Pro-Growth County Planner Schreiber Unmoved by Criticism

When Betsy Schreiber moved to her hillside home here 13 years ago, the view from her backyard included nearly all of Green Valley, which was then a peaceful and undeveloped collection of rolling hills and meadows stretching from Encinitas north to Carlsbad.

Today, Schreiber gazes out and sees auto dealers, apartment complexes, shopping centers and an intersection often described as one of the most poorly planned in San Diego County.

But where others see only clutter, Schreiber, a county planning commissioner since 1979, sees progress.

“It’s beautiful at night,” she says. “All the lights are wonderful.”

Schreiber, who began in politics a decade ago with a successful fight to prevent a zoning change on her mother’s property, is now recognized widely as the county planning commissioner best versed in the complicated maze of laws and regulations that govern land use. Armed with an excellent memory and an almost block-by-block familiarity with coastal North County, Schreiber has won the respect of fellow commissioners and is a friend and confidant of Supervisor Paul Eckert, who appointed her.

In San Dieguito--the string of unincorporated communities along the coast between Del Mar and Carlsbad--Schreiber stands out as a consistent advocate for development at a time when the area’s most vocal activists are calling for a slower pace of growth.

The level of disenchantment with county rule in San Dieguito is such that efforts to incorporate Solana Beach and a larger area centered in Encinitas are expected to be on the ballot in June. The county’s most visible role in San Dieguito is in land use, and Schreiber, despite her protestations, has come with Eckert to be credited--and blamed--for the way the community has evolved.

“Land use is, in the eyes of the community leaders, somewhere between 80% and 95% the reason for this push for incorporation,” said Bob Bonde, chairman of the North Coast Incorporation Coalition. “Sure, services are important, people can moan and groan, but you wouldn’t have the uproar if not for land use. And that falls right in her lap.

“I think Schreiber’s actions have been a discredit to the entire North County area. She’s dedicated to her cause--and to the developers’ rights to do whatever they want to do with their property, regardless of what it does to the community. It appears as though the developer is always right as far as Betsy Schreiber is concerned.”

Marjorie Gaines, a former member of the San Dieguito planning group who is Schreiber’s harshest critic, said the 44-year-old planning commissioner has been “an absolute disaster” for North County.

“She has pushed increased densities on areas that will totally change the character of those areas and will grossly overload the traffic systems, not just traffic, but public facilities, schools, everything,” Gaines said. “She has taken up the banner of what she calls property rights but what is really development rights. Not all property owners are developers. What she has done has benefited developers in the community and not the people who own their property and intend to live on their property.”

Gerald Steel, chairman of the local planning group, said Schreiber fails when it comes to the kind of creative planning that he believes could help the community absorb its inevitable growth.

“Planning is resolving issues, creating an environment that is pleasant to live and work in,” Steel said. “That’s not what the planning commission, particularly not what Betsy Schreiber strives to do. She strives to approve and encourage development and is not sensitive to the price communities have to pay for that development.”

Schreiber contends that her job as a planning commissioner does not include creating a vision for the future of her community. She believes that role belongs to the county Board of Supervisors.

“The board sets policy, and I am an independent hearing body that hears these policies and evaluates them with the public at the same time,” Schreiber said. “I follow the state law, I follow the rules and regulations, but . . . the planning commission’s job is not long-range policy setting. Anybody who thinks it is is crazy. That’s just not the role the state laws have defined for us.”

If vision is not Schreiber’s strong suit, those who have worked alongside her on the commission say they respect her knowledge of the law and of San Dieguito. They say her critics in the community have lost their credibility because they refuse to compromise.

Stanwood Johnson, who served on the commission for four years and is now an attorney in private practice, said he marvels at the precision of Schreiber’s memory. He recalls the time an opponent of a project came before the board and complained that the developer was an absentee landowner with no interest in the community.

“Betsy shot right back that the owner of the property graduated from San Dieguito high school in 1955,” Johnson said. “I swear she knows every single parcel of land there. She knows the owner of it. She knows the history of it. And she knows what is the most desirable use of that property.

“It’s my opinion that, at least when I was on the commission, when it came to the issues of San Dieguito she was the single most- important person in the whole land use process,” said Johnson, whose term ended early this year.

Alan Ziegaus, chairman of the commission and a moderate on development issues, said he sides with Schreiber when it comes to her ongoing battle with the San Dieguito planning group.

“A lot of the people who come down from San Dieguito are simply people who want to pull up the drawbridge,” Ziegaus said. “They have their home, their market, their stake in a fine community. They don’t want to see anybody else there. I think that, beneath their facade, what they really want to do is stop further development.”

Greg Garratt, an attorney with Peterson, Thelan and Price who often represents San Dieguito developers, said Schreiber is not the knee-jerk, pro-development vote her critics make her out to be.

On one project with which he was involved, Garratt said, Schreiber opposed rezoning for an apartment complex on Encinitas Boulevard before she was persuaded by fellow commissioners to vote for the proposal. On another, she led the effort to defeat a proposed mini-warehouse facility near Interstate 5 in Leucadia because she feared it would create traffic problems for the neighborhood.

“There are a lot of people in the San Dieguito area active in planning who feel too much development is going on and oppose a lot of it,” Garratt said. “She is seen as someone who doesn’t support them a lot of the time and, for that reason, is seen as pro-development on everything. I don’t think the facts bear that out. I don’t think she is by any means a rubber stamp for developers.”

Despite her grasp of the issues, Schreiber is known to lose control of her emotions. On controversial matters she often tries to bowl over with bluster those she can’t convince with the facts. Even her usual allies say Schreiber is not a good loser.

Phil Pryde, who served six years on the commission and often clashed with Schreiber, described her as a “strong personality” who responds to strength.

“She respects people who will stand up to her, who will give and take and not back off,” Pryde said. “If she senses you’re being intimidated, she’ll come on even stronger.”

Ziegaus said Schreiber’s criticism can be “biting and caustic” and that she will sometimes resort to poking fun at him for his views when they disagree.

Johnson, who was Schreiber’s philosophical soul-mate on the commission, said that once after they disagreed on an issue, “Betsy got so mad she couldn’t speak to me.”

“She gets mad only because she is so intensely committed to her own philosophy and she can’t understand why someone else couldn’t agree with that philosophy or see the facts she sees so clearly,” Johnson said. “I knew she’d get mad. I knew she’d get mad at me. But you say OK, she’ll be mad, but then after a while she won’t be mad anymore.”

Schreiber says her temper and tenaciousness helped get her into land-use politics 11 years ago. Attending a meeting at a local junior high school, Schreiber learned that the county planned to “down-zone” her mother’s Leucadia property from 14 units per acre to 2.9 units per acre.

Schreiber, who moved with her mother to a home on the small parcel of land in 1949 and has lived in the San Dieguito area virtually ever since, was incensed. She began to educate herself on land-use law and carried petitions to rally neighbors in support of her cause.

She went before the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors to fight the change, and when local slow-growth activists refused to compromise, Schreiber took them on and eventually won increased zoning on more than 200 coastal parcels.

By that time, Schreiber was fully involved in the battle over the future of San Dieguito. The mother of two girls, ages 9 and 16, Schreiber has been involved in local politics since she registered to vote as a Republican the day she turned 21, but never had she jumped into an issue with as much enthusiasm as she showed for land use. In 1977, Schreiber won a seat on the San Dieguito planning group--the only pro-growth advocate on a board otherwise filled by a slate of 14 members of the “Slow-Growth Alliance.”

The next year, after her first-choice candidate in the primary race for county supervisor failed to qualify for the runoff, Schreiber called the then-political unknown Paul Eckert and offered to aid his campaign. She ran his San Dieguito office and was appointed by Eckert to the Planning Commission shortly after he took office in 1979.

The two have since become close allies in the struggle for the rights of developers. They are also friends, and with their spouses they spent a month in Europe together earlier this year. Schreiber’s husband, Fred, is chairman of Eckert’s San Dieguito campaign committee for the supervisor’s bid for a third term. Betsy Schreiber, whose current term on the commission will end in 1987, employs the same aggressive tactics on the commission as those used by Eckert on the Board of Supervisors.

In contrast to her reputation as a bully on the commission dais, though, Schreiber is much less abrupt in a personal setting. When two door-to-door evangelists interrupted an interview at her home last week, Schreiber stood in the foyer and listened patiently to their speech for several minutes without cutting them off, even though as a Catholic she had no interest in their message.

In the same interview, Schreiber revealed that she does not take lightly the constant criticism leveled at her in her home town, particularly the oft-whispered charge that she somehow uses her position to enhance her own wealth or that of her friends.

Schreiber has accumulated property since she joined the Planning Commission. On her statement of economic interests upon assuming office in 1979, Schreiber listed only one investment and an interest in one piece of property in Arizona--each worth less than $10,000. On her most recent statement, filed in March, Schreiber listed interests in two pieces of property, one worth less than $10,000 and the other worth between $10,000 and $100,000. She also listed an interest worth more than $100,000 in a property holding partnership.

In an interview, Fred Schreiber, who sells real estate in his spare time, said he is less active in that business now than he was when his wife joined the commission. But the value of each deal--particularly two projects in which he helped convert mobile-home parks to condominiums--has climbed dramatically.

Both Fred and Betsy Schreiber contend that they are careful to not mix business and politics. A detailed review by The Times of Schreiber’s property records, her business affairs and hundreds of her planning commission votes shows she apparently has never voted on an item on which she had a conflict of interest.

“I’ve always worked for what I think is the best interest of the community,” Schreiber said, her voice cracking and a tear welling in her eye. “It’s very tough when people blatantly out-and-out lie and take pot shots at you without even knowing the nature of the beast, and for people to accept that.”

Then Schreiber asked that her concession that she is hurt by the criticism not be printed.

“I’m really very soft-hearted, but I don’t let it get in the way of my business,” she said. “I don’t want to look vulnerable.”