Limit Could Kill Blackhorse Farms Development

The controversial Blackhorse Farms project at UC San Diego, approved by the City Council and the UC Board of Regents, is now in limbo and may be doomed because of the growth-control ordinance adopted by the council Tuesday.

John O’Brien, one of the project developers, said Wednesday that his only hope may lie in seeking a hardship exemption from the ordinance, a process that he says will lead to a degrading “Queen for a Day” spectacle at City Hall as developers beg for the right to build.

“What’s a hardship? The ordinance doesn’t say,” O’Brien said. “Does your property have to be in foreclosure? Do you have to have failed to make lease payments? How about eviction? Is that hardship enough?”

The Blackhorse Farms development--121 town houses, a conference center, and a 210-room hotel--is one of potentially dozens of council-approved projects now frozen by the council’s decision to set April 29 as the cutoff for building permits. That was the date Mayor Maureen O’Connor and Councilman Ed Struiksma held dueling press conferences on growth management.

“Blackhorse may be the most high-profile development caught in the crunch, but it’s not alone,” said Kim Kilkenny, spokesman for the Construction Industry Foundation. “There are dozens, possibly hundreds, of developments potentially caught without vesting rights.

“There are at least a dozen subdivisions where developers have spent millions of dollars making public improvements prior to getting final approval on the basis of good-faith negotiations with the city,” Kilkenny said.

Workers hired by the Blackhorse partners, for example, have already been constructing a city-required wall between the project site and the exclusive La Jolla Farms subdivision. Still, the builder, Davidson Communities, did not apply for an overall building permit until May 14. The $67-million project was approved in January, 1985, by the council.

O’Brien said the builder would have applied for the permit six months earlier except for a last round of negotiations over residential density on the 23-acre site, which fronts on North Torrey Pines Road and lies south of the Salk Institute and opposite UCSD’s Revelle College.

O’Brien is exasperated because the Blackhorse Farms project was approved after going through 60 public hearings to satisfy the Planning Department, the council, the La Jolla Farms Property Owners Assn., the La Jolla Town Council, the La Jolla Parking and Business Association, and the UCSD student government.

“I’m paying $500,000 a year in rent (under a 55-year lease with the Board of Regents), and my project is probably going to die,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien and other developers are waiting to see what regulations will be devised by the city manager, city attorney and Planning Department in the next 30 days. Those regulations are meant to answer crucial questions such as which developments have vested rights to proceed and what will be the annual allocation for each community.

Deadline Defended

Tim O’Connell, an assistant to the mayor on land-use matters, is not without sympathy for the plight of O’Brien and other developers, but notes that whenever a deadline is set, particularly a retroactive one, some people will fail to qualify.

“Anytime you do anything like an I.D.O. (Interim Development Ordinance), you know there are people who are going to get hurt,” O’Connell said. “By its nature, such an ordinance is going to be inequitable somehow.

“The best we can do is to create distinctions not between different people but between different classes of projects.”

As for when a developer has vested rights to build, O’Connell said, “If you didn’t have your building permit in hand prior to April 29, don’t count on it.”

Under the 18-month ordinance adopted Tuesday, exemptions were provided for housing built in downtown, Tierrasanta, Otay Mesa, much of Southeast San Diego, all trolley corridors, and the transportation corridors in Mid-City.

It is yet to be decided how the 8,000-unit per year limit will be divided among communities, but La Jolla probably will be one of the more restrictive. One proposal put La Jolla’s limit at 29, which could pit O’Brien against developer Paul Chang, who has plans to build a subdivision on Mt. Soledad.

The Chang case is a particularly thorny one since the development is another phase of an existing subdivision. The question of providing exemptions for subdivisions built under prior agreements with the city for phased construction is among those legal and political issues unresolved.

Along with the town houses and hotel, the Blackhorse Farms project is meant to provide a conference center catering to academic and high-tech groups, as well as as much as $1.1 million in rent to UCSD. The site is a former riding academy.

O’Brien said the conference center and hotel might also be imperiled by the housing limit because the residential development was meant to help pay for public improvements such as streets. The project had been slated for completion by the end of 1989.