Engineer at Center of Escondido Battle : Action by Ally of Developers Helps Spark Referendum Drive by Slow-Growth Forces
Arland Wiberg didn’t grow up in a land of plenty. Sheridan, Wyo., was little more than a cow town in the 1940s, an out-of-the-way place bereft of opportunities.
Few members of Wiberg’s graduating high school class hung around for long. The jobs were elsewhere; there was little reason to stay.
It’s been three decades since Wiberg joined that exodus, but the memories still linger. Indeed, they form the bedrock of Wiberg’s philosophy today.
An Escondido-based civil engineer, Wiberg believes the best antidote for the type of economic stagnation that plagued his anemic hometown is unharnessed growth.
And he practices what he preaches.
Working 10-hour days, seven days a week at his modest office on Hale Avenue, Wiberg’s mission is to make things happen for developers--to get buildings built. Savvy, clever and expert at shepherding controversial developments through the municipal planning process, Wiberg is far and away the busiest engineer in Escondido, often advocating five or six projects to the City Council on a single night.
Though it has won him innumerable clients and keeps his phone ringing off the hook, Wiberg’s style has made him a marked man in Escondido. With a slow-growth battle mushrooming in the inland community, Wiberg has become the No. 1 villain in the eyes of many residents, who fear the short, benign-looking man aims to pave over their entire city.
“He’s bad news for Escondido,” said Barbara Jones, a resident active on growth issues. “He’s a good engineer and he serves his clients well, but he’s got a grab-it-and-run philosophy. He won’t stop until he’s put apartments on every corner.”
Wiberg’s critics--among them, other North County engineers who asked not to be identified--say that his success is enhanced by his personal relationships with several members of the council. He has known Councilman Doug Best for almost 20 years and was host for a wedding reception for Best’s daughter in his backyard. Wiberg has accompanied Mayor Jim Rady on fishing trips and is friendly with Councilman Ernie Cowan as well.
Over the years, Wiberg says he has donated the maximum allowable to the three council members’ campaigns, and frequently suggests that his clients pitch in, too. Such support and his personal ties with Best, Cowan and Rady add up to a warm reception for Wiberg-sponsored projects at the council level, according to those often are opposed to developments bearing his stamp.
“The impression is that Arland has contacted the (three members), told them of his plans and obtained their commitments long before a given project comes before the City Council,” said Councilman Jerry Harmon, a slow-growth advocate who is one of Wiberg’s harshest critics.
“He gets 99.8% of what he asks for. So there is really no need for the public hearing process. . . . Where Arland is concerned, it seems the votes in favor are cast well in advance.”
Wiberg, 53, and his supporters say that’s not the case. The silver-haired engineer says he has never, “to my knowledge, asked anyone to vote for a project of mine.” Instead, the business thrives because “I do my homework, I compromise and I work a little harder than the next guy.
“There’s no black magic,” Wiberg said over lunch recently, taking a break from his petite filet mignon to toy with an olive in a half-empty martini. “I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I ought to be good at it. I ought to know the system by now.”
Moreover, Wiberg noted that the council is sympathetic to his projects because, “We share a similar philosophy. We believe it’s better to be an active and vibrant city and move forward than to go the other way.”
If it serves any professional purpose, his friendship with the council majority merely “gets me in to talk to them a little easier,” Wiberg said. “But it’s not like I know their phone numbers by heart or anything.”
As for the three council members who are friendly with Wiberg, they deny that the social acquaintance creates a different, lower standard for approval of his projects.
“I make my decisions on the basis of pertinent land use issues, and I leave the personalities out of it,” Best said. “He contacts me before meetings but never applies any pressure. He never expects a particular favor, and I don’t give him any.”
Furthermore, Best and others note that Wiberg’s projects typically are altered and scaled down during the planning process, either by staff members or at the Planning Commission level.
“By the time they get to the council, there’s been two years of negotiations and massaging things and adjusting densities,” Mayor Rady said. “It’s not like the guy is just walking in the door for the first time. His projects rarely get through untouched.”
Best cited Quail Hills, an industrial development, as a good example. The industrial park on Escondido’s western boundary was approved last October, but Wiberg was denied a request to build apartments on an adjacent parcel owned by the engineer himself. Wiberg said that action “hit me right in the pocketbook.” And Best, who said he voted against Wiberg on the matter, called it evidence that “Arland doesn’t always go home with a full loaf.”
Wiberg’s passion for engineering dates to his youth, when the descendant of Swedish ship’s carpenters worked in the family construction business. Driving nails and pouring concrete, however, seemed a limited future, and after a stint as an Army drill sergeant in the Korean War, and training at the University of Wyoming, Wiberg moved to Los Angeles. There he became a civil engineer.
In 1968 the family moved south and Wiberg joined Klema Engineers in Escondido. He quickly became a protege and when Roy Klema retired in 1977, Wiberg was left the major stockholder. A legal conflict with another partner--who sued Wiberg, alleging mismanagement of company funds--prompted Wiberg to form a new corporation, Escondido Engineers. The suit was settled out of court.
The Wibergs have two children--a daughter who is a deaf actress and a son who works as a land surveyor for the family firm--and live in a refurbished Spanish-style home in San Marcos.
When he’s not working, Wiberg likes to “get out my frustrations with a hammer and saw” or do a little gardening. Vacations are rare, and his family complains that “wherever we are, I drive down a street and think of what we could build on it.”
He’s an obsessive reader, gobbling up anything he can find on the Civil War era, but fishing is his true love. “It enables you to get away and still have a purpose,” Wiberg said. Some day, he hopes to while away his retirement beside a fertile stream in Montana or the High Sierra.
For now, though, there remains much to be done.
Escondido Engineers handles more than half of the projects that wend their way through the City Council, according to estimates by Wiberg’s fellow engineers, and the aggressive Wyoming native has roughly 100 active accounts now. About 30 new inquiries come in each day.
His days typically begin at 5, and often stretch past midnight as he attends meetings to present projects for clients throughout North County.
“I’m a workaholic,” Wiberg said, “but I don’t think that’s a bad word. If I were putting washers on bolts it would be one thing. But I love my work. I like to chase numbers and solve problems.”
Aside from concerns about what they describe as Wiberg’s cozy relationship with the council majority, the engineer’s critics complain that he invariably proposes the maximum density possible for a property--and often seeks zoning changes that would permit even more buildings on a given site.
“Zoning doesn’t seem to be any problem for Arland Wiberg,” said Phyllis Hassinger, a local slow-growth activist. “His goal is to pack as many apartments onto a lot as possible to maximize the profit . . . If the existing land is rural, he’ll simply get the zoning changed to high density.”
Such an approach, critics suggest, undercuts the city’s General Plan and amounts to “leapfrog development.”
“I call it spot-zoning and once it gets started, it spreads, like a cancer,” Planning Commissioner Tom Tucker, an architect, said. “Arland does a good job for his clients, you can’t fault him for that. But from my side of the table, his projects are very high-density and raise concerns about the effect on the community.”
Wiberg counters that the high densities are necessary to make a project workable in the Escondido market.
“No matter how you look at it that bottom line has to come into play,” Wiberg said. “You can’t build $1,000 a month apartments because we don’t have $1,000 a month renters in Escondido. So you look for ways to make them affordable. That usually means putting 10 (units) instead of five on an acre.”
Recently, the fires of controversy surrounding Wiberg have been fanned by an apartment project a client proposes to build adjacent to Interstate 15 near Bernardo Avenue. Like many of Wiberg’s projects, this development has sparked opposition from residents an the area, who say apartments don’t belong in their neighborhood and believe sufficient environmental review of the project has not been done.
The project required a zone change and general plan amendment to permit a higher residential density on the 44-acre parcel, which is bordered by single-family homes. After some modification--the number of apartment units was cut from 416 to 256 and a convalescent home was added--the development was approved 3-2 by the City Council Wednesday, with Harmon and Councilwoman Doris Thurston dissenting.
Privately, some North County engineers were stunned by the council’s action, saying that the so-called “scaled down” version of the plan wasn’t scaled down at all.
“I don’t know how the city planner can stand up there with a straight face and say a convalescent home is a less intensive use than 150 apartments,” one engineer familiar with the project said. “It’s just amazing, and it’s a little frustrating for the rest of us.”
Angered by the council’s action, nearby residents and slow growth activists teamed up to form the Greater Escondido Homeowners Assn. Kris Murphy, a slow-growth advocate and unsuccessful council candidate last June, said the group will “fight to protect neighborhoods from the incursion of commercial, industrial and high-density development.”
“The residents of Escondido are irate, outraged, at the pattern of growth in this city,” Murphy said. “I think the time has come for the developers--and their representative, Arland Wiberg--to start losing in this game.”
Murphy said the group has begun circulating petitions to qualify a referendum on the Bernardo Avenue apartment project for the ballot. If successful, the effort would represent the first time a development has been put to the voters in Escondido, he said. A special election would be held this spring.
Surprisingly, Wiberg’s critics see a silver lining in his successful reign as chief advocate of development in Escondido. As Harmon puts it, the volume of projects processed by the engineer and his habit of increasing densities around the city have “irked so many people that they are finally starting to wake up.
“I think Wiberg has been so successful and so blatant that residents are finally organizing politically on the growth issue,” Harmon said. “I would wager that his success has in it the seeds of his own defeat.”
Wiberg, who has piercing blue eyes and a creased face, would beg to differ. He has weathered tougher storms, and he suspects this one may have already passed its peak.
“Oh it’s just a few people feeling their oats and running for office two years before the next election,” said Wiberg, whose slicked-back hair, outdated dress and low-key manner mask a shrewd and observant mind.
“It’s easy for Harmon and his friends--who probably live in houses we built--to just say Nyet, nyet, nyet all the time. I just wish they’d do something so I could go on the attack.”
