Panel Tops Off Growth Plan for City

An advisory panel writing a growth-management plan for San Diego wrapped up 16 months of deliberations Wednesday by adding a controversial “killer clause” to the blueprint.

The panelists also rebuffed efforts to limit home building until the city improves its air and water quality, sewage treatment, transportation system and trash-disposal system.

Building Portion Is Honed

In a seven-hour session, the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Growth and Development also fine-tuned its proposal for a five-year cap on home building before sending the San Diego City Council its 37-page document, intended to guide the city’s growth into the next century.

The far-reaching plan also contains detailed protections for the city’s canyons, slopes, and flood plains as well as measures to unclog freeways and proposals to preserve the character of urban neighborhoods.

The council, which will spend the week of June 20 working on the plan, can alter it in any fashion before putting it on the Nov. 8 ballot, where it will compete with the more stringent Quality of Life Initiative. That measure, which seeks stricter limits on growth than the city-sponsored measure, qualified for the ballot through the petition process.

The nine council members are certain to come under intense pressure to rewrite the plan from environmentalists, who believe the advisory panel’s version was weakened by developers, and from developers, who believe it is too strict.

Developer representatives on the advisory panel “systematically weakened or destroyed any tough portion of this initiative,” said Peter Navarro, a University of San Diego economist who served on the panel and is a member of the citizens group that devised the competing ballot measure.

Mike Helmer, first vice president of the Building Industry Assn., said, “My desperate hope is that the council will unload the baggage that has been hoisted onto this product in hopes that it would be more salable.” Helmer’s group opposes growth caps, and much of the plan’s protections for so-called “environmentally sensitive lands.”

The killer clause makes the competition between the two growth proposals a winner-take-all affair. If each plan receives more than 50% of the vote, the one with the fewer votes will have no effect. But Robert Freilich, the panel’s consultant, told the group that the legality of such a clause is open to question while a judge rules on a lawsuit filed to overturn a similar clause contained in a Carlsbad growth plan.

Besides approving a five-year building cap of 41,829 homes for the years 1989-94, the advisory panel proposed that the city not allow more than 8,366 homes to be built in any one year. However, the annual caps could be adjusted by as much as 20%, as long as the five-year limit is not exceeded.

The panel rejected a measure to cut home-building by 5% for each year that the city fails to meet certain standards for air and water quality, sewage treatment, transportation and solid-waste disposal.