Battle on Building Comes Down to San Diego’s Hills and Valleys

Cypress Canyon is not the easiest place to build homes. A slim, deep basin, its sides slope steeply upward to scrub-covered ridges that run crookedly along its edges.

To build there, and on the rest of the 2,000-acre Miramar Ranch North community where plans call for 4,650 homes and 121 acres of light industry, those slopes must be made more gradual, with flat areas to accommodate homes.

Bulldozers will do the work, slicing off the tops of narrow ridges and bumpy hills and filling the canyons with that earth in more than half of the parcel.

To the building industry, such grading is a fact of life in a city that has all but run out of the mesas that make inviting locations for economical tract housing.

Fighting for Hills

“A developer’s ideal land is a flat mesa,” said Bill Rick, chairman of the board of Rick Engineering, which is planning the grading of Miramar Ranch North for BCE Development Inc. “That’s not a choice in 1988. It’s all gone.”

But to environmentalists like Lynn Benn, a city planning commissioner and Sierra Club member, those facts are nothing short of heresy.

“If the developers had their way,” Benn said, “they’d turn San Diego into Kansas.”

That, in its simplest form, is the essence of the “environmentally sensitive lands” conflict that erupted in acrimony this week at a meeting of the advisory panel mapping the city’s future growth plan.

In a city whose remaining open space is largely hilly, environmentalists are determined to protect that land--along with floodplains, wetlands, significant archeological sites and animal habitats--from an industry that needs flat parcels for its very existence.

But developers argue that the so-called “sensitive lands initiative,” written by San Diegans for Managed Growth to accomplish those goals, is so broad, so vague and so stringent that it is unworkable and sometimes illegal.

San Diegans for Managed Growth originally planned to put their plan before voters by gathering signatures on petitions, but dropped that plan because they lacked the money and manpower to succeed.

Instead, they have joined the city’s growth plan deliberations, hashing out their differences with development industry representatives at the meetings of the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Growth and Development. On Wednesday, the panel cast its first votes on recommendations that will be sent to the San Diego City Council--touching off angry exchanges when environmentalists claimed that a coalition of developers and swing voters “gutted” their plan.

5-Year Growth Cap

The nine council members can change the plan in any way they want before submitting it to voters for the Nov. 8 ballot as part of an overall strategy that currently includes a five-year growth cap.

That day, the measures will compete with the Quality of Life Initiative, the tougher, citizen-sponsored growth-cap proposal that has qualified for the ballot via the petition process. It contains many of the same stringent protections of environmental lands that can be found in the original draft of the San Diegans for Managed Growth plan.

The growth caps propose to tell the building industry how many homes it can build. The sensitive lands provisions would tell builders where they can build those homes, and how densely they can cluster them.

In that way, they are the arena for a struggle over the future of the 40,335 acres of slopes and 7,653 acres of floodplains and coastal wetlands that collectively compose about 25% of the city’s 210,087 acres.

No one has calculated how much of that land remains undeveloped, or how much development would be stopped by the passage of a sensitive lands initiative. The San Diego Association of Governments is presently conducting such a review and the city’s planning staff has proposed to map all the sensitive lands citywide.

In a presentation to the advisory panel Wednesday, Pardee Construction Co. officials showed that San Diegans for Managed Growth’s initiative would reduce the number of homes that various developers could build in Otay Mesa from 19,062 to 9,289. Other limiting factors would decrease that number to 5,926 homes.

Ann Hix, a principal planner with the city, said that she and a colleague reviewed the Pardee maps and agree with the analysis.

Land use attorney Paul Peterson, who is leading the development industry opposition to the plan, said that in current form it would preclude construction of more than half the homes planned for Miramar Ranch North. Rick believes that, as a practical matter, the entire project would be economically impossible.

Environmentalists assert that their plan merely collects existing environmental protections--including coastal regulations, the city’s Hillside Review regulations and its Resource Protection Overlay Zone--and removes the discretion given to council members to override those provisions.

In that way, the measure would remove the temptation for cash-starved city officials to trade development rights to hillsides, canyons and floodplains for the roads, schools, parks and libraries that developers have the money to build.

Closing Loopholes

“We’re taking out all sorts of discretion and the cracks and the loopholes that have allowed . . . the destruction of whole areas,” said Bob Glaser, an attorney and member of San Diegans for Managed Growth.

Developers claim that the provisions are far more strict than current regulations, even with some of the concessions to builders that the advisory panel approved Wednesday. Hix, of the city’s planning department, agrees with them.

“I think that the sensitive lands initiative, in any form that is currently proposed, is considerably stricter than anything the city has on the books,” she said. “I’m not making a judgment whether that is good or bad. But it is much stricter and will have a very real effect on how much developable land will be available.”

Its authors claim that the initiative is an effort to halt the wholesale grading and filling of San Diego’s unique topography by forcing developers to build on natural contours--not a method of halting development. But they agree that the considerable “downzoning” of much of the city’s land--decreasing of the number of homes allowed per acre--will significantly decrease the amount of home building in the city.

“I’ve always defined or boiled down the initiative to the basic philosophy that we are attempting to define where we will grow by defining where we will not grow,” Glaser said. “We are attempting to go after the geographic character, which indirectly gives the community its character.”

Focusing on Topography

To accomplish that, floodplains, wetlands and any slope steeper than 25% and taller than 25 feet would be off-limits to home building. Such sensitive lands in the city’s northern tier would be downzoned to allow one home per 10 acres--essentially an agricultural zone. Property in the city’s urbanized sections would be downzoned to one home per acre.

If 75% or more of a parcel is covered by hillsides, small portions of it would be available for development.

Exemptions could only be granted to property owners who proved that the initiative deprives them of all use of their land, and gets seven votes on the nine-member council in favor of an exemption. Developers want that number decreased to five votes.

The initiative’s authors, who originally had no exemption clause, said that they included that provision as a concession in a deal with Mayor Maureen O’Connor that they thought would win placement of the initiative on the June ballot. Instead, the council’s Rules Committee, which O’Connor heads, gave the initiative to the advisory panel for inclusion in the general growth plan.

O’Connor’s land-use aide, Tim O’Connell, said that the mayor never agreed to place the measure on the June ballot.

Developers say that some of the measure’s provisions are unworkable or illegal. Depriving someone of all reasonable use of his land is unconstitutional, industry officials said, and could result in litigation that forces the city to buy that land from the owner.

“I’d say that you have a combination of things that could result in invalidation (by courts) and other things that could result in a tremendous liability to the city,” Peterson said.

Mission Valley Project

The initiative is silent on whether a huge project in Mission Valley, where Chevron Land Development Co. has already committed to spend $200 million for homes, hotels and 2.6 million square feet of office space, would be precluded by the floodplain rules. The initiative’s authors say that they do not intend to prevent that development, and in last week’s committee meeting, it appeared to win a recommendation for an exemption.

With hillsides in the urbanized areas protected by the ordinance, anyone who wants to remodel a home, or even remove a wall, would be forced to go through a public hearing to receive the necessary permit, said Kim Kilkenny, legislative counsel for the Construction Industry Federation.

“What public interest is there in forcing hundreds, if not thousands of property owners to undergo a public hearing?,” Kilkenny asked.

Glaser said that the initiative never intended such effects, but that the center city was not specifically excluded because its authors were afraid to set a precedent by allowing exemptions of any kind.

“If somebody can figure out a way to write a definition that does what we want in the rest of the city and doesn’t include downtown, we’ll listen to it,” he said.

Glaser believes that sensitive lands protection, particularly hillside and canyon safeguards, is inevitable--either with his group’s initiative or through individual community plans, which are slowly being downzoned. If developers continue to weaken his organization’s plan, and the council adopts their recommendations, voters will respond by voting for the alternative already on the ballot.

“If the council decides to back the developer-written growth-management plan, they’re not going to have San Diegans for Managed Growth and the environmental community out lobbying for the city’s growth-management plan,” Glaser said. “We’ll be out supporting the Quality of Life Initiative.

“We’re going to win that one and then we’re going to come back and say ‘OK, do you want to talk?’ ”