Slow-Growth Forces Lose: Supervisors OK Road Deal

The Orange County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Wednesday to approve a development agreement that will guarantee that the Mission Viejo Co. can build 6,400 new homes in return for an up-front contribution of more than $17 million for road improvements.

The proposal sparked a rare face-to-face confrontation between supervisors and slow-growth advocates.

In sometimes-heated debate, slow-growth proponents said that guarantees in the agreement are merely a bid to protect developers from the limits of the proposed slow-growth initiative, which would prohibit new construction in areas of heavy traffic.

“It is an attempt to thwart the initiative,” said Gregory A. Hile, a co-author of the measure. “We face a crisis in Orange County. The panic in Orange County is over development.”

Hile suggested that the agreement be postponed until after Mission Viejo residents vote next month on whether to incorporate and after the initiative is voted on next year.

But Supervisor Harriett M. Wieder told Hile: “I think your approach to the problem is simplistic, if not irresponsible, if not insincere. Nobody wants to deal in logic and fact; to stop everything is not the answer.”

The Mission Viejo agreement is the first of 11 similar contracts that are planned with other landowners that eventually will generate more than $235 million for road improvements for the heavily congested south county under the so-called Foothill Circulation Phasing Plan. The other agreements are scheduled to be adopted by January.

Developers participating in the plan will provide funds for building 133 lane-miles of roads, upgrading 40 intersections and building part of the proposed Foothill Freeway.

The benefit to the developers is that current zoning conditions will be locked in place for 10 years, after which they again will be subject to changes. Slow-growth advocates said the zoning guarantees might allow development that the proposed initiative would prohibit.

Under the accord approved Wednesday, the Mission Viejo Co. could build more than 6,400 new homes in an area south of El Toro Road and east of the Santa Ana Freeway, contingent upon completion of certain road improvements.

In return, the company will contribute $17 million to the Foothill plan and spend $1 million more on road improvements within its community.

Huge Sums of Money

The supervisors and some community groups have said the agreement is the only realistic way of generating the huge sums of money needed to improve roads in southern Orange County.

“The $235 million cost of the FCPP is far beyond the capacity of public funds to provide,” said a description of the agreement prepared by Robert Fisher of the county Environmental Management Agency.

“It may not be the ideal world, but we have to deal with the real world,” Supervisor Roger R. Stanton said. “It seems to be the way out of the traffic morass.”

Hile told the supervisors that he is supportive of the phasing plan but that he opposes the guarantees to developers. Other opponents questioned whether the plan’s road improvements will be offset by the new development allowed in the agreement.

‘No. 1 Concern’

“The problem I have is that we are locking it (the plan) in for 10 years, and what if it doesn’t work,” Hile said.

Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez, whose district includes the planned community, told Hile: “You used words like thwarting and insidious, when 56% (of the residents in a recent survey) said traffic is their No. 1 concern.”

Vasquez also complained that slow-growth advocates have improperly portrayed the developer agreements as a recent idea drafted in response to their initiative, when agreements have actually been a part of the Foothill plan for almost a year.

“The deceivery of suggesting the development agreements emerged as part of this (initiative) process is in error,” he said.

Vasquez said the agreement was unanimously supported by three community groups, including the Saddleback Area Coordinating Council, the Mission Viejo Municipal Advisory Board and the Mission Viejo Community Services District.