Valley Center, Poway Growth Curbs Sought

When Craig Johnson returned to live in rural Valley Center after an absence of more than a decade, he found it just as he had left it and just as he wanted it to be.

The 46-year-old professional bought a home there last year and planned to run his publishing business from the North County village northeast of Escondido in a place with few traffic problems, only an occasional Los Angeles smog intrusion and not too many people.

Now he finds Valley Center is about to become a boom town, quite a metamorphosis from a quiet, wide spot in the road it used to be. Now, Johnson is looking at the specter of a community of 10,000 or more in the 4,000-acre center of the town that now is a flat, grassy mesa on either side of Valley Center Road.

Johnson, no activist, now finds himself the chairman of the newly formed Voters Initiative Committee, which is about to launch an initiative petition campaign to put the decisions about Valley Center’s growth in the hands of its residents.

To the south, in Poway, a similar move is taking place. A sharply split City Council is considering a measure that would put growth-inducing changes in the community’s General Plan up to a vote of the citizenry.

A Council Divided

Three of the Poway council members feel that a referendum on all growth-inducing changes in the low-density general plan they created for their city would insure that future councils would not be able to remove the growth lid in favor of promises by developers of increased city tax revenues and other incentives--at least not without the approval of a majority of the voters.

The other two council members feel that such a requirement for voter approval would be a cop-out; that voters elect council members to make such decisions and council members should not ask voters to do the job that the council was elected to do.

Poway Councilman Carl Kruse was on the winning end of the 3-2 council vote to ask the voters whether they wanted to vote on future growth-inducing plan changes. He admits, however, that “there are a lot of people out there that think differently.” The public, he says, might tell the council members to do as they have been doing in the past--making the decisions on the city’s future.

Following a two-hour debate on growth issues last week, no minds were changed on the Poway council but, Kruse said, the complexity of the growth issue became all too clear.

“We know that we are not the only ones faced with growth problems. We know that all sorts of methods have been tried in other cities and the county, but it seems hat none of them has worked too well,” Kruse said.

To Kruse, a backer of the referendum idea, it’s a simple question: Does the city want a few eyes or a lot of eyes keeping watch over the city’s growth?

Limits in Poway

Poway, which looked as rural 20 years ago as Valley Center does today, now has a population of 40,000. Since its incorporation in 1980, Poway has developed a general plan that calls for maximum population of 55,000, although more than 75% of its area is undeveloped.

John Fitch, assistant city manager, said that Poway city staff is also under orders from the council to develop a mass of information on the impacts--good and bad--of giving voters a veto power on growth. That research is expected to take several months to complete.

In Valley Center, there will be no more studies. There will be action, promised Johnson. On Aug. 20, the 32 members of the Voters Initiative Committee will begin collecting signatures on initiative petitions to require the Valley Center Municipal Water District to gain voter approval for any proposed project of $1 million or more, except for necessary maintenance and repair works.

The initiative measure is aimed directly at a $10-million sewer system which the Valley Center district has been planning to build for more than seven years, ever since a building moratorium was clamped on the center of town because of septic tank failures. Without a sewer system, the town center stays just as it is; with a sewer system, population could zoom from 1,000 to 10,000 or more under present zoning.

“If I wanted to live next to a supermarket or a fast food place, I would have moved to Escondido,” Johnson said. He likes the rustic “downtown” Valley Center and does not want change to mar its image.

‘Will Be Easy’

To gain the end that he, “and all of us who live out here because we like it rural,” want control over the Valley Center MWD’s spending. A small sewer system that would allow modest improvements and a lifting of the building moratorium might not ruin the town, Johnson said, and he’d go along with it “if that is the will of the people.” But the voters must have the final say on how big such a system would be and how much the town would be allowed to grow, he stressed. He thinks that the majority of Valley Center residents don’t want any sewers at all.

“It will be easy,” Johnson said confidently about gathering about 1,150 signatures on the VIC petitions. “We will have enough within a week.”

Just to make it easier, VIC is holding a series of Saturday picnics in Adams Park, raffling off a bicycle and other donated items to raise money for their campaign and gathering petition signatures of like-minded townsfolk.

Of the 7,700 or so voters in the far-flung Valley Center water district area, Johnson plans to garner signatures from at least 15%, which will force the district board either to enact the spending lid or to call a special election.

John Hennigar, water district general manager, was reluctant to discuss the sewer system project because of the lawsuit pending against the district and other governmental agencies and officials. But, he said, the sewers are going in on schedule, despite the delay granted in the court case.

Craig Johnson, the Valley Center property owner who sued the district to halt the sewer, is not a relative of Michael Johnson nor a member of VIC, but he has done the organization a big favor. His lawsuit has caused the state attorney general to request a four-month stay on the project and the lawsuit to prepare a defense for the state Water Quality Control Board, one of the defendants.