North County Groups Join Forces to Help Curb Building Boom

Hoping to gain greater clout with politicians and at the polls, slow-growth advocates from cities across North County are forming an umbrella organization to share ideas and coordinate efforts to curb the region’s building boom.

The effort is being mounted to help the activists establish a more potent regional network to counter the formidable influence of the building industry, organizers say.

“We feel we can make ourselves as viable as the developers without spending large amounts of money,” said Melba Bishop, a backer of a landmark slow-growth initiative approved by Oceanside voters last month. “It’s a matter of wanting to say to the powers that be at the city halls or at the county level that voters have the right to be heard.”

Slow-growth stalwarts from Escondido, San Marcos, Vista, Carlsbad, Encinitas and Oceanside, as well as unincorporated county areas such as Fallbrook, have expressed interest in participating in the group, which will have its first meeting tonight in Vista.

Push for Controls

With several North County cities rated among the fastest-growing municipalities in the state, the push for controls on development in the region has blossomed in recent months.

Elections on the issue have already been held in several cities after citizen-generated petitions forced slow-growth measures onto the ballot. In Carlsbad and Vista, voters favored managed-growth measures backed by the city Establishment over tougher slow-growth initiatives sponsored by citizen groups.

Oceanside voters, however, convincingly approved a strict cap on the number of dwellings that can be built in the city each year, the first such slow-growth initiative approved at the polls in San Diego County. In the meantime, growth-control supporters in other cities, among them fast-developing Escondido, are working on their own ballot measures.

With both successes and failures behind them, slow-growth advocates are eager to move forward--and they see formation of a broad-based coalition as the next logical step.

Organizers say the group could shape new ideas and strategies and more closely coordinate growth-control campaigns.

“We might derive some beneficial ideas as to new approaches to the growth problem,” said Nelson Aldrich, co-chairman of Concerned Citizens, a grass-roots group that pushed the slow-growth measure in Carlsbad last November. “Maybe there are other ways we can attack the problem.”

Focus Might Expand

Although the organization will focus on the North County region, some participants are not ruling out the possibility that the coalition might eventually link up in some fashion with slow-growth backers in San Diego and elsewhere in the county.

“It’s hard to say what will come out of this type of thing,” Aldrich said. “It depends on the political expertise of the people involved. The growth problem in all our cities is a political problem caused by city councils that don’t want to do what citizens want. They do what developers want.”

Indeed, the organizers are taking a wait-and-see approach.

“It might not pan out to be anything, then again it might pan out to be something great,” said Patsy Filo, a leader of the Vista slow-growth group. “I think we’ll be better off as a large organization than we are with all these fragmented groups.”

While formation of the slow-growth coalition seems the sort of effort that could easily strike fear in the hearts of developers, a spokesman for the building industry said he welcomed a broader slow-growth group in North County.

Kim Kilkenny, legislative counsel for the Construction Industry Federation, said members of a larger, better-organized group would likely be more knowledgeable on the myriad issues springing from growth.

“With a larger organization, the inevitable byproduct will be that everyone is better informed,” Kilkenny said. “What we want is an intelligent, informed dialogue on the issue. We’re confident that, once that occurs, the positions of the building industry will fare well.”

A Better Approach

Organizers of the coalition acknowledge that they hope their group can act to better study the issues--but with an eye toward thwarting the efforts of the building industry.

“We think we can generate some surveys of our own, some data of our own that might be really beneficial to elected officials,” Bishop said. “Developers always have their three-piece suits and their studies when they go before councils and planning boards. We would like to do some studies that support some of the contentions we have.”

On the political front, organizers say the coalition could prove helpful in raising money and mustering campaign workers. In addition, the group could more effectively share political know-how that can prove so important in grass-roots politics, they say.

“Anybody who knows anything about politics knows that money and bodies are very important,” Bishop said. “But how you utilize those two things is just as important.”

Moreover, the political push does not stop once a growth-control election is completed, Bishop and others say. Since council members can have a profound impact on the way new legislation is implemented, city council campaigns or recall drives can prove just as important, they note.

In Oceanside, for example, the City Council last week approved several broad exemptions to the slow-growth initiative, loopholes that will allow 6,000 dwellings to go forward unfettered by the new law, which allows construction of 1,000 units this year and 800 in each subsequent year through 1999. Bishop and other slow-growth advocates say they will file a lawsuit against the city to block many of the exempted units and are toying with the idea of a council recall.