Debate Over Future Look of La Jolla Now Goes to City Council

As Larry Keller sees it, downtown La Jolla just isn’t what it used to be.

The quiet hamlet he cherished, the village of small seaside shops and curving thoroughfares, has in recent years become a land marked by dense office buildings, crowded condominium complexes and traffic-choked streets.

Fritz Liebhardt, however, sees a different La Jolla. For him, life in the upscale town beside the Pacific seems pretty darn good. Sure, traffic gets congested on the main roads leading into the area, but he suggests that engineering solutions are at hand. And if things are so bad, he ponders, why do so many folks keep flocking to the area?

Keller and Liebhardt represent two sides in a debate over the future of downtown La Jolla. Tonight, that debate will unfold before the San Diego City Council, which will consider adopting key changes in a planning blueprint governing land-use decisions in the tony, palm-studded village.

A local planning group has recommended that the council substantially revise the key land-use document for downtown La Jolla, adopting changes that would slash the height and size of office buildings and dramatically reduce the density of condominiums and apartments to be built in the years to come.

Composed of members from the La Jolla Town Council and the La Jolla Community Planning Assn., the group has been busy for eight months drafting the new proposal, which it says is needed to prevent the traffic ills in the community from getting worse.

In addition, the group suggests the new regulations are needed to ensure that the “visual density” of the downtown begins to veer back toward the days of yore, when one- and two-story buildings dominated the landscape.

The changes being proposed cover four key areas:

- Office space would be limited to 1,000 square feet on a single lot, regardless of the size of the lot. This dramatic move is designed to discourage development of new office complexes in the community.

- The bulk and floor space of new commercial structures would be slashed in half in many cases.

- The height of new buildings would be limited to 24 feet instead of 30 and two stories instead of three.

- Residential densities for new condominiums and apartments in the downtown region, which stretches north from Pearl Street to the Pacific, would be reduced by about 50%.

“I think there’s a broad base of community support” in La Jolla for the proposal, said Keller, a member of the La Jolla Community Planning Assn. and a participant in the group that is proposing the revisions. “What we’re seeing in La Jolla is a microcosm of all of San Diego.”

But opponents of the changes, such as Liebhardt, say there is no strong consensus. Two months ago, he and other foes of the new measures banded together as La Jollans for Responsible Planning. Since then, they’ve taken out newspaper ads and manned phone banks in an all-out effort to convince residents that the changes should not be enacted.

“We feel their use of the traffic situation as justification for this proposal is nothing short of a ruse,” said Liebhardt, the group’s chief spokesman. “Really what they’re looking for has nothing to do with traffic, but rather with an effort to pull up the ladder behind them, to say, ‘I got mine; now go find yours somewhere else.’ ”

Just what the council will do about the dispute remains clouded. Most council members were reluctant Monday to say which way they were leaning on the issue.

Councilwoman Judy McCarty said she would listen to testimony, but worries that the community is too split to justify the council backing one side over another right now.

Councilman Bob Filner, meanwhile, said he is concerned because the proposal has not been reviewed by the city Planning Department.

An aide to Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer, whose district includes La Jolla, said the councilwoman traditionally has backed the recommendations of the local planning group. Wolfsheimer could not be reached.

Councilman Ron Roberts suggested that the changes appear to be on the right track, but said some of the proposals seem too strict. Moreover, the land-use changes need to go hand-in-hand with road improvements at key problem spots, he said.

“We don’t need to spend $50,000 studying this,” Roberts said. “To me, there’s no reason this can’t all be worked out during the next two weeks.”

Several options are open to the council. It can approve the suggestions outright, or it can ask its planning staff for input. A third option has been suggested by city planners and the city’s Planning Commission, which has recommended that the issue be put off until October, 1989, the five-year birthday of the original land-use blueprint that now regulates La Jolla.

That planning document, called the La Jolla Planned District Ordinance, was approved in 1984 after more than two years of often-heated debate.

Liebhardt and his group contend that the document deserves to be tested over the five-year stretch, but Keller and other supporters of the changes suggest five years is just an arbitrary number and that the time for action is now.

Moreover, Keller said, the council promised when it approved the La Jolla ordinance in 1984 that the plan would be interim in nature, something to be reviewed and perhaps revised after a city traffic study was completed.

That study was completed in September, 1985, and recommended that several major roads through La Jolla be widened and improved, said Keller, an attorney. The report also noted that the building densities being allowed at the time would lead to “intolerable traffic conditions” along roads leading into the community, which is nestled between Mt. Soledad and the Pacific.

“Now here we are, in 1988, and they were right,” Keller said, arguing that the situation only promises to get worse if something isn’t done soon. About 200,000 square feet of office space in La Jolla has yet to be occupied, meaning even more traffic could soon be cascading onto the streets when those open suites are finally leased, he said.

A delay of 18 months, as is being recommended by city planners, would only allow that many more months of high-density growth to occur in downtown La Jolla, Keller said.

Liebhardt, meanwhile, insists that the real solution is being ignored. To ease traffic problems, he said, road improvements need to be made. Unfortunately, those improvements have been blocked by the same groups pushing for the changes in La Jolla’s planning blueprint, he said.

A draftsman for a local architecture firm, Liebhardt said property owners in the downtown region were not properly notified of the proposed changes nor given sufficient chance to comment.

“There hasn’t been a chance for opposing voices to be heard,” Liebhardt said.