S.D. Officials Urge Veto of Chacon Bill as Threat to Prop. A.

San Diego officials are pressuring Gov. George Deukmejian to veto a hastily drafted bill they fear would aid developers in a court challenge to Proposition A, the far-reaching anti-growth initiative approved by local voters last November.

But Assemblyman Peter Chacon (D-San Diego) insists that his bill does nothing more than conform state statutes to a May state Supreme Court decision that is already law. He said the city’s opposition is misdirected and “unfortunate.”

“The City of San Diego is unnecessarily alarmed over this bill,” said Chacon, who opposed the growth-control initiative during the campaign last year but says he would never try to circumvent the will of the voters.

Proposition A, considered one of the most stringent growth-control measures ever passed in California, requires voter approval for any development in the 52,000-acre “urban reserve” along the City of San Diego’s northern fringe.

Chacon, who has received heavy contributions from developers over the years, tacked provisions centering on the May Supreme Court statute to an otherwise noncontroversial bill. It passed both houses without any hearings or debate during the last scheduled week of the legislative session.

In the May decision, the court ruled that local voters’ initiatives limiting growth--such as slow-growth ordinances adopted by city councils and county boards of supervisors--must be proven necessary to protect “public welfare.” The ruling also said that local officials must prove, in court challenges, that an anti-growth initiative has no adverse impacts outside the affected city or county’s border. If it did, the measure would be invalidated.

The ruling was a major victory for development interests, who were reeling from a series of losses in communities throughout the state.

San Diego city officials fear the provisions in Chacon’s bill, which were co-authored by Assemblyman Gray Davis (D-Los Angeles)--will have a greater impact than he is admitting. City lawyers say the bill would erase all doubt that the May ruling shifts the major burden of proof regarding the validity of growth initiatives like Proposition A onto its backers.

City officials also say that if the bill is a mere statement of what the Supreme Court has already made the controlling law, they “do not understand the haste” with which it was drafted by Chacon, passed and sent to the governor.

“When we heard about the thing, it was already on the governor’s desk,” complained Sal Giametta, an aide to Mayor Maureen O’Connor who was active in the campaign to pass Proposition A.

Opponents of the measure say they are suspicious of Chacon’s bill mainly because the key provisions surfaced during the waning days of the legislative session, when powerful special interests often try to enact favorable new laws without notice, and with little or no debate.

But city officials, local government lobbyists and environmentalists say they are also suspicious because the Building Industry Assn. (BIA), a key development industry lobbying group, was trying with little success to persuade some legislator to carry a similar bill earlier this year--before the May state Supreme Court ruling on a BIA challenge to a 1981 local initiative in Camarillo limiting condominium development.

BIA lobbyists were unavailable for comment on Chacon’s bill. But Chacon said it was his co-author, Davis--not development industry lobbyists--who persuaded him the law was needed.

“I agreed because I was persuaded that the amendments would simply codify the Supreme Court decision,” Chacon said in an interview.

“Giving the people notice of what the law expects of them, in a clear and concise language, is necessary and proper,” he wrote in a letter sent to Deukmejian Friday to rebut the claims of the bill’s opponents.

Davis, the Democratic candidate for state controller, was not available for comment. But an aide confirmed that the amendments, added to Chacon’s bill late last month, were drafted by Davis. The aide said Donald V. Collin, the BIA’s chief lobbyist in Sacramento, did not even agree to support the measure until Sept. 3, “after the bill had already gone to the governor.”

Records show that developers have contributed heavily to Chacon’s campaigns over the years.

Between 1981 and 1985, Chacon received more than $39,000 from land development interests and more than $53,000 from financial and lending institutions, according to Legi-Tech, a computerized information service.

Most of the money was contributed during years he chaired the traditionally pro-development Assembly Committee on Housing and Community Development. But official campaign finance records filed with the Secretary of State show that developers have also contributed nearly $5,000 to the eight-term assemblyman this year.

Deputy City Atty. Curtis M. Fitzpatrick said city officials think Chacon’s bill is important to builders because it would erase all doubt that the Supreme Court ruling in the Camarillo case applies to the San Diego initiative as well. Without the bill, he said, an attorney could argue in court that there are distinctions that make the law apply differently to the San Diego and Camarillo initiatives.

“As a lawyer, I want to take advantage of every nuance in the law,” Fitzpatrick said. “I don’t want to concede.”

But Chacon, armed with an emphatic opinion from the Legislative Counsel’s office that his bill is “only declaratory of the existing law” since the Supreme Court’s May decision, said such an argument would only delay the inevitable.

“There is no confusion about what the Supreme Court is saying,” said attorney Robert G. Miller, who wrote the Legislative Council’s opinion. “The Supreme Court’s ruling was a 7-zip decision.”

Fitzpatrick acknowledged he had seen the opinion and that people who insist the city’s concerns are “a tempest in a teapot” may be correct. But without Chacon’s bill, he said, the issues are at least debatable.

An internal memorandum by Fitzpatrick makes clear, however, that he has his own doubts. When Scott Harvey, director of intergovernmental affairs, first told Fitzpatrick that Jack Van Cleave, a planning official, had read Chacon’s bill and feared it would have a major impact on Proposition A, Fitzpatrick fired back a response that began: “Tell Mr. Van Cleave to stop practicing law without a license.”

So far, the only court challenge to Proposition A has been a lawsuit filed by a subsidiary of the Campus Crusade for Christ, which charged it was “unlawful discrimination” that the initiative has stalled its already-approved plans for a 1,000-acre Christian university, to be surrounded by residential housing and an industrial park.

But builders and developers, who spent more $600,000 fighting the initiative, have made no secret that they too might challenge its overall validity.