Short Honeymoon for San Gabriel Council : Slow Growth Off to Slow Start

Three months ago, a new era appeared to have dawned in San Gabriel, a garrulous little city of neat one-family homes and bustling commercial strips. After a hotly fought election, three new “slow-growth” councilmen were sworn in, and a fourth was appointed to fill a vacancy. All of them were committed to halting the unruly proliferation of condominiums and strip malls that have begun to clutter once-tranquil neighborhoods.

San Gabriel was one city, everybody said, where slow growth had won.

But things kept going wrong. The newly elected councilmen were barely in office 30 minutes when some of their own supporters were accusing them of violating the Brown Act, which prohibits a quorum of elected officials from meeting in private. That was after they had whisked in a surprise “transition team”--a lawyer and a consultant, both with ties to development-minded Irwindale--with no public discussion.

Since then, James Castaneda, Frank Blaszcak and Mayor John Tapp have been slow in revising the city’s General Plan (the “road map” for development in the city, as one councilman described it), stumbled over a $640,000 budget deficit and lapsed into petulant squabbles among themselves. Some former supporters from the grass-roots Citizens for Responsible Development have even accused them of abandoning their slow-growth principles.

“They always fight like cats and dogs down there,” said one elderly voter, pushing an antiquated motorized lawn mower in front of his Grand Avenue home, as the late afternoon sun danced over rose-colored blossoms on a row of crepe myrtle trees nearby. “Let ‘em strangle themselves. Give them enough rope and they’ll do it.”

The councilmen themselves say their current difficulties were inevitable. “When you go from a campaign mode to a policy mode, your perspective changes,” Tapp said. “It’s not like you wave a magic wand and things happen. There’s a process of government that exists.”

And critics concede that some major difficulties, such as the budget gap, are not of the present council’s doing.

Nevertheless, progress in this beleaguered city of 33,000, tucked among Alhambra, Rosemead and San Marino, has been slow in coming. “Given the lack of experience of the three new councilmen, things are not proceeding as quickly as we would have hoped,” said Greg O’Sullivan, chairman of Citizens for Responsible Development, which supported the new councilmen in the April election.

As a longtime member of the Planning Commission, Councilman Ted Anderson, who was appointed to fill a vacancy in May, has considerably more experience than Tapp, Blaszcak and Castaneda. Councilman Sabino Cici is the only holdover from the previous council.

“One thing you can say, though, is that they all truly support the platform on which they ran,” O’Sullivan added. “In time, hopefully, their personalities will mesh.”

One sign of increasing frustration has been the heated debate over Blaszcak’s city-financed car telephone. Depending on whom you talk to, the phone is either a petty detail or a symbol of the kind of political arrogance that, critics contend, voters thought they were putting behind them in the April election.

Blaszcak says he needs the telephone to conduct city business. As a public affairs director for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts, Blaszcak is prohibited from making personal calls from his office, he said. The car telephone, for which he has billed the city $2,100, is portable, allowing him to make calls not only from his Mercedes-Benz or his pickup truck but from his Los Angeles office as well.

Three weeks ago, the council voted to require its approval for personal expenses exceeding $200, and last week the council grudgingly authorized payment for Blaszcak’s phone.

“It’s an embarrassment,” said Cici, who has joined Tapp in criticizing Blaszcak. “We’re being ridiculed by other cities.”

Tapp said that three weeks ago, he was the target of considerable ribbing from other officials attending a conference of the Independent Cities Assn., an alliance of Southern California municipalities. “A lot of people were wondering why a small city like us needed a sophisticated communications system for a councilman,” he said.

The phone flap was followed last week by a spat about Castaneda’s expenses at a San Diego conference. The city paid $610 for registration, fees, meal tickets and two nights at the Rancho Bernardo Hotel so Castaneda could attend the annual conference of the Independent Cities Assn. three weeks ago. Critics say the money was wasted, charging that Castaneda did not attend.

Didn’t See Colleague

Castaneda insists that he attended one day of the three-day conference, although Tapp, who was also at the conference, said he did not see his colleague.

Meanwhile, other city business lumbers along.

A one-year moratorium on most development in the city, already more than halfway to its conclusion, will have to be extended at least six months so the General Plan revision can be completed, council members concede. The council just approved an $85,121 contract with Willdan Associates, a planning firm from the City of Industry.

“We’re hoping they’ll hit the ground running,” Blaszcak said. But initial assessments indicate that revising the General Plan, which includes a series of public hearings, will take at least a year.

At the same time, the city’s $13-million operating budget for the current fiscal year will have to rely on reserves to cover a $640,000 gap, with the prospect of more red ink next year.

“I never deluded myself into thinking it would be easy,” Anderson said. “But I can say now unequivocally that I’ve begun to realize the task is gigantic.”

The reasons for the budget shortfall, according to City Administrator Robert Clute, are numerous. They include the loss last year of federal revenue-sharing funds, the closing of a lucrative Gemco outlet on Valley Boulevard and loss of revenue from building-permit fees since voters approved the development moratorium.

The city “simply does not have a large economic base,” Clute added.

The budget gap gives residents good reason to criticize councilmen’s expenses, Tapp said. “Most people have a hard time grasping a $600,000 deficit,” he said. “But $2,000 for a phone or $600 for a conference--people can identify with that.”

The revised General Plan will address the issue of economic development, including a blueprint for attracting “quality” commercial developments, which can generate large amounts of sales tax.

Mired in Lengthy Process

One such development remains mired in the lengthy process of city review. Three weeks ago, the council voted to broaden the moratorium to include the so-called Edwards Drive-In project, an 11.5-acre hotel-and-restaurant complex on the site of a former drive-in theater on Valley Boulevard.

The project, which has already been stalled for more than year, could generate as much as $500,000 a year in sales tax revenues for the city, according to some estimates.

It was the drive-in project that really touched off the voluble slow-growth movement in San Gabriel last year. Angered by what they perceived as a “concrete happy” City Council, about 200 residents gathered at City Hall in March, 1987. They threatened political retaliation if the council approved a zoning change for the project, which would be built on the city’s last major piece of commercial real estate.

Court Challenge

After a series of tumultuous meetings, the council approved the project. Citizens for Responsible Development led a court challenge and petition drive against the project, claiming it would further jam streets with traffic and overburden sewer and water systems. The court action failed and the initiative was thrown off the ballot on a technicality. But a subsequent ballot initiative to impose a one-year moratorium won by a landslide last December. In April, CFRD made good on its threat to oust those who approved the drive-in project, electing the slow-growth slate of Castaneda, Blaszcak and Tapp.

The new councilmen point to some accomplishments so far. After the fiasco on April 19, when the council hired Fullerton lawyer R. Zaiden Corrado and West Covina consultant Xavier Hermosillo as a transition team, it has been working diligently to recoup its damaged popularity and to attend to city business, Castaneda said. Corrado and Hermosillo resigned two weeks later and submitted a $7,000 bill to the city.

“We’ve got everybody facing the same way now,” Castaneda said.