It Takes Money and Clear Language : Slow-Growth Backers Get a Painful Political Lesson

The slow-growth movement, which has hopes of sweeping California like a Proposition 13 prairie fire, was given some painful political lessons in Tuesday’s election.

One was that a well-financed, well-planned advertising campaign, pointing out ambiguities and possible weaknesses of complex slow-growth citizen initiatives, can defeat them. That was demonstrated by the rejection Tuesday of such measures in Orange County and Pasadena.

Speaking of the Orange County proposal, UC Irvine Professor Mark Baldassare, who conducted pre-election polls for The Times, said: “The supporters never really had an effective campaign of explaining to people the benefits of the measure.”

That left them vulnerable to a well-financed attack--almost $2 million for the opponents against $48,000 for supporters--in the final days, Baldassare said.

A second lesson is that slow-growth movements remain, by and large, local phenomena, with fates determined by local conditions. This means that a statewide slow-growth initiative probably is not going to occur anytime soon.

“I do not think slow growth is ready for a statewide campaign,” Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, the area’s major regional planning organization. “It is spotty and depends on what is happening in a given geographical area. It is very intense, but in specific areas.”

That was clear in a survey of local elections. In defeating Orange County’s Measure A, voters rejected the idea of linking growth in unincorporated areas to the provision of traffic, fire, police and parks services. By contrast, a similar measure was passed in the Orange County city of San Clemente, in an area that strongly supported the countywide initiative.

Sonoma County turned down a proposal to limit local government’s power to regulate land use. Chico voters rejected a 749-acre residential development. Kern County voters said no to a proposal for a solid waste disposal facility in an unpopulated area.

Runoff for Antonovich

And in Los Angeles County, County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who was attacked for months by nine under-financed challengers for accepting campaign contributions from developers and supporting large new residential projects, was forced into a runoff with Baxter Ward, whom Antonovich defeated in 1980.

Throughout the campaign, growth was the challengers’ main issue in a district that contains the bulk of the county’s undeveloped land. The district, the 5th, extends from the Santa Monica Mountains through the San Fernando Valley to the San Gabriel Valley and contains some of the area’s hottest centers of slow-growth activity, including the Santa Monica Mountains, the Santa Clarita Valley and the western and far northern San Fernando Valley.

Difficult to Predict

Political leaders, pollsters and campaigners agreed in interviews Wednesday that it is difficult to make firm predictions about the fate of a movement so complex that its name, “slow growth,” falls far short of describing it.

“It is not a simple issue,” Pisano said.

For example, the California Assn. of Realtors’ list of development-related issues on Tuesday’s ballot included local measures around the state to deal with traffic, limit construction, save an old fire station and allow the building of an oil facility.

If they have a common thread, it is that they all deal with the quality of life in communities in a state where good living, free from congestion and hassle, has always been a main component of the California dream.

In the shorthand favored by journalists, politicians and campaign managers, all these issues have been lumped together in what is known in headlines, newspaper leads, and broadcast news as the “slow-growth movement.” In the last few months, it has started taking a formal shape. Leaders of the movement from several communities have been meeting and are organizing a statewide group. Some have been talking about organizing a statewide initiative campaign to put some sort of growth-control measure on the state law books.

Fueled Enthusiasm

Several victories for such measures in Northern California over the last several years, and a growing number in the south, have fueled their enthusiasm into hope that the movement can become another Proposition 13, the tax limit that swept into law a decade ago.

So popular was Proposition 13 that it moved into the ranks of California political prairie fires, a descriptive term first popularized by Ronald Reagan when he correctly predicted his 1966 gubernatorial campaign would sweep the state in the manner of a wind-blown Great Plains conflagration.

But looking over the Orange County results, political consultant Kenneth Khachigian, an adviser to President Reagan and Gov. George Deukmejian, said the slow-growth movement is not yet of Proposition 13 proportions.

“Proposition 13 was directed to a statewide problem that universally affected everybody and met a need--a lot of people were getting priced out of their homes,” he said. “You had basically greedy state and local governments doing nothing to relieve the people as inflation hit in the ‘70s. You just tapped into that resentment.”

Orange County’s measure, like all the slow-growth movements, was much more local.

It would have tied future growth to the ability of developers to meet standards for easing traffic and providing flood control, parks and public safety. Certain levels would have been required for those services before some developments were allowed.

It was designed to hit hard at local concerns about growing congestion on freeways and streets, caused by booming commercial and residential construction.

Even in the drafting stage, however, some of those familiar with the plan believed its provisions dealing with easing traffic were confusing.

“Translating traffic control into a citizen initiative is a difficult proposition,” said Mark Weinberger of the San Francisco environmental law firm of Shute, Mihaly and Weinberger, which represented the sponsors in a legal dispute over the measure. “Voters had to perceive the regulations in the initiative would translate into improvements in the freeways and the arterials and this is a difficult proposition to sell.”

Center of Attack

Raising big sums from developers and other businesses, opponents centered their attack on such complexities in the measure’s language.

“Two weeks before the election, when I saw (the opponents’) material, I thought it was going down to defeat because their message was good, they were giving an extremely educational, informational message about the problems the measure would create,” said Khachigian, a critic of the measure.

Both he and some supporters agreed that the proponents failed to answer the attack--because they could not meet the huge spending of their foes and because they didn’t make a strong effort to raise money for a counterattack.

“What you had here was a bunch of guys who were full of themselves, sort of thinking they were the new Howard Jarvises, and they learned a lesson that you can’t put an extreme thing on the ballot and expect it to pass,” Khachigian said.

“The main thing about it was that when all was said and done, people realized that it would not solve the county’s most pressing problem, which was traffic,” said pollster Baldassare.

Traffic Wouldn’t Improve

“In the last poll we did for The Times, we found that the best message that opponents could give was that the measure would not improve traffic. That was the message that people heard during the month and they came to believe it because they did not hear any message to the contrary.”

In Pasadena, where voters turned down a measure that would have placed a moratorium on major projects, the same pattern was followed on a smaller scale. Opponents outspent proponents $130,000 to $7,000 and attacked the language of the measure. In this case, they said it was too extreme and complex.

The lessons of Tuesday’s elections are being studied by rival forces in the area’s next big quality-of-life campaign, the November battle in Los Angeles over an initiative designed to stop Occidental Petroleum Corp.’s plan to drill for oil off Pacific Palisades.

Occidental is planning to put large amounts of money into the campaign. Proponents, while not able to match Occidental’s financing, say they will not make the mistake of the Orange County slow-growth forces and lose by default.

Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, an oil drilling foe, said “we are starting behind the 8-ball” because of campaign finances, but Occidental “will not go unanswered.”

Times researcher Cecilia Rasmussen contributed to this story.