far the largest city in the state--and perhaps the nation--to consider a measure that would allow voters to seize power from their elected representatives and determine for themselves the fate of certain development projects, such as homes and industrial parks. If it passes, the initiative will work a fundamental change not only in how the city grows but in how it governs itself, political and land-use experts say.

Proposal Called Radical

Opponents characterize the proposal as a radical and dangerous departure from representative government.

“It’s vigilante politics,” said Sam Popkin, a UC San Diego political science professor and critic of the initiative. “They are going to tar and feather the City Council because these people (council members) had to balance the interests of lots of groups and lots of voters. They are going to punish the City Council. . . .”

Supporters of the measure, called Proposition A on the local ballot, admit it is a drastic step, but they say it is needed to check the influence of big-money developers over the nine-member City Council, which in recent years has four times departed from the city’s long-range General Plan to open pristine areas to urban development.

“All you’ve got to do is get five votes (on the City Council), and you can damn well do what you want in this city. . . ,” Jay Powell, one of the initiative’s authors and coordinator of the local Sierra Club chapter, said of developer influence. “All you have to do is look at the campaign contribution lists and you’ll see who is fueling these (City Council) campaigns.

Political battles over the pace and environmental price of urban growth are not new here. Republican Sen. Pete Wilson was first elected mayor in 1971 largely on his pledge to control growth, and Roger Hedgecock’s environmentalist credentials and his pledge to prevent the “Los Angelization” of San Diego helped make him Wilson’s successor in 1983. Today, a popular bumper sticker around town reads, “Welcome to San Diego. Now Go Home.”

Perhaps not surprisingly then, both sides in the current campaign fashion themselves as protectors of the environment.

At stake in the initiative vote is control of 52,273 acres theoretically set aside by the city’s General Plan as an urban reserve to remain untouched by developers’ bulldozers and backhoes until 1995. The jewel of the reserve is more than 19,000 acres cradled in the northern reaches of the city--an inviting virgin landscape of rolling hills now feeling the pinch from burgeoning urban growth.

In a series of decisions in the last 3 1/2 years, the City Council has set aside the General Plan and opened nearly 35% of the 19,000 acres for immediate development. The first decision was a controversial vote in March, 1982, that opened up the reserve for Fairbanks Country Club, an exclusive, 735-acre residential development and golf course that was the setting for the long-distance equestrian event in the 1984 Olympics.

The vote that most angered growth-control advocates, however, was an emotional 5-4 decision by the council in September, 1984, that gave preliminary approval to the 5,100-acre La Jolla Valley development, which includes a Christian university, industrial park and eventually, its developers hope, 15,000 to 25,000 homes.

Decision Considered Crucial

To those already concerned about what stepped-up urban growth could do to the city’s air and water quality, relatively unclogged freeways and the school system, the decision on La Jolla Valley was crucial. To them, it meant destruction of the integrity of the urban reserve.

Immediately after the vote, slow-growth advocates drafted their initiative. It would repeal the La Jolla Valley decision and would require majority approval by San Diego voters of any future development in the urban reserve.

One expert terms it the equivalent of calling a series of “town hall meetings.”

“You certainly don’t get everybody from San Diego inside some stadium and discuss issues,” said David Brower, associate director for the Center for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But what you do do is move the decision making. You change the decision-making body from a representative group . . . back to the electorate.”

David Magleby, a political scientist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said the San Diego measure is indicative of an “explosion” of such local initiatives that, as offspring of a growing suspicion of government among voters, he finds troubling.

‘An Immobilized Government’

“You can imagine what politics would be like, in San Diego or anywhere, if all other active groups in policy areas--education, budgetary, tax groups--were able to enact that kind of requirement” for popular votes on crucial issues, he said. “It would be a very crowded ballot, and you would have an immobilized government, a government that is unable to act.”

Sponsors of Proposition A collected 75,000 signatures--23,000 more than needed--on petitions to qualify the initiative for the ballot.

The initiative’s backers have been overwhelmed by the opposition when it comes to fund raising. While the pro-initiative camp had raised $42,123 as of Oct. 19, the opposition collected $307,211, the great majority from developers. Opponents hope to raise $725,000 by the end of the campaign.