Slow-Growth Initiative : Carlsbad Movement to Curb Pace of Building Gains Momentum

When Jeannette Ike arrived here back in 1949, Carlsbad was a sleepy little town, a patchwork of citrus groves and flower fields linked by dusty farm roads. The population was 1,000, give or take a few.

Back then, folks with cars cruised easily through the streets of the coastal village. There were no traffic lights and few stop signs. The nearest traffic jam was several decades away.

Today when the elderly Ike ventures out for a drive it often takes upwards of 15 minutes to journey the four short blocks from her home to the closest freeway on-ramp.

She has seen other changes. There are long lines everywhere--the bank, the service station, the grocery store--as Carlsbad’s 50,000 residents bustle about town. Stucco condominiums have sprouted on the open fields that once bordered her home.

“The whole place is so changed,” said Ike, a retiree who once owned an electronic appliances store with her husband in Tulare. “Carlsbad isn’t the nice quiet, little town I appreciated. I think we need to grow but not so fast.”

That sort of sentiment is becoming commonplace today. As building has boomed and Carlsbad’s population has soared, many residents have grown disenchanted with the city’s maturation and are determined to steer a new course.

These critics, both longtime homeowners like Ike and more recent arrivals, say that unharnessed growth is threatening Carlsbad’s small-town appeal and straining the city’s ability to provide needed services--police protection, roads and parks.

While residents troubled by the pace of growth here once merely grumbled to themselves, they have banded together in recent months to form a ballooning coalition that has caught the attention of City Hall.

Topping their agenda is a controversial ballot initiative--expected to go before voters in November--that would put an annual cap on the number of homes built in Carlsbad over the next decade. Backers say the initiative aims to put the brakes on growth, enabling the city’s overburdened public services to catch up with demand.

More generally, the slow-growth forces say their chorus of protest has begun to influence the City Council. Elected officials now take a more critical look at the toll a proposed project will take on the city’s resources, slow-growth advocates contend.

Moreover, the council has taken steps to initiate programs to ease the pace of growth, approving policies that have reduced densities and put major developments on hold while city officials evaluate Carlsbad’s future.

“What we’re seeing in Carlsbad is just an overwhelming response from citizens that enough is enough,” said Councilman Mark Pettine, who was elected in November, 1984, on a slow-growth platform. “I think the rank-and-file citizen has gotten fed up with what he has seen.”

Few city officials deny that Carlsbad is feeling growing pains. Still, many leaders maintain that development is imperative to finance construction of roads, sewer systems and other facilities used by all citizens. Without the money that development pumps into city coffers, Carlsbad could be left fiscally high and dry, unable to meet the needs of even its existing population, they worry.

“If our citizens are asking for parks and libraries and traffic signals and improved roads, then we do have to go forward,” Mayor Mary Casler said. “If they’re content with the facilities we have now, and they have told us they aren’t, we don’t have to go forward.”

The mayor and other officials also argue that it is unfair for the city to restrict a landowner’s ability to build on his property.

“Certainly someone has the right to develop their land under the free enterprise system,” said Councilman Richard Chick, who slow-growth proponents view as the arch-enemy. “When we start removing those rights, we’re undermining our basic system of government.”

Not surprisingly, developers planning projects in Carlsbad agree. D.L. Clemens, West Coast representative for a development firm owned by the billionaire Hunt brothers of Texas, warned that the city is affected by traffic and other effects of growth in neighboring areas and would be powerless to address the problems should development fees suddenly dwindle.

“Certainly there’s no way you can construct walls around Carlsbad and say you’re going to stop time for 10 years,” said Clemens, whose company plans a sprawling resort and residential community on the north shore of Batiquitos Lagoon. “That’s an absolutely nonsensical approach to the real world. Unless you put a toll gate on I-5, there’s no way to prohibit growth in a place like Carlsbad.”

The furor over development is something new for Carlsbad. Incorporated in 1952, the city has only recently felt the discomfort associated with rapid growth.

A decade ago, the city’s population stood at 22,000--less than half what it is today. But in recent years developers have flooded the area, lured by the city’s inviting mix of terrain--from miles of beachfront to grassy, gently rolling hills--and hospitable city government.

City officials point to the rise in the number of building permits they issue as evidence of Carlsbad’s growing popularity in the development community. In 1975, 335 building permits were granted; last year, developers obtained about 2,400 permits.

For a long time, the builders’ arrival went largely unnoticed. While developers have planned projects at a brisk pace, a sluggish economy kept construction to a minimum. In addition, limited capacity at the city’s major sewer plant forced the council to restrict building in the late 1970s.

But with the recent nationwide economic resurgence, builders have emerged in force. Seemingly overnight, residents began noticing fleets of bulldozers grading wide swaths of land in all corners of the city.

Few slow-growth advocates quarrel with the quality of development coming to Carlsbad. Rather, it’s the volume and rapid rate of development that concerns them.

“Before, we had a view of nice rolling hills,” said Nelson Aldrich, a retiree and co-chairman of Concerned Citizens, one of two groups sponsoring the growth initiative. “Now we’ve got a view of bulldozers, graders and various and sundry earth-moving equipment. We’re being surrounded by bumper-to-bumper houses.”

Worried that the City Council was ignoring the effects the construction was having on their community, residents uneasy about the changes decided to take a stand.

Forming a loose-knit coalition, Aldrich and other slow-growth advocates backed a slate of candidates for the November, 1984, municipal election. The effort met with limited success: Pettine was the only one of four candidates fielded by the group to win election to the council.

Nonetheless, it was a pivotal event. Although slow-growth Councilman Claude (Buddy) Lewis had been waging the battle since 1970, Aldrich and others say he was little more than “a voice in the wilderness” until Pettine arrived.

“All of a sudden we were one vote away from significant change,” said Anne Mauch, recalling the importance of Pettine’s victory.

Almost overnight, growth had become a prominent issue. In the months after the election, the council reacted by forming a 25-person citizens’ panel to study the city’s 10-year-old general plan, the chief blueprint governing development in Carlsbad.

Although slow-growth proponents complain the group was dominated by residents and business leaders sympathetic to developers, the committee produced a 200-page report recommending a series of changes, among them that future housing be less dense and more open space be provided.

In July, 1985, the council agreed to many of the ideas but balked at a proposal pushed by Pettine and Lewis for a growth management program which would require builders to file detailed plans outlining when and how they would provide public facilities such as roads, sewers and parks. As Pettine saw it, the growth management program would act to slow growth, serving as a financial disincentive to runaway development.

With the defeat of that plan, Aldrich and others decided it was time to push for a ballot initiative to put a cap on housing construction.

The ballot measure, similar to one approved by San Clemente voters in February, proposes that 1,000 residential dwelling units be built in the city during 1987, 750 units in 1988 and 500 each year after that through 1996. At that time, the measure would appear again on the ballot, giving residents the option of extending it for another five years.

More than 40 cities and two counties in the state have passed growth controlling initiatives since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal challenging a law limiting construction in Petaluma, a Northern California city.

As Aldrich tells it, the slow-growth proposal has been heartily welcomed by Carlsbad residents, many of them refugees from crowded Los Angeles and Orange counties.

“Of the people we’ve approached, 90% are signing the petition,” Aldrich said. “At some houses, they grab it out of your hands they’re so eager to sign it.”

So far, the coalition claims it has gathered 4,000 signatures, well above the estimated 1,900 it will need to qualify for the ballot. The coalition plans to submit the signatures to the city clerk within a month.

On another front, residents have begun flocking to City Hall in growing numbers to complain about housing projects planned near their neighborhoods. In particular, homeowners from La Costa began attending council meetings to lodge opposition to a slew of condominium projects planned for the posh enclave on Carlsbad’s southern flank.

Faced with the mounting protests and the looming slow-growth initiative, the council agreed in December to go forward with the growth management plan endorsed by councilmen Pettine and Lewis. A month later, the council took an additional step: despite protests by the development community, the council enacted a six-month moratorium on building permits to give the city planning staff time to draft the program.

Initially, the growth management proposal attracted the support of many slow-growth advocates. Now, however, they have turned against the plan, charging that city officials have gutted it.

“In order to make it fly, the council had to get the support of the development community,” said Tom Smith, co-chairman of Concerned Citizens. “They had to make concessions. And now it’s just a blueprint for further avalanche development.”

Likewise, Pettine has grown wary. And he warns that if, indeed, his council colleagues dilute the growth management program, the far-stricter citizens’ initiative will pass in a landslide.

“If the council guts the plan and goes back to business as usual, then passage of the initiative will be a foregone conclusion,” Pettine said.

To say the least, the growth initiative has developers with land in Carlsbad more than a little uneasy. The builders, many of whom have sunk thousands of dollars into preparations for their developments, say that the construction cap would force major changes or kill their projects altogether.

Clemens, for example, said passage of the ballot measure would force his Dallas-based firm to abandon plans for about 4,500 homes now planned for the company’s South Carlsbad development. Officials would proceed only with the country club segment, he said.

Many residents say such a scenario wouldn’t bother them a bit.

“Carlsbad has gotten a national reputation as a developer’s heaven,” said Mauch, one of the council’s harshest critics. “The character of the city is being changed. We see Carlsbad turning into a built-out, urbanized, high-stressed area. And we don’t want it.”

‘What we’re seeing in Carlsbad is just an overwhelming response from citizens that enough is enough.’

Mark Pettine

Carlsbad councilman