Citizens-Sponsored Growth Plan Faces Battle With Goliath

As the San Diego City Council begins a crucial week of deliberations on its landmark growth-management plan today, leaders of some of the city’s most powerful institutions are gathering their resources to defeat its citizens-backed competitor, the Quality of Life Initiative, which has already qualified for the Nov. 8 ballot.

Convinced that that stringent slow-growth measure would destroy the city’s economy, a broad-based coalition of business and civic leaders is planning to raise as much as $500,000 to stop the initiative and support the city-sponsored alternative--if it is still a more moderate approach to growth control when the council completes its rewrite of the plan this week.

At the same time, the county’s powerful Building Industry Assn., declaring itself unalterably opposed to any plan that includes a residential building cap, will almost certainly work against both measures in an effort to preserve the status quo, association officials said.

David Versus Goliath

Together, the two strategies appear to set the stage for a David-versus-Goliath conflict, matching a grass-roots campaign orchestrated by the community group, Citizens for Limited Growth, and its allies against the wealth and connections of the newly formed Coalition for a Balanced Environment--and probably the BIA.

“There is absolutely no way the people of San Diego are going to turn down some kind of proposition to limit growth,” said former U.S. Rep. Lionel Van Deerlin, chairman of the new coalition. “I think what we have to do is persuade them that the Quality of Life Initiative is inimical to the broad-scale interests of the community.”

“I think the Quality of Life Initiative is a fraud,” said Herb Cawthorne, president of the Urban League of San Diego and the coalition’s first vice chairman. “I think that (with) every problem it purports to solve, a cursory analysis leads one to believe it is false. It does not stop traffic. It does not stop pollution. It does not stop people from coming here.”

Tom Mullaney, co-chairman of Citizens for Limited Growth, said his organization expected opposition from the types of business and civic leaders represented in the new coalition, people who he claims depend on unfettered growth for their profits.

“We expect the builders to ally themselves with their traditional supporters, and those are the growth industries such as banking and tourism,” Mullaney said. “We don’t see any widespread pro-growth support among most business leaders. Our group contains many business owners who are strong proponents of the Quality of Life Initiative.”

Mullaney declined to identify those supporters.

Fall Campaign Planned

So far, the new coalition is chartered under federal tax laws as an educational foundation whose leaders will disseminate information and testify at this week’s council hearings in an attempt to shape the city-sponsored plan.

But its leaders plan to convert the foundation to a campaign in the fall, one that will probably work for the city’s plan and against the Quality of Life Initiative, they said.

The BIA has no current plans to mount a campaign, said Executive Vice President Robert Morris. For now, it has budgeted a modest $30,000 to $40,000 to deliver its message to the 350 building firms and 600 suppliers and subcontractors that make up its membership, through speaking engagements and BIA publications.

Using Speakers Bureau

BIA members are also addressing organizations such as community planning groups through its speakers bureau, said Jeanette Roache, the BIA’s director of community affairs.

But the association’s newly hired communications consultant, Stephen Coury, said the BIA “cannot rule out” some kind of campaign for the fall, and few observers expect the association to sit on the sidelines while San Diegans vote on two measures that will directly affect its members’ livelihoods.

“As long as there’s a cap involved--of any kind--we will be opposing it,” Roache said. “If that means that we have to campaign hard against it, we will.”

Moderate Controls Sought

The coalition, positioning itself as the rational, centrist alternative to slow-growth and building industry extremists, intends to raise $300,000 to $500,000 to shift public sentiment toward moderate growth controls, said Sara Katz, president of Katz and Associates, the Republican political consulting group hired by the coalition.

While builders, whose negative reputation with voters can be costly to a campaign effort, and prominent environmentalists are not in leadership positions within the coalition, any who support the group’s call for balanced growth controls are welcome in the organization, Katz and others said.

The coalition has already received pledges of $10,000 from Home Federal Savings and Loan Assn., $10,000 from Great American First Savings Bank and $5,000 from the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce.

The Coalition for a Balanced Environment--assembled by a steering committee that included chamber Executive Director Lee Grissom and Louis Wolfsheimer, a prominent land-use attorney and a San Diego Unified Port District commissioner--has enlisted a diverse group to lead it.

In addition to Van Deerlin and Cawthorne, the group boasts arts patron Danah Fayman as second vice president, longtime Navy public relations man Robert Murphy as secretary and Great American First Savings Bank Vice Chairman James Schmidt as treasurer.

The 350-person guest list for its first formal gathering, a Tuesday morning breakfast at the University Club hosted by Home Federal President Robert Adelizzi, reads like a who’s who of prominent San Diegans. University of San Diego President Author Hughes, Port District Commissioner William Rick, Sea World President Robert Gault, and Deloitte, Haskins & Sells head Ronald Burgess have already accepted invitations.

Other invitees include developer Ernest Hahn, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Executive Vice President Peter Jovanovich and Home Federal Chairman Kim Fletcher.

Difference in Caps

At issue are the two slow-growth plans that will be presented to voters in November. The city-sponsored plan, which still may be changed by the council, calls for the building of 41,829 homes over the next five years and includes provisions designed to assure that schools, roads, fire stations and other public facilities are available to residents when they move in. It also contains language protecting the city’s “environmentally sensitive” hillsides and canyons that is tougher than current city regulations.

The more stringent citizens-backed plan would allow 26,000 to 36,000 homes to be built during the next five years, depending on whether the city meets certain standards for improving traffic, air quality, water quality, its sewer system and its trash disposal system. It also includes tough language protecting the sensitive lands that give the city its character.

Handicapping the contest nearly five months before the vote can be risky, as both sides in a slow-growth measure put before Orange County voters learned June 7, when the proposal went down in a surprise defeat. But some of each side’s tactics have already emerged.

The coalition’s early literature amounts to a strong attack on the Quality of Life Initiative, with a short reference to the city-sponsored plan as “a better solution.” The coalition claims that the citizens-sponsored measure, which it labels the “no-growth initiative,” would not reduce traffic congestion or force developers to provide needed public facilities, and would jeopardize jobs and raise housing prices.

The group hopes to have the benefit of San Diego’s business network to spread that word, along with the hundreds of thousands of dollars that will be needed to reach voters this fall.

Money No Guarantee

But money cannot assure victory. In 1985, San Diego voters approved slow-growth Proposition A, giving themselves the right to determine when land in the city’s future urbanizing zone would be developed, despite an unprecedented $600,000 campaign by developers against the measure.

Still undetermined is which plan will win the support of San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor. A spokesman for O’Connor said she will urge her council colleagues to reduce the cap recommended by the advisory panel that drafted the city’s plan.

Meanwhile, cash-short Citizens for Limited Growth will attempt to tap into voter frustration with traffic snarls, disappearing open space, and the pollution of air and water, painting itself as the alternative to untrustworthy developers and City Council members.

The group is buoyed by sentiments like those expressed in a recent Times poll, in which more than 75% of voters said they favor growth restrictions even if those limits would harm business and cause a loss of jobs.

But as backers of Orange County’s Measure A learned, that early support can be soft, especially in the face of heavy spending by opponents. The ballot proposition was defeated by a healthy 55.7%-to-44.3% margin after developers spent $1.8 million to defeat it and supporters did not campaign effectively.

Citizens for Limited Growth co-chairwoman Linda Martin had said that qualifying the initiative for the ballot would be a much tougher task than winning in November, but after the Orange County vote, the organization’s leaders are wary.

Expects to Be Outspent

“In hindsight, it may serve as a warning that public support for something such as slow growth can be eroded through massive amounts of developer spending,” said Mullaney, the co-chairman.

He said his group will spend $50,000 to $100,000 in support of its measure, and expects to be outspent “20 or 40 times.”

“We expect that the opposition will spend between $1 (million) and $3 million to defeat our initiative,” Mullaney said. “We expect them to have an onslaught of misleading mailers, TV ads and phone calls to try to convince people to support the status quo.”

Mark Baldassare, an urban sociologist at UC Irvine and pollster for the Times, agreed that Orange County developers probably could not have defeated Measure A without their hefty expenditure.

“But the initiative was not only lost (because of) money, but by lack of organization and lack of effort by the supporters,” he said.

“In most growing areas in San Diego or Orange County, it’s easy to find a majority in favor of the concept of slowing down growth and development,” he added. But “that does not necessarily mean than an initiative will pass. What it takes for an initiative to pass is for people to be shown in the course of an election or in the course of campaigning that the slow-growth initiative will make a difference in the people’s quality of life.”