Filner Wants Answers on Master Plan, Funding : Balboa Park Building Ban Is Proposed

San Diego City Councilman Bob Filner has released proposals on the future of Balboa Park that emphasize the expansion of open space and call for a building moratorium until financing for improvements and access to the park via a shuttle system is assured.

Filner, voicing concern that a piecemeal approach to improving the park has precluded comprehensive planning, called on the council and city officials to adopt a clear-cut master plan before going ahead with individual decisions such as where to locate parking garages. The park is in the 8th District, which Filner represents.

Filner released his memo Monday, hours before the council agreed to delay discussion of a new master plan for 90 days to allow more work by City Manager John Lockwood’s staff. A proposal in the April 1 draft of the master plan to add a surcharge to ticket prices charged by museums, theaters and the San Diego Zoo has engendered those institutions’ opposition, and they have asked for time to develop alternatives.

Mayor Opposes Surcharge

Under sharp questioning from O’Connor, who said she adamantly opposes a surcharge, Lockwood said the idea is just one of many for financing the $99 million in needed improvements in Balboa Park.

Filner’s call for a “pedestrian-oriented, not auto-oriented park,” includes recommendations that the city explore a shuttle system to carry visitors into the park’s core from outlying parking lots--a suggestion that already is scheduled for a summer, 1989, experiment--and that it consider creating trolley or bus routes to carry people to the park.

Filner also said he wants the council to take no action that would preclude the eventual closing of the Cabrillo Bridge to vehicles, and supports the construction of only one parking garage, to be situated at the Organ Pavilion.

The building moratorium proposal, which would remain in effect until the council agreed to return the Prado and Palisades area to pedestrian plazas and implement shuttle access to the park, puts Filner in the path of the expansion plans of many of the cultural institutions in the park’s core.

Jeffrey Kirsch, executive director of the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theater, said he would oppose a moratorium. The space theater could be the first Balboa Park institution to come before the council with expansion plans, which consist of doubling its size at a cost of $17.5 million. Kirsch said the organization expects to ask the council for conceptual approval of its plan late this summer.