USD Forum to Debate S.D. County Growth

To encourage debate over growth in San Diego County, advocates on both sides of the issue will be questioned during a mock trial by University of San Diego law school faculty May 13 in the first USD Forum.

USD officials, whose goal is to make residents more aware of critical issues, will offer the free forums twice a year on various topics. The forums constitute the first major USD program to take place off campus, school officials said.

“People have the illusion that there is a choice: that we either have growth management or we don’t,” said Dwight Worden, one of the upcoming forum’s advocates for managed growth. “The fact is that growth management is inevitable and it is just a matter of how you get it.”

Worden is a lawyer specializing in land-use planning and environmental law. He and Lynn Benn, another upcoming witness, say the city’s current managed-growth plan is ineffective because it is really a “growth accommodation plan,” which allows the city to continue growing as long as it needs to.

Benn is vice chairwoman of the mayor’s Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Growth and Development.

“As it is, there is a tremendous outcry in the communities for a moratorium on growth because of the lack of schools, congestion on our freeways and the inability of the city to finance all of the needed facilities,” Benn said.

Benn, who is also the chairwoman of the Torrey Pines Planning Group and the city land-use chair of the Sierra Club, said an example is the city’s “inadequate waterlines” during the 1985 Normal Heights fire that destroyed 102 homes. She also cited the ongoing problems that plague Sorrento Valley’s sewage Pump Station 64.

Former City Councilman Fred Schnaubelt, who will participate in the forum on the side against government-managed growth, said managed-growth advocates, acting as the government, should not intervene in the work of developers because it is the developers who are directly responsible to the people.

“Who should do the planning?” asked Schnaubelt, who is now a real estate broker. “Should it be the people who look in the horse’s mouth and count the teeth or should it be the people who sit in the library and read about it?

“When developers are left to their own devices, you get something beautiful, such as Rancho Bernardo,” Schnaubelt said, adding that low-income people suffer the most when there are restrictions placed on development because the cost of housing increases as the demand does.

“There is an enormous spillover effect that reaches down into every segment of the economy,” he said. “It is like a bowl of marbles--when you move one, all of them shift.”

The forum will be held at 4 p.m. in the Lyceum Theatre at Horton Plaza, and admission tickets can be obtained at the university at Alcala Park, off Linda Vista Road.