San Clemente Growth Initiative Targeted

Marblehead, a limited partnership, filed a petition in Orange County Superior Court on Friday in an effort to remove the San Clemente Sensible Growth and Traffic Control measure from the city’s June 7 ballot.

Defendants in the suit are the Citizens for Sensible Growth and Traffic Control, Orange County Registrar of Voters Don Tanney and the San Clemente City Council, which voted unanimously March 2 to place its residents’ petition on the ballot.

Marblehead is a limited partnership with the Lusk Co. of Irvine as the general partner that has been developing 1,000 acres of property in San Clemente since 1979.

Marblehead’s petition follows other recent court actions attempting to remove a similar countywide initiative from the county’s June 7 ballot. Both the city and county slow-growth measures would require developers to meet stringent traffic-flow and other requirements before developments could proceed.

In addition to asking the City Council to remove the measure from the ballot, Marblehead’s petition asks for a judge’s ruling on the initiative’s validity, alleging that it is unconstitutional and violates California statutes.

Donald Steffensen, Lusk’s executive vice president, declared Friday in a written statement: “The initiative actually takes away planning authority from the elected leaders and sets up unreasonable and sometimes even impossible target levels for traffic flow, police protection, fire protection, paramedic services, flood control and parklands.”

San Clemente City Atty. Jeffrey M. Oderman could not be reached for comment.

Recently, the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California, the Commercial Industrial Development Assn. and the Orange County Chamber of Commerce filed a lawsuit in Superior Court to remove the county’s slow-growth initiative from the June ballot. And this week, the Irvine City Council voted to file legal papers seeking to make the city a party to that lawsuit, with the intention of defending the initiative.

San Clemente residents started their own petition drive for a city initiative because the county’s applies only to unincorporated areas.

The Marblehead property in San Clemente includes a coastal bluff that was proposed as a site for the Richard Nixon Presidential Library before that project was switched to Yorba Linda.