Local News in Brief : Countywide : Slow-Growth Advocates to Discuss State Effort

Orange County slow-growth advocates will join counterparts from Riverside, San Diego and Los Angeles counties in San Diego today to begin mapping a plan of cooperation that could lead to a statewide growth-control initiative, activist Tom Rogers said Monday.

Rogers said the meeting will follow the filing of more than 70,000 signatures collected by San Diego’s Citizens for Limited Growth on behalf of a proposed initiative there that is similar to the Orange County measure that will appear on the June 7 ballot.

“It may be a meeting just to decide to keep meeting and nothing more, but I’d like to see a statewide effort discussed,” Rogers said.

“The state highway system isn’t covered by the county-by-county initiatives, and we need something that cranks in measures of what’s allowable in the way of growth given current and project capacity on state roads, not just county roads,” he added.

Rogers is co-founder of Orange County Tomorrow, the group that drafted the countywide slow-growth initiative and formed Citizens for Sensible Growth and Traffic Control, the campaign organization which supports the measure.