ESCONDIDO FACES GROWTH ISSUE : The City Council: Majority Is Pro-Growth

Weekly, these five people meet to discuss and decide the city’s major land-use questions, but seldom do they all agree. Here are their philosophies on growth:

JERRY HARMON

Long identified either as a troublesome maverick or as the lone intelligent voice in the wilderness, Harmon has been the loudest, if not the only, slow-growth voice on the City Council.

Harmon, 43, began attending City Council meetings in 1969 when he was manager of Pacific Telephone’s Escondido business office; he moved to Escondido in 1971, ran unsuccessfully for the City Council in 1972, then was elected in 1974 to replace a council member who had been recalled.

Today, he is the council’s senior--and sometimes loneliest--member, having been reelected three times but unable each time to extend his coattails to a slow-growth sympathizer. Instead, in each election since 1976, voters have sent a split message to City Hall, electing slow-growther Harmon and, at the same time, growth advocates Jim Rady and Doug Best.

Harmon said he has been unable to compete with the kind of campaign treasure chests filled by developers on behalf of “the good old boys on the council.”

“This city has grown up so fast that it hasn’t been able to develop the political sense that it is now starting to materialize,” he said. “It’s been like an uncoordinated child trying to grow up. Now, we’re maturing. And things have gotten to the point finally where all of the problems (of growth) are surfacing simultaneously, and not just in one neighborhood but citywide.”

He said his credibility on the City Council has improved with the election last June of Doris Thurston, who as often as not sides with Harmon on issues of growth.

“Now the community is seeing that’s it not always 4 to 1 with Harmon out, but it’s 3 to 2 and even though Doris and Harmon are on the losing end still, maybe Harmon isn’t the odd man out that he had been made to look like,” he said.

To criticism that he would be more effective as a politician if he compromised on some issues, Harmon responds: “I’m trying to change the basic policies of the power structure, which is a laissez-faire attitude toward growth. On that, I don’t intend to compromise my principles. They would have been better off listening to me , but they didn’t and instead we now have a basic degradation in the quality of life in Escondido.”

DOUG BEST

A resident of the city since 1958, Best first ran for the council in 1974, losing to two incumbents who were reelected. In 1976 he ran again, and won. “I’ve run on pro-growth every time, and I’m not ashamed of that,” he said. “Why should I be?”

Best, 61, has long been associated with the local business community, is currently a representative for a title insurance company and plays Saturday morning disc jockey for an Escondido radio station’s Big-Band program.

He says growth is inevitable, given the allure of San Diego County. “I don’t pretend to have the answer to growth,” he said. “But we can’t slam the door or pull up the bridge. You are dealing with American citizens. There’s a whole bunch of people here who are into the drawbridge syndrome, ‘I’m here and we’ve got to stop growth.’ You can’t do that. Just a few weeks ago someone protested growth at a Planning Commission meeting, and he’d only lived here for two days.

“Anybody who has moved to North County and made the assumption that this is the Garden of Eden and it won’t ever change, has made a terribly foolish assumption.”

Best said there are some development decisions he regrets in retrospect. “Those apartments on Grand Avenue behind the Village Mall--I look at those and I wonder why I ever voted for that,” he said. It’s the largest apartment complex in Escondido, with about 500 units.

Newcomers to the city, Best said, are no more detrimental to the area “than Harmon was when he cluttered this town with his four kids. He’s deceitful as hell. He had no qualms about moving into Escondido and now he says it’s got to stop. I can’t think of anything more selfish.”

JIM RADY

A transplant from New York City, Rady arrived in Escondido in 1962, and brags that, as a businessman, he hasn’t strayed more than five blocks from downtown’s Grand Avenue since 1966. Today Rady, 45, is the president of an Escondido-based savings and loan.

“I can remember what it was like in the mid-’60s, the ‘70s, the early ‘80s; from personal perspective, I can see the diminution of the quality of life--and how it can be rectified with dollars,” Rady said.

“I’ve been singing the song for years that growth isn’t terribly bad if it is coherently planned and pays its way. I still believe that. But we haven’t been completing the equation, which is to intelligently spend the (development impact) money for the purposes it was exacted.”

He says much of the growth pains being felt in Escondido are the doings of the slow-growthers themselves, including a citizen’s initiative drive in 1968 that blocked the continuation of California 78 through town--a campaign that was supported by Harmon and now-Councilman Ernie Cowan.

“Their theory was, if you don’t have the roads, the people won’t come,” he said. “But the people came anyway, and now we have a Mickey Mouse road system that will cost a fortune to remedy because of the short-sightedness of the people at the time, and you’ve got all that traffic dumping into the downtown (where 78 terminates) causing a lot of the problems they’re complaining about today.”

He said he favors growth not only because it generates a stronger local economy but because it promotes “a pluralistic society where rich folks, poor folks, young people and old people can live together. You can have no-growth if you live in Rancho Santa Fe, but I don’t want to live there.”

He suggested once that a slow-growth activist move to Valley Center where she could raise her farm animals in peace. “If you want a rural, laid-back life style, then Escondido isn’t the place for you,” he said.

And on Jerry Harmon: “I get the biggest kick out of hearing people from Escondido Hills protesting (about growth). If we had listened to Jerry, there wouldn’t have been an Escondido Hills (neighborhood) for them to live in.

“Jerry could be more effective if he’d learn to compromise. Politics is compromise, and my definition of a good deal is when both sides leave the table unhappy.”

ERNIE COWAN

Promoted as the darling of the Chamber of Commerce, Cowan, 42, is a portrait studio photographer active in downtown affairs who was elected to office by a comfortable margin in 1982, and narrowly reelected last June. He has lived in Escondido since 1968.

“Some of the most strident, strongest no-growth people I’ve talked to say, ‘Hey, we realize there has to be progress and growth, if the sources of revenue are to continue for the very things we demand as a community are to be paid for.’ Growth translates into jobs, and that’s what keeps a community strong,” Cowan said.

He said the worst problem with growth is traffic--and that traffic has been generated by commercial, not residential, growth. “The citizens of this community made a real and conscientious decision a few years ago when they voted to build a regional shopping center, meaning we would become the commercial hub of North County,” he said.

“Well, they can’t expect that to occur without people driving here to spend their dollars in our community. So we’re benefiting on the one hand, from the placement of the shopping center in our city, but the downside is increased traffic.”

Cowan said he is not too troubled by the number of apartments in the city, saying that is more a function of the economy and the marketplace than it is politics, but said the time has come to adopt a design review ordinance to better control the quality of the apartment construction.

“There have been some very bad projects built in the city,” he said. “We need to catch the shoddy projects before they’re built.”

DORIS THURSTON

A nurse who served on the Palomar Pomerado Hospital District board of trustees, Thurston, 57, was appointed to the Escondido City Council in 1982 and elected in her own right last June. An Escondido-area resident for 31 years, today she is considered to have developed one of the widest bases of support on the council.

Regarding instances when she has held developers in contempt for trying to bully their way before the council, Thurston said:

“I say that you accommodate growth by planning for it and putting the pressure on the developer, not by giving into pressure from the developers. Let’s us make the policy and make the developers conform to it.

“If they (developers) know they can pressure us into changing the general plan, then of course they’ll try. I don’t blame the Arland Wibergs (a local civil engineer considered one of the most successful in winning city approval for new residential projects at higher densities). I blame the council.”

The council, she said, should have been firmer in holding true to the existing general plan rather than voting as often as it has to amend it, usually by increasing residential housing density.

She said she personally helped distribute petition forms for the referendum campaign against the council’s 3 to 2 approval of Wiberg’s apartments between Bernardo Avenue and 11th Avenue “because the council had been irresponsible in approving them.”

About the campaign’s success in collecting nearly twice as many signatures as required, she said, “I would have been surprised if the community had not risen up.”