‘Just Too Much’ : That Phrase Sums Up Opinion of Many When Quizzed About Growth Initiative

The time was 4 p.m., the day Tuesday, the location a corner service station near the San Diego Freeway--for many, the final stop before committing the next several hours to gridlock, gas fumes and the punishing pavement.

But if the freeway traffic was at a standstill, opinions were flying.

Just two hours earlier, Orange County Superior Court Judge John C. Woolley had ruled in favor of the so-called slow-growth initiative, ensuring a place on the June 7 countywide ballot for the measure--one that many Orange County residents consider an antidote to too much civilization and that many others consider economic anathema.

“I’m all for that,” said Bill Fairclough, a 27-year-old construction worker from Costa Mesa. “It would mean I’m out of work, but there’s way too much congestion here.”

A self-proclaimed nature freak and holder of strong opinions, Fairclough said Tuesday that he would happily “give up a few dollars an hour to stop this development.”

Fairclough handed eight quarters to the gas station attendant, reached for the pump, and talked about what he saw as the damage done in Orange County by development, with its attendant parking lots, mini-malls, condominiums and housing tracts.

“This place used to be all orange groves, and you can’t find one anymore, anywhere,” Fairclough mourned. “There’s just too much smog, too much people, too much cars.”

Fairclough was in the majority Tuesday afternoon in both opinion and intensity. Nearly all the dozen or so commuters interviewed randomly shared Fairclough’s support of the initiative and expressed pleasure at Woolley’s decision; even those who disagreed shared Fairclough’s fervor.

“I’ve lived here too long and have seen too much traffic,” said Barbara Hanson, a residential loan officer who lives in Irvine. “On the weekends, it takes 45 minutes to go 10 miles. I went to UCLA and moved away from Los Angeles because it was too crowded.”

Hanson’s office is in Santa Ana, her business territory in Newport Beach, a predicament that puts her on the freeway every day.

“My office is five miles from Newport Beach, and it takes 30 minutes to get to it,” Hanson said. “Too much time is wasted. I’m a commissioned salesperson. It affects the amount of people I can see in a day.”

Money is a potent argument on both sides of the initiative.

It is Hanson’s opinion that dollars go down the drain when she sits behind the wheel instead of behind the desk. In addition, she contends, overbuilding will drive people and business away from a community if it is just too much trouble to patronize.

Durk Collins, a trucking contractor from Santa Ana, voiced the opposite economic argument Tuesday--the belief that passage of the initiative would plunder the county’s prosperity.

“It’ll hit the economy,” the lifelong Orange County resident said. “Everything will move out to the Inland Empire, as far as I can see. . . . It’s great for my property; it’ll probably double in value. But who’s going to buy it?”

Robert J. Uribe, a retired Los Angeles police detective who lives in Huntington Beach, predicted the same economic difficulty as Collins if the initiative passes in June. But that is all the two men shared Tuesday.

Collins said he will vote against the measure, and Uribe said he will cast his ballot in favor of it.

“I think the biggest problem in Orange County is that it grew so all of a sudden,” Uribe said in a telephone interview. “Now they want to put the brakes on it. That’s going to hurt employment, but you have to stop someplace. You just can’t go on and on. The slow-growth initiative will be a solution, but it won’t mean a complete stop.”

Uribe comes by his do-anything-just-curb-traffic-please sentiments honestly, he said. And he finds daily evidence to bolster his opinion. The most recent proof came as he tried to drive to his son’s Los Alamitos home on Sunday.

“It was bumper-to-bumper the whole way in,” complained Uribe, who was one of many Orange County residents surveyed earlier this year in a Times poll about the slow-growth measure. “It was beautiful out there Sunday, and there were more people in the county than you could shake a stick at. I thought there was an accident on the freeway. But then we drove and drove, and I realized it was just the traffic.”

Gary Hemlick of Garden Grove takes perhaps the most local view of the Citizens’ Sensible Growth and Traffic Control Initiative. From his Haster Street home, the measure looks like a very good idea.

“I’ve been in Garden Grove since 1963 and remember back when it used to be just a little side street,” said Hemlick, another respondent to the earlier Times survey. “It’s a major street now, a feeder for the Garden Grove freeway.”

And it is not a playground for Hemlick’s children, who he says are victims of development and traffic in their own right.

“They’re not allowed anywhere near the street,” Hemlick said. “Haster Street averages probably seven accidents in one month. . . . Ten years ago, you could ride your bike down the street and never worry about a car.”