SAN MARCOS: City a Growth Control Pioneer : San Marcos: Growth Control Leader

When talk comes to growth control and growth management, San Marcos officials sound a bit smug. They say they think they know what works, and what doesn’t, because they have tried just about all the techniques of controlling the pace of growth in their 25-year-old city.

San Marcos incorporated primarily to fend off aggressive annexations from Escondido to the east. In those early days, when bigger was better, San Marcos’ growth took its own pace as a function of market conditions.

Housing tracts sprouted in pastures, and mom-and-pop industries took form beneath ticky-tacky Quonset huts and side-by-side warehouse buildings.

Over the years, the city became sophisticated, and, in the late ‘70s, so-called slow-growth candidates won election to the City Council, saying enough was enough.

And so it was in 1978 that San Marcos became the first community in San Diego County to establish building caps--artificial limits on the number of residential building permits issued. Any given year, only 200 to 500 units were authorized for construction in San Marcos.

There was, curiously now, little negative reaction from the development industry. For starters, North County’s sewer districts were overtaxed and had imposed their own residential construction moratoriums, the need for which was undisputed.

Moreover, the economy took a downturn in the late ‘70s, and there simply wasn’t the rush to build residential projects. Indeed, building permits went unclaimed altogether.

That changed in 1982, however, when interest rates lowered, the building industry burst back to life and builders were literally camping out in front of San Marcos City Hall to be first in line to receive the city’s allotment of building permits.

On paper, the city was to decide which builders’ projects were most worthy, and to grade them to determine which builders should receive how many permits.

“But we had trouble being that subjective, so it turned out being a first-come, first-served basis,” said City Manager Rick Gittings.

The quota further backfired, he said. “Developers who wanted to put in master-planned communities and were willing to put in the necessary public facilities--roads, sewers, parks and the rest--were unwilling to step forward because they needed more than 100 or 200 building permits for their project.”

The developers, he said, were afraid of committing millions of dollars for public improvements, only to end up with far fewer building permits than they needed to make their project feasible.

‘Some Real Dumps’

“As a result, we were only attracting builders of 15-unit apartments who could barely afford to build the street in front of their complex,” Gittings said. “What we wanted were well-planned, quality developments, and we found ourselves going in the opposite direction.”

Said Mayor Lee Thibadeau: “We were ahead of our time with building caps. We had the toughest, most restrictive ordinance in the county, but quality developers said they didn’t have time for us, and they decided to look elsewhere. So, all we got was hodgepodge. If you look at what was built in San Marcos during that time, it would make you sick. We got some real dumps.”

In 1983, the building caps were eliminated, and the City Council decided that it would be better to let growth take its course under the guidelines of the city’s general plan--but only if the developer paid for the necessary improvements to ensure there would be no compromise on so-called quality-of-life issues: traffic congestion, crowded parks, crowded schools and the like.

A community task force was established in 1986 to review the 25,000-population city’s general plan and to propose an ordinance, to be put up for voter approval, to govern the city’s growth through development requirements.

That proposed ordinance will be put before San Marcos voters June 7. If approved--and there is no ballot argument in opposition--the ordinance would carry the weight of a citywide vote validating what the San Marcos City Council has begun requiring in recent years on its own: that residential developers pay for public works projects so the growth in population their projects bring will not burden existing streets, parks, fire protection and schools.

Already Enforced

“I don’t know who will vote against it,” Thibadeau said. “It was prepared and written by all the againsters to growth.”

The essence of the ordinance already is being enforced by City Council action. The Baldwin Co., which is preparing to build 1,559 homes on 500 acres over the next eight years near Palomar Community College, has been required by the city to construct a fire station and an elementary school, and to provide for parks, streets, sewers and other necessary improvements.

Claudia Troisi, project manager for Baldwin in San Marcos, said the improvements will cost more than $20 million, eventually to be passed on to home buyers.

“In communities where we are participating in growth, we want to participate in a positive fashion,” she said. “Building caps won’t resolve problems with overcrowded schools, because they will remain crowded even if there is no more building.”

Thibadeau said he doesn’t understand why other cities, such as Oceanside and Carlsbad, have adopted building caps, and why San Diego is considering it.

“We’ve learned through our own hard knocks that it doesn’t work,” Thibadeau said. “Building caps sound sexy, but they don’t work, and some of these cities will be stuck with them for a long time, since they are ballot issues.

“The sensible approach is to work with the quality developers, but to force them to improve the quality of life when they build as the cost of the privilege to build in your city,” Thibadeau said.