Escondido Struggles With General Plan : Outdated Guidelines on Growth Called a ‘Joke’ as Task Force Begins New Draft

Bob Mitchell is hardly a civic activist or City Hall gadfly. He moved to Escondido four years ago from Aspen, Colo., to find work, and every weekday he drives to San Diego, where he is a commercial sign painter.

But one night last week, Mitchell showed up at a public workshop being conducted in a community meeting room at the North County Fair shopping center to put in his 5 cents’ worth on the future of Escondido.

In a room filled with movers and shakers, large property owners and aspiring politicians debating the philosophical contents of a new General Plan to direct the future of Escondido, the unknown Mitchell stood up said what he had to say.

“I want a General Plan with credibility behind it,” he voiced. “I bought a house in a residential area, and now all that has changed and the area is commercial.

“I invested in something that was called a General Plan, and now I feel burned that it was changed by people who had enough money to change it. The General Plan is a joke,” Mitchell said, sounding both bitter and sorrowful.

Indeed, at a series of public workshops being held around Escondido, one recurring theme voiced is that, no matter what the contents of the new General Plan, it should be respected, not changed at the whims of politicians and developers.

Current Plan

Escondido’s current General Plan--the formal, broad-brush guidelines upon which specific land-use decisions are made--was prepared in the late 1960s and adopted in 1972. But it has been amended so many times as to no longer reflect some of the thinking and philosophies of the late ‘60s.

“Our current plan reflected reasonable growth for Escondido. That’s what we asked for and that’s what we got,” said Councilwoman Doris Thurston. “But they never assumed back then that future city councils would allow as many amendments and changes to occur as have occurred.”

Most of those amendments have either redesignated neighborhoods from residential to commercial or industrial, or have increased the population density of the residential areas.

“The citizens want stability, something they can count on,” Thurston said. “Living with uncertainty is one of the most difficult experiences people have, especially if it involves your family and the greatest investment you’ll make in your lifetime, your home. But that’s what we’ve been placing on the people of Escondido--a perpetual life of uncertainty, because there is a General Plan that we continually change.”

The current City Council says the plan should be updated to reflect the demographics, planning strategies and market conditions of the ‘80s so that the city can better plan its land use into the 21st Century.

Future growth is hardly a moot issue in Escondido. Even though it will celebrate its 100th year of cityhood next year, Escondido is only entering middle age from a planning standpoint. The current population is about 82,500--with an ultimate population expected of 235,000 in an area that includes outlying neighborhoods not yet annexed into the city. Only about 40% of the land within what will be the city’s ultimate boundaries has been developed so far, said Assistant Planning Director Brian Smith.

Most Growth Still to Come

For all the attention given so far to growth, the most is still to come.

“There is no specific guidance given by state law or the courts on how specific a General Plan should be, other than that a given property owner should be able to find out the general development guidelines for his property and the maximum allowable density for it,” Smith said.

Mayor Jim Rady said the 1972 plan is outdated and no longer relevant to Escondido because of factors that were not considered when the first plan was adopted 25 years ago--public transit, condominiums, smaller cars, freeways, changing demographics, and even such factors as the cost of agricultural water and the plague of root rot in avocado groves.

“Times have changed, demographics have changed, technology has changed, housing types have changed,” Rady said. “We need to adopt a new general plan to reflect that.”

To help accomplish that, the City Council appointed a community task force of 27 persons representing a cross section of Escondido’ residents and growth philosophies.

That task force’s series of five public workshops is to elicit comments and recommendations from the public on what development philosophies should be contained in the next General Plan. Three workshops were held last week; two more will be held this week: Wednesday at Oak Hill Elementary School on Oak Hill Drive, and Thursday at Del Dios Middle School on Ninth Avenue. Both sessions will be from 7 to 10 p.m.

The workshops so far have been conducted with a certain amount of flair, a hybrid of sorts between an art lesson and a Phil Donahue talk show.

The meetings are run by two specially trained facilitators from a Berkeley consulting agency. One, the moderator armed with a microphone, continually baits the audience for comments and scans for their name tags (“Thelma, I see your hand is up, would you like to go next?”) He immediately repeated back a distilled version of the comment, right out of a textbook on the art of feedback. His partner, holding a fistful of marker pens like a bouquet of flowers, writes summaries of the remarks on a huge expanse of butcher paper, adding his own graphic illustrations and artistic flourishes along the way: pie charts, exploding arrows, graphs, traffic “hazard” signs and the like.

When a rancher complained of water prices and growing avocados, the man quickly sketched out an avocado grove on the butcher paper; when someone else called for a balance between forces pushing growth or advocating slow growth, the man sketched a teeter-totter; when someone suggested nicer park facilities, he drew a fountain.

Between 40 and 60 persons have attended each of the first three public workshops, including between 10 and 15 members of the task force itself. Some city officials say they are dismayed by the small turnouts, which their consultant said was to be expected.

There has been little no-growth militancy aired at the meetings so far--a fact that has surprised some city officials, especially given public votes in Carlsbad and Oceanside to put an actual limit on the amount of new construction that can occur in their cities.

“The people have not been unreasonable,” said Thurston of those who have attended the workshops.

Added David Drake, another member of the task force who has attended each of the workshops so far, “Everyone seems to be coming with an open mind. There’s been no strong rhetoric from either side saying we have to absolutely do this or that.”

Varying Opinions

The theme of the public remarks has varied slightly from workshop to workshop. At the meeting held in the northern part of Escondido, for instance, there was a decidedly more slow-growth mentality voiced than at the meeting held on the south side of town, where several large property owners discussed the need for growth to bring economic stability to Escondido.

At one workshop, there was a suggestion that hillside development be limited if not outright banned; at another, there was only a vague passing reference to hillsides as a “natural resource” to be respected.

There is no clear consensus on such issues as the widening of major roads, either. At one meeting, a speaker said Bear Valley Parkway--a major north-south thoroughfare along the eastern side of Escondido--should be widened because of growing congestion. Another speaker retorted she’d rather be stuck in traffic and looking at trees than to be breezing along a road widened at the expense of country ambiance. A third speaker--a nurseryman--offered to sell fast-growing trees to the city to replace those that would be cut down by the widening of the street.

At another point in the workshop, several speakers argued that commercial development should be limited to the downtown area; another speaker then argued for more neighborhood convenience centers as a way of reducing traffic congestion in town with everyone heading downtown.

And so it went.

Following this week’s sessions, the task force will meet at 7 p.m. on May 7 at the Escondido Library to distill what it learned so far. Then, it will meet again at the same time and place on May 11 to hear technical experts discuss such issues as population forecasting, fiscal impacts of development, downtown redevelopment, and sewage and water demands.

Three Different Plans

On May 21, the task force will formulate, in a broad sense, three different General Plan scenarios to be written by the city’s General Plan consultant, reflecting three differing views of thought on the city’s future growth.

On Aug. 27, those three proposals, plus the existing General Plan, will be discussed at a public workshop at the Escondido Library, where public reaction and further input will be solicited.

In September, the City Council will decide which of the four General Plan scenarios it prefers, and order an environmental impact report for it.

The final General Plan will then be reviewed by the Planning Commission next February, and adopted by the City Council next March.

The unanswerable question is whether the final document to be adopted by the City Council will accurately reflect the sentiment of the community--if such a consensus can be reached and measured--or simply reflect the thinking of the three-member pro-growth majority of the City Council as it now stands.

Said Rady, “We, the City Council members, are in fact members of the community, and if there seems to be a consensus in the community that certain things need to be done, the City Council will probably reach those same conclusions.”

Others are more skeptical. “We’re wondering if the keyboard is connected to the computer,” remarked Neil Lynch, one of the members of the community task force. “We don’t know yet whether the public’s input will be used in the end, or whether (the public workshops) are just a bone for the public.”

Talk of a Public Vote

One alternative on the lips of more than a few activists in Escondido is to put the General Plan alternatives to a public vote or, if there is displeasure with the plan adopted by the City Council, to call for a referendum election to reverse the decision.

“I have a feeling that the citizens of Escondido will have something ready to place on the ballot, if it’s necessary, for the June ’88 election,” Thurston said.

In fact, Planning Commissioner David Barber and supporters are currently circulating a petition calling for an initiative which, while not in conflict with the current or any proposed General Plan, would establish specific guidelines on how often such a plan could be amended by the City Council, and to what degree zoning density changes could occur.

When pressed on how he reads the public so far on its wishes for the General Plan’s contents, Bill Frey, chairman of the task force, offered only that “the people want more quality-type growth.”

Drake said he is concerned that the proposed General Plan scenarios will be too complicated for most persons to understand. He suggested that the city staff identify the 20 largest parcels of undeveloped land in Escondido and apply each of the four proposed General Plan scenarios to each of the 20 parcels.

“Let’s see how each parcel is affected by each of the proposals,” he suggested.

Drake, like Thurston and Mitchell the sign painter, said he hopes the city will abide by the plan, whatever form it takes. “If the General Plan was better adhered to 10 or 15 years ago, we wouldn’t have the acrimony we have now,” he said. “The goal now is to come up with a General Plan that will help us avoid fistfights in the year 2000.”