2 Irvine Officials Chided for Absence at Meeting : Supervisors Rap Some Slow-Growth Advocates

Orange County supervisors took turns Wednesday criticizing slow-growth proponents, including two Irvine city officials, for failing to help the county draw up its annual projection of development and needed services.

Chairman Roger R. Stanton said “so-called no-growth advocates” did not attend any public workshops on the county’s annual Development Monitoring Program.

“These folks apparently sat on the sidelines,” Stanton said, and “missed a golden opportunity” to help solve some of the county’s problems.

“I miss the mayor of the City of Irvine,” Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder said at Wednesday’s supervisors’ meeting, at which the Development Monitoring Program was discussed.

Irvine Mayor Larry Agran, a prominent critic of past growth policies in the county, reportedly was out of town and unavailable for comment.

And Stanton said that, although Irvine Councilman Ray Catalano “weaves a web in a corner somewhere,” he did not provide his views on the monitoring program.

Works During Day

Catalano, a professor of urban planning at UC Irvine, said he worked during the day and couldn’t have attended the supervisors’ meeting even if he had known the monitoring program would be discussed.

Denying that he is “not a no-growth person,” Catalano said he thinks that many residents of south Orange County believe that the Board of Supervisors historically has not been concerned with the impact of rapid development on the quality of life in unincorporated areas.

Catalano said the Development Monitoring Program’s annual reports have warned the supervisors of the problems that new development will bring but the warnings have not stopped them from approving still more development.

The seven previous monitoring program reports were largely statistical summaries without conclusions or recommendations.

But this year’s presented 43 implementation strategies to deal with development and traffic problems. Most of the strategies dealt with looking for money to pay for roads, flood control, water and sewer facilities and other necessities for new development.

When the report was first presented in February, developers said they had expected just the usual report and complained that they were not allowed to discuss the recommendations with county planners before they were published.

Developers since have presented their views on the report at county Planning Commission meetings and workshops. The recommendations are to be brought back to the supervisors as strategies are worked out, and developers and other members of the public will be given chances to comment.

Representatives of the Irvine Co., Mission Viejo Co. and the Orange County chapter of the Building Industry Assn. said Wednesday that they are now largely comfortable with the report.

Study Released

In a related development, the county released a builder-financed study Wednesday on how developers can meet the supervisors’ demand last December that roads be built in the eastern Orange County foothills before new development takes place.

Developers agreed to split the cost, based on how much traffic their new tracts will generate. The Baldwin Co., developing in the Portola Hills, and the Hon Development Co., developing the Whiting Ranch, would pay the most.

The two firms would be assessed $7,962 in fees per single-family home. Other developers in the Mission Viejo-Lake Forest-El Toro area east of Interstate 5 would be charged from $5,186 to $2,017 for each new single-family home. Homes already built would not be included in the fee programs.

The money will go for a “backbone” road system that is estimated at costing $120 million. It would be designed to parallel the freeway with new or improved roads and intersections and to unsnarl traffic in the area.

The supervisors are scheduled to approve the plan next week, with implementation likely to begin in August.

The study said construction could begin next year on new roads or improvements to existing roads such as Bake Parkway, Lake Forest Drive, Portola Parkway and Santa Margarita Parkway.

“The program is an excellent program,” said David Celestin of the Mission Viejo Co. “I think it will result in needed roads being built.”

Celestin and county officials said developers would have paid for the roads anyway but that the normal procedure is to build roads as new homes are built or after people move in.

The new plan requires the roads to be built before development starts and will require the formation of districts that can issue bonds to raise money.

Formally known as the Foothill Circulation Phasing Plan, the study and the Development Monitoring Program have been cited by supervisors as evidence of their attempts to solve the county’s traffic problems.

Proponents of cutbacks in development have contended that the supervisors have done too little, too late. Some slow-growth advocates are drawing up an initiative for next year’s ballot to cut back development in the county.

Supervisors complained Wednesday, as they have in the past, that most of the county’s 26 cities have been slower to act than has the county. Stanton, Wieder and other supervisors said that slowing or halting growth in unincorporated areas will do no good if cities continue to approve development projects.