O’Connor Campaign Pledge on Planning Enacted by Council

Enacting one of Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s major campaign pledges, the San Diego City Council on Tuesday approved new rules governing community plan amendments. O’Connor said the rules will “restore common sense and fairness” to the city’s development planning process.

The new guidelines will, in most cases, consolidate proposed amendments to particular community plans into no more than two annual hearings. This will enable the council, O’Connor argued, to “get a better look at the overall picture and impact” of plan changes than was possible under previous city policy.

Before the council’s unanimous approval of the changes Tuesday , community plan amendments could be considered whenever they were initiated by the Planning Commission or City Council, usually at the request of private property owners. City officials conceded that because large numbers of proposed amendments were reviewed individually and sporadically, it was often difficult to obtain a comprehensive overview of their impact.

During last spring’s special mayoral campaign, O’Connor charged that that “piecemeal approach” not only made for ineffective planning, but also was a “tricky little way” through which high-powered development interests could circumvent the wishes of a community’s residents by disguising the cumulative impact of new developments. Most proposed community plan amendments, then-candidate O’Connor complained, resulted in increased population densities in various inner-city neighborhoods.

Under the new rules, all proposed amendments within a single community will be heard in preferably one but no more than two hearings per year, with the hearing dates based on which of six sectors in the city it is located.

“We’ll be looking at the whole picture, not just part of it,” O’Connor said. “It will give us a good overview on how all of these amendments will affect communities. When the extra cars and houses are already there, it’s too late.”

Exemptions from the consolidated hearings would be permitted under what city planning officials termed “specific limited circumstances,” including projects that do not affect the type or density of land use, certain public projects, projects initiated by the City Council and emergency situations.

The council, however, rejected another proposed exemption--dealing with “large, significant projects with major impacts”--after Councilman Mike Gotch warned that the purpose behind the consolidated hearings “would be gutted if . . . we start getting into small versus large projects.”

City planners also had initially proposed that, once a community plan was updated, no amendments would be considered for the next three years. O’Connor contended that a three-year ban could be a burden both to communities displeased with plan changes and developers with desirable projects, prompting the council to also reject that provision.

“I have no problem with them coming in once a year and listening to them, because if we don’t like what we hear, we can always vote against it,” O’Connor said.

The new rules--which theoretically could result in as few as six community plan amendment hearings per year--likely will result in a major reduction in the number of such meetings per year. John Wilhoit, a city planning official, said that the council approved 15 plan changes in 1984 and 19 in 1985. As of September, 46 amendments had been proposed this year.

O’Connor and others consider perhaps the major attribute of the new rules to be a process under which the cumulative impact of all proposed amendments within each of the six sectors would be assessed annually.

According to a Planning Department report, that comprehensive review would evaluate the potential effect of the proposed changes on such issues as public services, traffic, urban design and land availability for other uses.

“That’s going to give us the big picture we’re not getting now,” O’Connor said. “Now, it’s tough to see what one project here and another one there will do to a community overall. This is a big step forward. It’s more responsive to the community’s wishes.”

During the council’s debate on the subject, Gotch praised O’Connor for initiating the review of the city’s planning policies.

“I want to thank you for coming up with something that many of us missed for many years,” he said.

O’Connor, meanwhile, expressed a “special pleasure” over witnessing her proposal--embraced by a philosophically diverse spectrum ranging from developers to environmentalists--”pass from concept to reality.”