Slow-Growth Advocates Win Majority on Escondido Council

Slow-growth Councilman Jerry Harmon, often the lone Escondido City Council vote against development projects, has become king of the hill in his North County community. He and the two candidates he endorsed were voted into office Tuesday, while three-term Councilman Doug Best was soundly defeated.

Harmon, who led the crowded slate of 16 candidates by garnering 17.8% of the votes cast, was credited by election analysts with aiding slow-growth newcomers Carla DeDominicis and Kris Murphy in their victories over 13 others in the council race.

Victory for the slow-growthers, nicknamed the “the troika,” heralds a new ballgame in town, most poll watchers believe, because they will represent a majority on the five-member council. DeDominicis, 34, an attorney and former Escondido newspaper reporter, and Murphy, 26, a small-business operator, have campaigned hard on growth issues espoused by Harmon, who has been the lone slow-growth advocate on the Escondido council for nearly two decades.

DeDominicis, joyous at winning on her first try for political office, said the election results showed “a clear-cut mandate across the boards” for reining in the rapid pace of development.

In Escondido, a city whose name has become synonymous with rapid development, DeDominicis said, “these results should send a message to cities throughout the county” on the mood of voters faced with increasing traffic congestion, smog and the other urban ills that rapid growth brings.

Murphy, who has had a couple of near-victories in earlier council races, said his priority after taking office July 5 will be to “implement a growth-management policy with teeth in it.”

Murphy spent part of his campaigning time in supporting South Escondido property owners seeking revocation of a San Diego-Escondido land sale that would allow a private developer to build a housing development and public golf course north of Lake Hodges.

Will Continue Battle

He figures that the issue “cost me a few votes” from golfers and those who favored the new development, but he pledged to continue his fight to have the “insider deal” revoked and the project opened to all bidders, not the single developer selected by the current council to develop the property and golf course.

Best, saying that he is not bitter about his loss, blamed it on the “no-growth hysteria” sweeping North County.

“It will take a while for the citizens of this town to realize what they’ve done to themselves,” Best said. “They have put us in a czar situation--Jerry Harmon and his troika.”

Best said he will not seek office outside Escondido and will not oppose fellow council members Doris Thurston and Ernie Cowan in the 1990 race.

Mayor Jim Rady, who decided after 12 years that he had been on the council long enough and did not run for reelection, did not think Tuesday’s returns showed the formation of a new slow-growth power bloc on the council.

He said that DeDominicis, for one, “is an independent, and not one to follow whatever Jerry says,” referring to Harmon.

Rady also said that the approval by voters of ballot measures making the mayor’s office elective--eliminating a council seat--and selecting a two-year term for the elective office will allow Harmon to run for the top post and remain a councilman if he loses.

Council members Cowan and Thurston, whose terms expire in two years, would have the choice, if they decide to try to remain on the council, to either oppose each other for the lone council seat or run for mayor.

One of the most emotional issues on the Escondido ballot, and one credited with bringing out 49% of the registered voters, was a rent-control initiative for mobile homes, which won easily with 58% approval.

The proposal, which faced a well-financed, professionally run campaign by mobile-home park owners who backed an opposing “fair property rights” ballot measure, calls for rolling back mobile home rents to a Jan. 1, 1986, level, restricting increases to cost-of-living advances and instituting a rent appeals board consisting of the five-member Escondido City Council to settle disputes between tenants and owners.

The opposing property-rights measure, which would have prohibited the City Council from setting sale, lease or rent levels on private property, lost, receiving 43% of the votes.

Best, who championed the property-rights measure, apparently suffered from association with it. He finished fifth in his bid for a fourth term, receiving only 7.1% of the vote.

Escondidans also turned down an initiative measure that would have preserved the 50-year-old adobe building that formerly housed the main city fire station and approved an increase in the hotel-motel tax from 6% to 8%.

The old fire station stands at the busy intersection of Grand Avenue and Valley Boulevard, in the way of Palomar Medical Center expansion plans. The voter rejection will allow hospital officials to proceed to raze the building and former City Hall to make way for an administrative-office wing.

Escondido city Treasurer Kenneth Hugins won over a challenger, Vince Barranco, by a 3-2 margin, and Jeanne Bunch was reelected city clerk without opposition.