‘Ballot-Box Planning’ : Growth Policy: Voters Putting the Brakes On

Ed Skoog bristles whenever he thinks about the way traffic--a noose around the neck of most suburban towns--had finally begun to choke off the easygoing ambiance that first drew him to this affluent San Francisco suburb.

“We had reached a point where certain intersections . . . had reached the ‘E level’--that is a traffic engineer term for ‘not moving,’ ” said Skoog, an engineer for General Electric Co. “We felt city officials were not doing anything about it, so we thought we’d put their feet to the fire.”

Skoog and some of his neighbors put the city’s feet to the fire by putting the city’s foot on the brake: They authored a successful local initiative last November banning new office construction until traffic flow improves--by luck or by design--at seven key intersections in the congested downtown district. In the same election, Skoog was elected to the City Council.

‘Ballot-Box Planning’

This is but one example of “ballot-box planning,” a growing phenomenon in city planning, a trend born of grass-roots political groups concerned about the quality of life and local politicians fearful of recall elections and lawsuits.

With increasing frequency in California, zoning and other planning laws are being written and adopted not by people trained in the field, but by no-growth advocates--and, with less success, by real estate special interests.

In a study issued by the University of California’s Institute of Governmental Studies, researcher Larry Orman recently concluded that the ballot box “will increasingly determine California land-use decisions in years to come.”

The number of such measures already approved, and the prospect of even more, already has influenced land-use debates and policy decisions, concluded Orman, a visiting lecturer at the university’s Berkeley campus and executive director of People for Open Space, a San Francisco nonprofit research group.

In the decade since a state Supreme Court ruling in a San Diego case opened the initiative process to include planning issues, more than 50 local land-use issues have been put before voters throughout the state--45 in Northern California alone.

New Measures Considered

New measures are currently being considered in two San Francisco suburbs: Pleasant Hill and Moraga. A fourth community, Alamo, is agitating for incorporation so that it, too, can adopt its own growth-control ordinances.

And in Los Angeles, Councilmen Marvin Braude and Zev Yaroslavsky on Feb. 26 launched an initiative campaign to place on the ballot a measure that, if approved by voters, would drastically reduce density of future commercial building in most parts of the city.

The use of these usually restrictive ballot measures reflects an increasing backlash against high rates of commercial office development, particularly in small towns and suburbs. It is similar to the growth-control efforts aimed at housing tracts in the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

Indeed, suburban office growth and its attendant drawbacks have emerged as a hot issue in dozens of communities across the country, from Princeton, N.J., and Greenwich, Conn., to Phoenix and San Diego.

The phenomenon is particularly acute in the San Francisco area, where many firms have moved ancillary operations--billing and accounting, for example--out of the central city’s crushing high-rent district. (However, most of these companies are keeping top managers in prestigious downtown skyscrapers.)

The move to the suburbs has created tremendous booms in what were recently bedroom communities--or even farm towns. Some Alameda County towns such as Dublin, Livermore and Pleasanton have seen office space expand by 80% in the last five years, or more than four times the rate of San Francisco’s brisk growth.

Walnut Creek experienced office-space growth of more than 40% in that time, while nearby Concord--aiming to become the credit-card data-processing capital of California--grew by more than 50%. Despite the concern over high-rise growth in Concord, however, voters last week rejected by a wide margin an initiative that would have capped all new construction downtown at four stories.

The reaction to this boom in suburban development--which offers not only lower costs, but also such benefits as the ability to build pleasant low- or medium-rise campus-like facilities--varies from region to region.

The trend in California, with its 75-year history of “direct democracy,” has in many cases been to bypass local governments and clamp on controls with initiatives or referendums.

Such measures, while most popular in suburbs and small towns, have appeared in major cities as well. In San Francisco, for example, voters have considered three growth-control proposals, in 1979, 1983 and 1984. A fourth plan is being drafted for the November ballot.

Although the most severe measures were not approved, growth control clearly was gaining favor with San Francisco voters, prompting the city’s Board of Supervisors to adopt its own innovative Downtown Plan last year. New York City reportedly is eyeing the Downtown Plan as part of its own development debate.

Last November, San Diego residents also approved a landmark measure, voting to restrict for the next 10 years City Council zoning authority over more than 52,000 acres of undeveloped agricultural land on the city’s northern fringe.

The measure gives voters an opportunity to veto any City Council decision allowing development in designated “future urbanizing areas.” If the council grants a zoning change there, a citywide election must be held to let voters concur.

Without voter approval, such land must remain as is--zoned for low-density development, at most. Supporters acknowledge that the initiative is intended to discourage growth.

Elsewhere in Southern California, ballot-box planning has been used mainly to harness residential development. Redlands, Riverside, Santa Ynez and Thousand Oaks all have adopted restrictive laws in recent years.

And in late February, voters in San Clemente approved an initiative to sharply curtail the pace of growth in the coastal city’s back country, an area of rolling hills east of the heavily traveled San Diego Freeway. The measure drew a surprisingly high voter turnout of 42%.

The growing popularity of ballot-box planning in California is due in large part to the ability of many different interest groups to employ the process to their own advantage.

Conservation activists, for example, have turned to initiatives to sidestep the compromise-oriented legislative process, especially when faced with local governments eager to expand their post-Proposition 13 tax bases by encouraging rapid growth.

Homeowner groups have proffered their own ballot proposals to protect real estate values or preserve the character of residential neighborhoods.

Even developers have backed referendums on their own projects in an effort to settle questions about their popularity--and to lock in an approval revocable only by another vote--before committing large sums of money to construction.

Local officials have used referendums on their own decisions--or decisions they were unable to make--to avoid recall attempts by unhappy voters or lawsuits by frustrated developers.

By far, conservationists and homeowners have backed the majority of ballot measures, however.

Although members of each major interest group have turned to the ballot box to shape land-use decisions, the process is not without critics.

They worry about the inflexibility of initiatives that can only be changed by another vote, the complexity of land-use matters that may be too difficult for laymen to decide, the lack of study and research that go into many ballot measures and the effect of campaign financing on the planning process.

“Some critics argue that law-making ought to be difficult, time-consuming and frustrating--protected by checks and balances,” Orman cautioned in his report. “They see initiatives as being ‘sprung’ with little or no discussion, thus potentially short-changing the public, which deserves a real debate, not just a barrage of polarized campaign publicity, simplistic slogans and receipt of last-minute ‘hit pieces.’ ”

There also is a potential for the unconstitutional “taking” of property--that is, the imposition of restrictions so stringent that property owners are left with no economic use of their land. Growth moratoriums enacted last fall in Corte Madera and Walnut Creek both were challenged in court recently on this point.

Critics also are concerned about the impact such measures will have on the supply of housing. In 1984, the Building Industry Assn. and California Rural Legal Assistance formed an unlikely alliance to support legislation requiring ballot-box planners to furnish environmental impact reports on their proposals.

Because the cost of those reports would have been prohibitive, the bill eventually was killed by state legislators worried about curbing California’s tradition of direct democracy. However, building industry groups reportedly are planning further legislative attempts to curb land-use initiatives.

Despite the concern, Orman said, there have been some very successful ballot measures in the land-use area. In his study of the field, he cited Santa Cruz County’s Measure J, which was approved by voters in June, 1978.

Orman calls the measure “probably the state’s most extensive and effective county growth-management legislation” because of several innovative features. These include a 2% annual ceiling on population growth and the mandate that 15% of all new housing be affordable by people of average or below-average income.

The Santa Cruz initiative was notable too for its simplicity. Excepting its preamble and conclusion, the measure consisted simply of six one-line policy goals. County supervisors were left with the task of implementing them as best they could.

“By keeping the measure exceedingly brief, the board was able to avoid the pitfalls that a detailed policy statement might have encountered,” Orman said in his summary. “Also, by inserting a requirement for an annual determination of a desired growth rate, the board ensured that land-use planning priorities would remain high on the public agenda.”

The process of ballot-box planning, while mushrooming in popularity, is not new. Berkeley residents, for example, used the procedure as long ago as 1927, when they sued the city in a successful attempt to let voters ratify or reject a zoning decision.

However, the courts did not allow initiatives--that is, ideas proposed by citizens rather than government bodies--for more than 40 years. That changed in 1974, when the state Supreme Court decided that it was legal for San Diego to implement a voter-approved limit on building heights in coastal areas.

“The fundamental principle,” Orman said, “is that any legislative land-use decision (for instance, an amendment to a general plan or a zoning action) can be enacted by the initiative process.”

However, certain administrative rulings--use permits, variances and other decisions that affect only a few individuals--still can only legally be made by formal governmental agencies.

The restriction is a small one, experts agree, and it is not likely to stem the popularity of land-use ballot measures. Nor should it, some say.

“Despite acknowledged difficulties,” Orman’s analysis concluded, “ballot measures have clearly emerged as workable and important tools enabling citizens to participate actively in planning the use of their community’s land.”