City’s Penasquitos Failure Follows Mira Mesa Blunder

Back in the late 1960s, San Diego made a horrible mistake. Now, 20 years later, city leaders concede that they may have made the same blunder again.

That initial boo-boo was called Mira Mesa. Today’s counterpart is Rancho Penasquitos, Mira Mesa’s neighbor, north up Interstate 15.

Some city officials argue that the city didn’t make the same mistake twice, that it made two different mistakes. But they concede the results are nearly identical: traffic congestion, overcrowded schools and irate residents unwilling to accept promises in place of urban services.

Kathleen Zaworski-Burke, one of the most outspoken of Rancho Penasquitos residents, has been accused of “developer bashing” for her criticism of builders. But she is not backing down.

“I’d like them to live a typical day in Rancho Penasquitos, starting with sending the kids off to crowded schools, then heading off down a crowded freeway,” she said.

“I don’t blame developers for doing what they do because they operate on a profit motive. But, I would call what they have done here ‘environment bashing.’ ”

Two possible solutions to Rancho Penasquitos’ woes present political problems: More developer fees could be reaped through continued development, but that means more homes and more people; a special taxing district could be formed but homeowners are likely to rebel.

The problems of Rancho Penasquitos were not supposed to happen.

In the early 1970s, before community planning groups gained power and before growth controls were in place, an angry mob of Mira Mesa mothers marched on San Diego school and city officials, threatening to commit political mayhem if something wasn’t done.

Their community of better than 2,000 households had only one access road to the outside world--Mira Mesa Boulevard. There were no parks, no schools, no fire station, no library.

Mira Mesa had nothing but houses.

“I hate billboards, but I voted for one just to screen the sight of Mira Mesa from the highway,” said former City Councilwoman Helen Cobb.

Main Complaints

The residents’ prime gripes were the awful wait every weekday morning to get out the one escape route to work and the long bus rides their kids were forced to take to get to school in Clairemont or some other faraway suburb.

Ironically, Mira Mesa was designed in the 1960s to be one of the city’s first self-contained communities--a place to live, work and play.

Instead, it started life as an example of “urban scatteration,” “leap-frog development,” and a half-dozen other phrases that planners use to explain a goof.

Rancho Penasquitos came along at about the same time as Mira Mesa, but initially avoided the sins of too-rapid growth, the lack of urban planning and the dearth of public facilities.

While the first Mira Mesa residents lived in grid-like blocks of tract houses on the treeless mesas north of noisy Miramar Air Station, pioneer Rancho Penasquitos residents resided along curving streets or beside a plush golf course with plenty of landscaping and open space.

Penasquitos was designed as a “downscale Rancho Bernardo,” said Assistant City Manager John Fowler. It catered to less-affluent retirees who didn’t have to punch a time clock or commute.

But Penasquitos developers soon learned that many elders didn’t want to be stuck way out in the country, miles from entertainment and shopping, any more than young families wanted to live light years away from jobs and schools.

So Rancho Penasquitos grew slowly and sedately while its neighbor to the south, Mira Mesa, grew like a weed.

By 1980, Mira Mesa was growing into adulthood. Its vacant fields had sprouted schools and parks; its streets had finally linked with busy traffic arteries to the south and west.

It now boasts a mixture of job-rich industry and commercial enterprise to balance off the rows of look-alike houses and has added enclaves of upper-income housing.

Councilman Ed Struiksma, who lives there, bristles and prepares for rebuttal when someone mention’s Mira Mesa’s disreputable past.

He ticks off the present-day highlights of his district’s much-maligned suburb: Two Olympic-sized swimming pools, three large parks, a good-sized library and sufficient fire stations. Soon, he said, a new hospital will be built at the community’s front door--Interstate 15 and Mira Mesa Boulevard.

“We are finally getting our fair share,” Struiksma said, although the community of better than 50,000 residents still suffers from traffic congestion, brought on in part by Rancho Penasquitos commuters trying to avoid the gridlock at I-15 on-ramps out of their community.

Putting on the Brakes

Now it is Rancho Penasquitos that is being held up as an example of overdevelopment and of the grass-roots movement of homeowners trying to put the brakes on builders until government can catch up. Now Rancho Penasquitos is being cited as an example of City Hall’s failure to manage growth.

A front-page story in the Wall Street Journal last fall about galloping growth and slow-growth resistance efforts nationwide carried the dateline Rancho Penasquitos, Ca.

Several Rancho Penasquitos residents, including Zaworski-Burke, are in the fore of San Diego activist groups organizing initiative petition drives to put even more stringent growth caps before voters this year.

And, no wonder.

Their community, according to city growth statistics, is suffering the worst impacts of runaway development of any neighborhood in the city.

Now it is Rancho Penasquitos residents who are suffering daily waits averaging 20 to 25 minutes, and sometimes stretching to 45 minutes, just to get out of their driveways and onto the freeway to begin their commutes down I-15.

Some innovative motorists have forged new routes out of the community--south through Mira Mesa or west through residential neighborhoods to a bumpy, partially paved shortcut to Interstate 5 at Del Mar.

Off-ramps at Rancho Penasquitos Boulevard and Carmel Mountain Road are a snarl of frustrated drivers who blame the city for their daily ordeal. Adding to the Penasquitos commuters’ outrage is the sight of two completed but unused I-15 interchanges into their community, empty because connecting roads have not been built.

When Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer--who represents Rancho Penasquitos--held a community meeting last fall to air the gripes of residents, she got an earful.

More than 1,000 Rancho Penasquitos residents turned out to decry the overcrowded schools--3,000-plus students in a high school designed for 2,000; the inadequate library--with a capacity of 40 people to serve the community of 35,000 residents; the dangerous intersections without traffic lights; the lack of parks, and, above all, the traffic.

“I can’t blame them one bit,” Wolfsheimer said. “They didn’t expect to have to wait years and years just for a traffic signal.”

Out of those early planning mistakes of the 1960s came a City Council policy proclaiming that development should be allowed only when public facilities, such as schools and roads and sewers, were available. The city has been trying to make good on that promise ever since.

Value of Hindsight

With the clear vision of hindsight, Assistant City Manager Fowler, whose tenure in city government spans three decades, can see why Penasquitos has become the Mira Mesa of the 1980s.

“When we analyzed (city population) growth in 1984, we were convinced that our worst problems were going to occur in the inner city,” in established neighborhoods, Fowler said.

After all, new apartment and condominium construction was booming there, overtaxing the streets, schools and sewers.

“We concentrated our (public) improvements there,” Fowler said. “We were wrong. Suddenly all hell broke loose” in the suburbs.

In the past two years alone, 2,000 homes have been added in Rancho Penasquitos. Demographics, as well as numbers, contributed to the problem.

New arrivals have tended to be younger, two-income families--the only ones who could afford the skyrocketing mortgage payments. As a bedroom community in a commuter society, Rancho Penasquitos outgrew its streets and its freeway ramps.

San Diego has placed ever-increasing fees and stiffer regulations on builders in an attempt to prevent another mistake like Mira Mesa, “but we couldn’t keep pace,” said Mike Stepner, assistant city planning director.

“Sometimes, we have enough money (from developer fees) but we can’t spend it fast enough,” Stepner said. Attempts to pace private development with public improvements failed because “we left one of the main ingredients out of the recipe.”

“We left out a phasing mechanism” requiring that public improvements be in place before additional houses are built, Stepner said.

Now, across most of the growth areas of the city, phasing plans are starting to make a difference. No more building permits will be issued in Penasquitos until a new road is completed, linking Rancho Penasquitos Boulevard to an already built I-15 interchange.

The road--North City Way--is being built by developers and is expected to open in July, giving Penasquitos drivers a third exit to the outside world and a bonus: a two-lane high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) expressway south down I-15 to the California 163 junction. The HOV lanes will operate southbound during the morning commute and reverse to northbound for the afternoon homebound traffic.

Opening of a fourth I-15 interchange serving Penasquitos is another 18 months away. Under the recently imposed traffic phasing plan, Mercy Road must be constructed to link with the idle Mercy Road interchange before nearby subdivisions can be built.

“We have gotten smarter,” said Allen Holden, deputy director of the city transportation and traffic planning division. “We have learned from our mistakes.”

Councilwoman Wolfsheimer has been working for two years on Penasquitos problems with varied results. She views the process as a deadly serious mind game played between city officials and developers.

“I have to keep my eyes open to what’s going on out there all the time,” she said, “or something we think we have achieved is gone.”

For example, in North City West, “plans called for 14 parks at one time and then there were only four. I managed to get three added, but they won’t be in the best locations,” she said. One possible gambit that Wolfsheimer is pondering at the moment is doing away with developer fees and going back to requiring developers to donate suitable sites for schools and parks and other public facilities.

The fee process requires developers to deposit a certain amount of money per dwelling unit or commercial acre into a fund used by the city to buy the sites and build the facilities.

“What happens is that there is never enough money in the fund when the time comes,” she said. “There is an incredible time lag. The land costs have gone up and the preferred sites have been used for something else. It just isn’t working.”

The councilwoman has formed a number of what she calls “DIN committees” to help Rancho Penasquitos. “DIN stands for ‘do it now’ and involves my staff, community leaders, the developers’ representatives and city staff,” she said.

Mim Scott, president of Newland California (formerly Genstar Development Co.), likes the concept of DIN groups, which give everyone the opportunity “of sitting down and getting to know each others’ problems.”

But she points out that “it still takes a year and a half to get a project processed through the city.”

Newland, as a landowner and major developer in Rancho Penasquitos, takes the rap for the community’s inadequacies, Scott said. However, she said, nearly 10,000 units were built before developer fees were imposed and it is hard to correct all the mistakes in a half-built community.

“We still don’t have a handle on the future,” warned Tim O’Connell, planning specialist and chief trouble-shooter for Mayor Maureen O’Connor. “We still don’t have an adequate means to monitor growth and so there is no guarantee that we won’t make the same mistake--a misjudgment, really--again.”

Assessment District?

One possible approach to solving Rancho Penasquitos problems would be a communitywide assessment district on existing households, but O’Connell sees a bleak future for such a tax.

“It sounds logical, to ask people who want services to pay for them,” O’Connell said, “but it is probably politically unrealistic. The general attitude among homeowners is that ‘I pay taxes and the city should provide the services.’ ”

Fowler said that an assessment on existing property “has been kicked around” in upper echelons at City Hall, but the problems are many and the benefits questionable.

Zaworski-Burke concedes that neither “developer bashing” by irate residents nor “environment bashing” by over-ambitious developers is going to resolve Penasquitos problems. She says the community may need to accept further development, in order to get the money for public services.

“The community and the developer will always be adversaries,” she said, “and San Diego will never again be a Garden of Eden. It is Paradise Lost.”