Petition Focuses Attention on Rural Growth Control

A paid petition circulator positioned strategically outside a Del Mar Heights supermarket stopped an exiting shopper in her tracks with two magic words: “Limited growth.”

He quickly got her signature on his petition but not before she confronted him with an angry glance and a sweeping gesture eastward.

“Where were you 20 years ago when it would have done some good?” she asked. “Now, it’s too late.”

2-Lane Roads Vanishing

The shopper was gesturing at North City West, a rapidly forming San Diego suburb where 50,000 people will live by the turn of the century. Two decades ago, the area was rolling countryside, dotted with horse ranches and meandering two-lane roads to nowhere.

Bill McNeely, a retired corporate executive, concedes that the shopper had a point. Most of San Diego County’s coastal plains are carpets of housing tracts where sheep once grazed and streams ran clear and cool.

But, there is still a battle to be fought and won, McNeely said. It is a battle to slow the rate of development to a manageable pace in the 36,000-square-mile unincorporated part of the county and to preserve the rural life style that still exists in communities like Rainbow, Bonsall, Fallbrook, Valley Center, Ramona, Julian, Borrego Springs, Descanso, Pine Valley, Alpine, Campo and Jacumba.

McNeely is the leader of a little-publicized countywide petition drive to put the lid on residential, commercial and industrial development in the hinterlands, where developers are expected to move as cities impose strict growth controls.

The measure, the Rural Preservation and Traffic Control Initiative, is viewed by the construction industry as more oppressive than a San Diego city initiative that already has qualified for the fall ballot. Both initiatives are sponsored by Citizens for Limited Growth, a powerful group of little-known members with the backing of the local Sierra Club and its 11,000 members.

The rural measure puts a numerical cap on new housing in the county’s unincorporated areas, based on a percentage of the number of units built there in the previous year.

Issue Is Taken Further

It also goes several steps further. It limits commercial and industrial growth, gives local planning groups the right to veto any project that requires increased density or smaller lot sizes than the county’s general plan now allows and places strict controls over any development in “sensitive areas” such as stream beds, archeological sites and steep hillsides.

Kim Kilkenny, spokesman for the building industry, views the rural growth initiative as an economic nightmare that would bring a 70% cut in new job creation compared to the banner construction year of 1986. Though most of the jobs lost would be in the construction industry, he said, the impact on the builders would spill over into every other field.

“I lived through a recession,” Kilkenny said, “and the impact of this could be a lot worse.”

McNeely sees no such economic disaster. He sees an apple pie and motherhood issue, which will easily pick up the 58,000-plus signatures needed to put the issue on the November ballot. What he is not so sure of is whether an angel or two will appear to bankroll what could be a tough and expensive fight against development interests this fall.

Developers are expected to raise at least $1 million to fight the rural slow-growth initiative and its sister measure, the Quality of Life initiative that has qualified for the San Diego city ballot, he said.

Howard Greenbaum, a Leucadia resident and a leader in the North County Slow Growth Alliance, joked that the leaders of the Rural Preservation and Traffic Control Initiative have had to rein the enthusiastic paid signature gatherers because, “They are bringing in more signatures than we can pay for.”

Greenbaum, who is running for Congress against incumbent Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad), estimated that the volunteer and paid petition circulators will collect about 85,000 signatures by the June 21 deadline, at a cost to the slow-growth backers of about $50,000.

Negative Reaction Scarce

McNeely said a negative response to the initiative is rare, “except, of course, from the builders.” Some urban dwellers want to know “what’s in it for them” and why they should vote to preserve someone else’s peace and quiet, he said. State law requires a countywide vote, though the initiative would affect land only in the unincorporated area.

Petition circulators have been told not to debate the growth issue with potential signers in an attempt to convert them, but McNeely is under no such gag rule. He will debate the issue at length at the lift of an eyebrow.

“There is something for everybody in this measure,” he said. Take the traffic situation. If commuters think the freeways are too crowded now, then they should vote for the Rural Preservation and Traffic Control measure, he argues. Runaway growth in the unincorporated areas of the county would add just as many more cars to the freeway--and for longer commuting distances--as would runaway growth in the cities.

According to traffic studies, there are now nine miles of congested freeways in the county, McNeely said, and by the year 2010 if we don’t control growth, that figure will “increase nearly nine times, to 80 miles of congestion that we will all have to drive through twice a day.”

The county Board of Supervisors “had the data to back up the need for growth limits two, four, five years ago. They should have acted then,” he said. “Now, they are between a rock and a hard place.”

If supervisors have dodged the growth issue in the past, they are biting the bullet now.

Supervisors George Bailey and John MacDonald, whose districts encompass much of the unincorporated county, are heading up a county effort to find a compromise with the Citizens for Limited Growth by drafting a modified slow-growth initiative.

Diane Barlow Coombs, a Bailey aide, explained that several sections of the rural initiative conflict with state law. For instance, she said, allowing local community planning areas to vote on land-use issues would be possible only after a change in state law.

The modified measure will be ready for a full review by supervisors June 21--the same day that initiative petition circulators must turn in their petitions.

“We’ve left the door open for further talks with them,” Coombs said, referring to the Citizens for Limited Growth, “but the time is getting short.”

She conceded that there might be two or three county growth measures besides two or three City of San Diego growth measures on the November ballot, and “the poor voters are going to be very confused.”

Supervisor Susan Golding is seeking to create a third county ballot measure designed to protect sensitive lands and to channel growth in the unincorporated areas into sites where neither the environment nor the local populace will be inconvenienced.

She is huddling with slow-growth groups, environmentalists and construction industry representatives in a marathon effort to forge an acceptable measure flexible enough to bring the diverse interests together. The group’s efforts will get a public review at a special supervisors’ meeting Thursday.

Golding has no quarrel with most of the stated objectives of the rural initiative but believes that her task force can “reach the same goals” as the Citizens for Limited Growth initiative without plunging the county into a snake pit of legal challenges she feels the rural-preservation measure would cause.

Costly Defense Seen

If the rural initiative is successful in November, the county could be forced to follow its strict growth-control tenets and to defend it against inevitable lawsuits by developers and landowners who contend that it deprives them of their rights, she said, “and we are seeking a measure which would be satisfactory to both sides.”

What would happen, for instance, if Four-S Ranch developers--who have already spent about $50 million on their project west of Rancho Bernardo--were not allowed to proceed? It’s the status of such projects in the pipeline, already granted preliminary county approval, that has stalled a task force agreement on an alternative and more moderate growth-control measure for the unincorporated area, she explained.

Golding pointed out that the county board has been given no credit for the many growth-control measures it has passed or is proposing to pass soon. Supervisors placed a moratorium on increased density in the unincorporated areas two years ago and have bowed to local interests and their desire to remain rural whenever the issue arose, she said.

“The problem is that the general public does not know what we have done, that many of the goals sought in this initiative measure have already been enacted.”

McNeely and Greenbaum feel that the time has passed for compromise, but McNeely admitted “there is still a small window of opportunity” until the final signatures are gathered on the initiative.

“We went to them and asked them to put it on the ballot,” McNeely said of the supervisors. “We were willing to drop our petition campaign and let them have all the credit. But they delayed and delayed. Now, the window of opportunity is closing.”

McNeely said that if the county supervisors field one or more measures designed to keep the initiative from being enacted, its backers will fight back with as much money as they can raise to prevent the competing measures from prevailing at the polls.

‘Worse Than City Measure’

To Kilkenny, spokesman for the Construction Industry Federation, the rural initiative “is far worse than the measure that the limited-growth people (Citizens for Limited Growth) are putting on the San Diego ballot.”

Why? Because the issue strikes at the heart of the region’s economic health--jobs--and takes the decision-making powers out of the hands of the county Board of Supervisors and gives it to rural residents.

“I give them credit for forthrightness. They come right out and say they want to cut down on jobs because people move here for jobs and they don’t want more people,” Kilkenny said.

McNeely counters that the initiative deals with only the unincorporated areas of the county and is designed to protect the rural life style that the residents prefer. Industrial parks and shopping centers don’t belong in the back country, he contends.

McNeely, after his appointment as head of the rural-initiative drive in January, struck out into the hinterlands, visiting the rural planning groups. He was welcomed as a savior by the outback residents, he said, and was granted pledges of volunteers and some money to pursue his cause.

The initiative measure, which fills three legal-size pages with small print, is the thinking of these rural groups and encompasses 23 purposes ranging from preservation of rural environment and agricultural lands to ensuring that approved new developments pay for themselves through development fees to provide for roads, sewers, parks, schools, and the myriad of public services that urbanization demands.

Kilkenny sees a major flaw in the rural initiative. To finance major public improvements, developers must be allowed large-scale development. Without large-scale development, there would be no funds generated for regional facilities, such as freeways, he explained.

“This doesn’t solve the problems of growth, it creates more problems,” Kilkenny said. Among them is the question of local “approval” of proposed development in the area.

County attorneys have confirmed that there are no legally designated local planning areas in the unincorporated area, Kilkenny said. McNeely, who has toured the back country, disagrees. He said that 26 designated planning groups cover “almost every unincorporated acre” outside city limits, state parklands and national forest boundaries.