Institutional Zone Vital to City Planning

A church in North Park is sold, torn down and replaced by apartments. A section of playground in another part of town is sold and turned into condominiums. A YMCA preschool in Pacific Beach will be sold for mixed-use commercial development. A public school is closed and leased to the highest bidder for 99 years. A museum wants to sell off its ocean-view land and use sale profits to build a museum downtown.

Bid goodby to the church ever becoming a community center, to the green space that playgrounds offer, to a new day-care center. Forget the idea of any community being able to rely on the presence of important institutions as the dependable warp in the fabric of desirable neighborhood life.

These unhappy examples illustrate why an institutional overlay zone (IOZ) is the ideal New Year’s resolution to be adopted by San Diego City Council at its meeting Jan. 13. The institutional zone is exactly what local community planning groups need to deal effectively with institutional transition in their neighborhoods.

Why do we need an institutional overlay zone? There are specific zones designated for commercial, industrial, residential and agricultural uses, but institutions are unprotected. In practice, only a building permit is needed to demolish an institutional building and replace it with something else.

Could this legislation or the lack of it affect your neighborhood? This answer is yes if your neighborhood includes schools, libraries, museums, churches, fire stations, park and recreation centers, medical service organizations and other public-serving facilities.

How would the institutional zone work? Through its community planning group, each neighborhood would inventory its institutional assets. The planning group of the City Planning Department would locate, identify and prioritize these sites. After public hearings at the Planning Commission and the City Council, certain sites would be given institutional zone status. The institutional zone would let the City Council delay any change of use for up to 180 days (with one extension) if there is evidence of progress on devising another institutional use for the site.

This procedure is similar to one established by city law for preserving San Diego’s historic buildings. The 180-day grace period is important: Unlike developers, communities do not have ready money in the bank that enables them to act immediately. A community needs reasonable time to gather its resources.

If a community cannot locate an alternative institution within the allowed time, redevelopment plans may be submitted by the owner to the city for review. Again, public hearings before the Planning Commission and the City Council would ensure that the project is compatible with the surrounding neighborhood.

Several years ago, a small hospital in Southeast San Diego was threatening to close, leaving the community without health facilities. A concerted effort by residents of that area made certain that this facility, which played an important role in that community, would continue to operate. The institutional zone legislation would provide the mechanism for this kind of community involvement.

Who doesn’t like the institutional overlay zone? On Dec. 31, the school district proposed a “memorandum of understanding” with San Diego that would exempt entirely all “surplus” school property from any protective provisions of the IOZ ordinance. The benign-sounding memorandum of understanding gives the school district carte blanche to dispose of school buildings and school property. There would be no provision for significant citizen review of such decisions. The district would be permitted to remove a school site from community use for as long as 20 years, an entire generation, with NO community input.

Under the school district’s memorandum, should a lease of more than 20 years or an outright sale of the school site be proposed, the community would have only 60 days to muster two-thirds of the City Council to purchase the site. This would seem to be an impossible task for individual citizens to achieve. The memorandum of understanding does not provide a window of time during which other community-serving institutions might step forward to buy or lease the property before it goes on the open market.

Should we trust the school district’s memorandum of understanding to deal with public school sites? More than 500 people at a meeting last year in Point Loma were bitterly disappointed with school district tactics when Dana Junior High was closed over strong community objections.

The school district’s memorandum of understanding, developed in private meetings with members of the City Council, has been placed on the consent agenda of the school board’s Tuesday meeting. (Items on a consent agenda generally are considered non-controversial and passed without discussion or public comment.) Obviously, this is an attempt to eliminate public scrutiny of this far-reaching document.

To counter the threat an institutional zone poses to school district autonomy in disposing of public property, this memorandum of understanding will appear on the City Council agenda--strategically placed ahead of the proposed IOZ ordinance scheduled to be heard that day.

Citizen volunteers from all over town have worked together for the past year to develop the proposal for a new institutional zone ordinance. They have found a common bond in their desire to salvage those community-serving institutions that make each neighborhood interesting and unique. From Rancho Bernardo to San Ysidro, more than 30 recognized community groups support the institutional zone proposal.

If you believe neighborhoods should participate in determining the course of change in their own backyards, ask your City Council representative to vote for the institutional zone on Jan. 13.