City’s Northern Tier, Hit Hard by Growth, Asks for Moratorium

It’s 8:15 in the morning in Rancho Penasquitos and Alan Dickey once again finds himself in an all-too-familiar situation: mired in a long line of cars waiting to get on the freeway.

If it’s a particularly miserable day--which seems to occur more and more often--the line will stretch half a mile up Rancho Penasquitos Boulevard.

On occasion, the wait is 45 minutes just to get onto Interstate 15 to join the increasingly clogged river of cars and trucks that drains from the residential basin of Rancho Penasquitos, Rancho Bernardo, Scripps Ranch, Mira Mesa and the city of Poway into downtown, Mission Valley and other business centers of the city.

It is in these middle-class suburban enclaves that the bloom of San Diego’s burgeoning growth is fullest, where the construction of houses, apartments and condominiums is outpacing--some say overtaking--anything else in San Diego.

But now, people living in Rancho Penasquitos and Rancho Bernardo want growth stopped, at least temporarily. Today they will take their requests for building moratoriums to the City Council, whose committee on transportation and land use has scheduled a hearing on the two moratorium proposals.

Repeating a litany that has become increasingly familiar as the San Diego area continues to fill with people, residents say the moratoriums are necessary because rapid development has thrown things out of balance.

In Rancho Bernardo, residents contend the maximum building limit set in the area’s 1978 Community Plan update has been exceeded and therefore development should cease.

In Rancho Penasquitos--where the building limit in its community plan has yet to be reached--residents say a moratorium is needed nonetheless because homes are being built and people are moving in at such a pace that there aren’t enough roads, libraries, neighborhood parks, schools or a fail-safe sewer system to accommodate them.

“I’m a 9 1/2-year resident of Rancho Penasquitos. I’ve seen it come from being kind of out in the country to where we are now, which is frightening,” said Dickey, a member of the community’s planning board and chairman of the board’s moratorium committee.

“Our intention is not to stop development in Penasquitos forever, but a moratorium is a temporary stop until we have some of the promised facilities in place.”

Says fellow board member Pat Recame: “We have a bunch of homes, a bunch of people and a bunch of cars and not anything else.”

On paper, Rancho Penasquitos is a community that works. According to the Rancho Penasquitos Community Plan and the San Diego Planning Department, which is opposed to both proposed moratoriums, growth in the community is following prescribed guidelines in the pattern of development, densities and proper land uses.

Any imbalance between growth and public amenities is temporary, according to Allen Jones, deputy director of planning.

Only by allowing growth will the city be able to obtain enough money--through fees paid by developers as they construct subdivisions--to build such things as neighborhood parks and new and wider roads, the city planners contend.

While acknowledging some problems, particularly with limited neighborhood parks and an overloaded street system, Planning Department officials say a moratorium would make matters worse.

“To impose a moratorium would delay the funding process and impede the construction plans for projects that the Penasquitos . . . community is critically dependent upon,” concludes a report signed by Deputy City Manager John Fowler and Planning Director Jack Van Cleve.

Such optimism is increasingly met with skepticism and cynicism by many Rancho Penasquitos residents, who criticize the Planning Department and City Hall for “tunnel vision.”

For Barbara Fisher, chairwoman of the Penasquitos Planning Board, the reality is this: “In terms of the number of (housing) units, we’re way ahead of schedule. But in terms of public facilities, we’re way behind.”

“Living here is a frustrating way of life,” she says. “It’s frustrating to sit in a parking lot situation on I-15 and have to face that every day, or to listen to your high school kids saying they can’t do this or that because their classes are too large.”

Geographically, Rancho Penasquitos is a community rich in nature’s bounty.

It is located amid rolling hills and canyons west of Interstate 15 and about 15 miles northeast of downtown San Diego. It is home to about 30,000 people, many of them young families. The first subdivisions opened about 15 years ago.

Only in the last two to three years, however, as interest rates have dropped after several years of double-digit inflation and developers have scurried to build houses to meet pent-up demand, have the accumulated effects of growth become a focal point.

Today, the major street corners along Rancho Penasquitos Drive and Carmel Mountain Road are dotted with signs directing motorists to one of several subdivisions under construction.

Today, plans for more home construction are moving ahead.

Today, people like Alan Dickey find themselves caught in suburban gridlock.

It’s not surprising, given the sensitivity to the problems caused by growth, that residents in Rancho Penasquitos, along with their brethren in Rancho Bernardo and Scripps Ranch, were among the strongest supporters of Proposition A, the controlled growth initiative approved by San Diego voters last November.

But Proposition A dealt only with keeping growth out of the urban reserve, not out of places like Rancho Penasquitos.

“I think that’s why Prop. A was adopted . . . people are calling for phased development,” says San Diego Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer, who represents both Rancho Penasquitos and Rancho Bernardo.

Wolfsheimer says she will recommend City Council approval of a phased-development program for Rancho Penasquitos, an idea supported by those seeking the moratorium. The details of such a program, however, have yet to be worked out.

Perhaps the most vivid example of how rapid growth has affected these communities, which compose San Diego’s northern tier, is to look at Interstate 15, the area’s only freeway.

Three years ago, the eight-lane freeway carried a little more than 100,000 cars and trucks a day near its junction to California 163.

As of the end of last month, the count was up to 168,000 vehicles a day, up 12% from 1985, according to Carl West, Caltrans deputy district director for planning and public transportation.

“Basically, it’s at capacity now,” West said.

Afternoon rush-hour congestion is increasingly lasting more than two hours, “which is the kind of stuff you see in L.A.,” West said.

To help alleviate the traffic problem, Caltrans plans to add two reversible carpool/bus lanes and a separate northbound lane by the middle of 1988.

But even those improvements won’t be enough.

Without construction of California 56 west to Interstate 5 and Del Mar, which the most optimistic Caltrans predictions say is about a decade away, Interstate 15 will gradually become a twin of Interstate 8, the Mission Valley freeway and the county’s busiest.

And there is the very real possibility that by the year 2005, as development in places like Rancho Penasquitos continues unabated, Interstate 15 will have to accommodate up to 260,000 vehicles a day--a rate comparable to that of California’s busiest highway, the Ventura Freeway in the San Fernando Valley.

Part of the traffic bottleneck in Rancho Penasquitos is that there are only two ways to get on the freeway, though two more interchanges are planned. The roads getting to the freeway present yet another problem.

Black Mountain Road, a main community road, was built to handle a maximum of 5,000 cars and trucks a day, yet more than 12,000 vehicles use it today.

The city plans to expand Black Mountain and Mercy Road, another overburdened street, to four lanes. The money to pay for the added lanes, however, is contingent on more growth.

Without the fees levied on developers as they build their subdivisions, the city won’t have the revenue to improve the roads.

And the same growth-dependent funding scenario is true for an array of community improvements, such as numerous traffic signal and street projects, the construction of a permanent library and development of three more neighborhood parks. That is why, the Planning Department and city manager’s office say, they oppose the moratorium, as do developers.

“The developers’ continual argument is, ‘Allow us to build and increase densities to pay for the schools, parks and libraries,’ ” said Lynn Benn, an environmentalist and land-use chairman of the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club.

“But what is happening is that the level of services in the community continues to go down. That’s why people are concerned and want something done,” Benn said.

Overcrowded schools rank among the biggest complaints of Rancho Penasquitos residents.

Although Rancho Penasquitos and Rancho Bernardo are in San Diego, the public school system is operated by the Poway Unified School District, one of the premier educational districts in the state, based on test scores.

The district has been so inundated with students that most of the seven schools in Rancho Penasquitos and Rancho Bernardo are at or over capacity. For example, Mount Carmel High School has about 3,000 students, though it was built to handle 2,000. Portable classrooms have been moved onto the overcrowded campuses and more teachers have been hired.

To meet the immediate demand in the San Diego portion of the district, Poway Unified has plans to build six schools--four elementary, one middle and one high school--at a cost of more than $50 million.

The need is so great that one elementary school due to open on Black Mountain Road next fall will be at its full 600-student capacity the moment it opens its doors.

The school district, which recently reached a revised funding agreement with developers to help pay for the schools while it attempts to work out a permanent financing plan, is also opposed to a building moratorium, as it would cut off money needed to build schools.

In contrast, the San Diego Unified School District has stopped issuing “letters of school availability” to developers because of overcrowded conditions in adjacent Scripps Ranch and Mira Mesa. The letters are normally issued by the school district when a developer agrees to pay the fees that the district uses for school construction. They are a precondition for city approval of a project.

The conventional wisdom held by many Rancho Penasquitos and Rancho Bernardo parents is that Poway Unified was caught with its plans down and was unprepared for the onslaught of students.

But school officials say such criticism is not only unfair but inaccurate.

“It’s not that we don’t have plans, we don’t have the money. State funding is abysmal,” said Stephanie Austin, Poway Unified’s director of facilities planning, noting that the district has traditionally had some of the highest developer fees in the state.

What happened, Austin explained, is that in the course of three years, the district went from one with a static population to one bursting with students.

As recently as four years ago, growth and the resulting student population was so stagnant that the district was considering closing schools, as only about 200 new students a year were entering the school system.

In the San Diego portion of the district, there were 346 homes built in 1982 and 337 in 1983. In 1984, there was an increase to 783, the first hint of the explosion to come.

In 1985, 2,405 homes and apartments were built, sending school officials scurrying for space. And in the first six months of this year, 1,644 homes were completed, a pace that would amount to almost 3,300 homes this year alone. During that period, no new schools were constructed.

“The residents are right that it is overwhelming and that it does place a burden on us. But it’s not because we haven’t planned. It’s because it came so fast,” Austin said.

The significant increases of the last three years, however, apparently have not had an effect on the quality of the district’s education, although the local teachers’ union claims some courses have higher than acceptable class sizes.

Austin said the district’s test scores, already among the highest, continue to rise despite the increase in students.

“From the educational quality side of it, we’re doing fine,” she said.

The district, which has about 18,300 students, expects to grow at a rate of at least 1,000 students a year for the next 10 years.

While Rancho Bernardo, particularly the section west of Interstate 15, faces overcrowded schools, the basis for its proposed moratorium is that the number of completed and approved but not yet constructed subdivisions exceeds the maximum level set in its community plan.

According to the plan, the total number of residential units should not exceed 16,700. Rancho Bernardo community leaders say that by their count the total is 17,100 and therefore a moratorium is necessary.

“People here are proud of this community and are happy with the way it’s grown. Now it’s time to respect the system that says we’ve gone beyond the maximum allowed,” said Jack Templeton, former chief deputy county assessor in San Diego and chairman of the Rancho Bernardo Planning Board.

While the effects of growth are not as acute as in neighboring Rancho Penasquitos, Templeton says more and more of Rancho Bernardo’s 24,000 residents are complaining about increased traffic and are increasingly concerned “by developments both internally and externally” in and around the community.

The Planning Department, in opposing the moratorium, says the number identified as the maximum limit should not be rigid.

What’s more important is the effect growth has had on Rancho Bernardo rather than the number of homes actually built, according to Jones, the deputy planning director.

“We’re not aware right now of any significant problems so overwhelming that it calls for stopping development in that community,” Jones said.

He explained that the Planning Department is in the midst of updating the Rancho Bernardo Community Plan, which will include an evaluation of how recent growth has affected Rancho Bernardo.

Watching the moratorium proposals warily are the developers, who could see planned projects brought to a standstill.

“We would oppose a moratorium strongly. Rarely, if ever, is it a solution,” said Kim Kilkenny, legal counsel for the Construction Industry Federation, which represents some of San Diego’s largest residential developers.

Kilkenny said developers are well aware of the lack of facilities and why people are frustrated. But, he said, the facilities can’t be built unless developers provide the money to have them built. And the only way to do that is to allow more growth.

With the city’s future urbanizing zone off limits to construction and more pressure to reduce densities in center city neighborhoods, that “only leaves the planned urbanizing areas (such as Rancho Penasquitos and Rancho Bernardo) to provide all the projected development,” Kilkenny said.

“The bottom line is that the City of San Diego has failed to provide enough residentially zoned land . . . and that’s why you’re going to have pressure for higher densities,” he said. “Is the city committed to growth or not?”

Since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 severely restricted the city’s ability to sell bonds that helped pay for many improvements in rapidly growing areas, the city has more and more relied on developers to pay for things such as roads and parks, he said.

“If you are depending on developers to provide the facilities and you don’t get it until development occurs . . . it’s difficult to get ahead of the problem,” Kilkenny said.

Calls for moratoriums, he said, violate the city’s growth management plan adopted in 1978, which set aside specific areas for development.

“The irony of the situation,” he added, “is that you have the building industry advocating to implement the growth management plan and some (community activists) who want to abandon the growth management plan.”