Accord on Growth Cap Put O’Connor to Test as Mediator

In behind-the-scenes meetings earlier this month at City Hall, Mayor Maureen O’Connor and her top aides huddled with representatives of the building industry and advocates of an initiative that would place stringent caps on growth.

The result of 15 hours of meetings over a week’s time was a tenuous compromise over temporary restraints on the city’s runaway development that ended with last Monday’s approval of the Interim Development Ordinance by the City Council.

According to interviews with participants at the meetings, neither the building industry nor the residents pushing a much more restrictive slow-growth initiative went away happy but reached an informal accord both sides can live with.

The limited growth proponents agreed to hold their initiative in abeyance for 18 months while the city fashions a new growth management plan.

Development industry representatives--who don’t believe in any growth controls--wanted a minimum limit of 10,000 units a year but reluctantly agreed to an 8,000-unit ceiling.

O’Connor the mediator found herself in the unfamiliar position of being aligned with development interests against the threat of an initiative petition drive that could put what she has called “an unrealistic cap” on housing starts. She also feared it would scuttle one of her central goals for the city--to revise the city’s General Plan to include a realistic growth policy that would last into next century.

‘Gained a Window’

“Up and down the coast, people are taking governmental interests into their own hands, and here we have gained a window, an 18-month window, to create a practical plan that all the interests can grudgingly support,” O’Connor said. “We’ve got to keep this effort moving.”

The bargaining tool O’Connor used was the little-heralded Limited Growth Initiative proposed by a coalition that included several groups that had banded together in 1985 to pass Proposition A. This time, they aimed to place the initiative on November’s ballot.

Working in the mayor’s favor was the belief that the initiative, given the mood of voters in San Diego and elsewhere in the county who have successfully used the ballot box to express increasing resentment toward rampant growth, had a good chance of being approved if the council placed it on the November ballot.

“There was this threat, this club hanging over our heads, that if we didn’t come up with a compromise that everyone could live with, we’d have this initiative which no builder could agree to,” admitted Mac Strobl, a development consultant who participated in the compromise talks.

From these sometimes heated, sometimes icy talks between the two diverse groups came concessions.

The coalition of growth control activists agreed to give the city an 18-month reprieve, time enough to forge a permanent policy that would rein growth to a pace that matched the city’s ability to provide basic urban services: adequate roads, parks, schools, sewer lines, libraries, street lights, police protection, among others.

Reluctantly Agreed

Building industry representatives reluctantly agreed to a development limit.

When it was all over, there were signs that the informal negotiations had produced an honest compromise, Tim O’Connell, the mayor’s chief adviser on land use matters, said. “The goal was to have everybody say, ‘We can live with this,’ and grin and bear it. Neither side was terribly happy, which tells me it is a pretty good agreement.”

Linda Martin, spokeswoman for Citizens for Limited Growth, which had put together the proposed initiative, and who was a principal in the meetings, said that, “Up until a few months ago, we didn’t have a development cap in our initiative. We were out to preserve the canyons.” But the cap--a firm 4,000 units of housing citywide--was added as the group evolved, and it turned out to be the key that brought housing developers into line, willing to embrace a compromise.

According to the participants, O’Connor was the referee at most of the closed-door sessions held in the 11th-floor conference room of the executive suite. She presided at about two-thirds of the marathon sessions, which began June 11 and concluded with late-into-the-night meetings June 15 and 16.

During the final days, O’Connor left for a U.S. Mayor’s Conference session in the East but kept in touch, via telephone, “every time we came to a stop,” Paul Downey, her press secretary, said.

The mayor’s message, interpreted by some as a veiled threat that she would endorse putting the limited-growth initiative on the November ballot if a compromise were not reached, was that, “It’s better to have a consensus approach we can all live with than to beat each other to death in open forum,” according to O’Connell.

During the talks, the barriers that threatened to sink O’Connor’s growth control efforts--a restrictive initiative measure that she felt could cause severe economic hardship to the building industry and a legal assault by developers on the city’s growth control efforts--apparently have been averted, at least for the present.

O’Connor and Aides

The main participants in the negotiations were O’Connor, her chief aides, O’Connell and Ben Dillingham; Strobl and his development consulting firm partner, Scott Harvey; David Landon of Pardee Construction; Martin and Tom Mullaney, Citizens for Limited Growth principals, and David Kreitzer, who headed the successful Proposition A campaign that imposed the requirement of a citywide vote of approval before land in the city’s undeveloped urban reserve could be approved for building projects.

The industry and environmental grapevines sent out news of the compromise accord and the reception was mixed.

Lynn Benn, a slow-growth advocate who bowed out of the public and private discussions on the IDO after her appointment by O’Connor to the city Planning Commission a few weeks ago, feels the compromise 8,000-unit yearly housing construction limit doesn’t mean much. “With all the exemptions, . . . (developers) will still be building 12,000 to 14,000 units a year,” just short of the 1986 all-time construction high of 15,000 homes.

Ron Roberts, chairman of the Citizens Committee for Managed Growth, appointed by the mayor to examine and update the city’s General Plan, downplays the importance of the private conversations.

Roberts said that he was kept abreast of the unpublicized meetings in the mayor’s office while his public sessions held the spotlight but felt that the participants in the closed-door negotiations could not make agreements that would be considered binding by the building industry or the initiative proponents.

Strobl readily agreed that no one man or group of developers could pretend to speak for the entire industry.

“That’s a great difficulty in the building industry,” Strobl admitted. “These guys didn’t get where they are by collective action, by saying, ‘OK guys, here’s what we’re going to do.’ These are aggressive, self-starting individualists.” The industry cannot halt a lawsuit by a disgruntled builder who opposes growth restrictions, he said.

Key Concessions

Strobl credited the mayor with pushing for the key concessions--lowering the construction cap to 8,000 houses a year and postponing the initiative for 18 months. Without these compromises and a few others agreed to in tense last-minute negotiations, the Interim Development Ordinance would never have gained an 8-1 council majority approval, he said. Only retiring Councilman Bill Cleator balked.

“This sort of a deal is one that could only come together under the leadership of the mayor,” Strobl said. “She took a big political gamble on this.”

O’Connor is no more satisfied with the details of the final ordinance than are the opposing sides. She wanted a lower construction cap and, with Councilman Mike Gotch, favored more specific protections for the city’s remaining open spaces and wetlands.

But she is pleased with the accord reached in the back room of the mayoral executive suite and plans to keep her unofficial negotiations going.

“In fact, I’m going to keep both sides talking together if it kills me,” she said.

As for the Citizens for Limited Growth, they’re watching and waiting.

“We don’t know yet what we’ve got,” said CLG spokeswoman Martin. The group is concerned about the various exemptions that could increase the housing cap by thousands of units, and emphasizes that their initiative is not dead.

“We haven’t put the hammer to bed yet,” Martin said.