City Council Puts Landmark Growth Measure on Ballot

The San Diego City Council put the finishing touches on a landmark municipal plan Monday and placed it on the Nov. 8 ballot, setting the stage for a competition between two slow-growth measures whose outcome could radically alter the nature of residential development citywide.

In separate votes, the council also agreed to ask voter approval for six other ballot propositions, ranging from an initiative calling for district elections to an advisory measure on staggering work hours to cut traffic.

With Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer dissenting, the council approved the Growth Management Plan after three hours of haggling over last-minute amendments, most of them minor. Because of a technicality in the way the ballot propositions were scheduled for debate, the council must take a second vote on all seven measures today.

The city plan, which calls for an annual 7,590-home cap on residential construction during the next five years, will compete with a similar, but generally stricter, plan that a citizens group qualified for the fall ballot through the petition-gathering process.

“I didn’t get everything I wanted,” said Mayor Maureen O’Connor in an attempt to persuade Wolfsheimer to support the plan. “But it’s certainly stronger than anything--and I will underline ‘anything’--that has ever been presented to the community.”

But Wolfsheimer blocked the unanimous consensus that council members attempted to forge during nearly two months of debate, saying the document was too loosely written to receive her vote.

“I think we’ve done the best possible job, but as I said before, it looks like Swiss cheese. It’s not a legally satisfying document,” she said.

In its only major 11th-hour change, the council agreed to add a list of “regional facility and environmental goals” that it will work to achieve in years to come. The goals commit the city to work for cleaner air, an adequate water supply, a better sewage treatment system, adequate trash disposal capabilities through recycling and waste-reduction strategies and no increase in traffic on “regionally significant roads.”

The measures are similar to ones in the Quality of Life Initiative with which the city plan will compete. But the citizen-sponsored measure caps development if the city does not meet certain requirements in those areas, while the city plan merely creates targets for which the city will strive.

Kathy Giles, a Sierra Club representative monitoring the hearings, suggested that the city added the goals in an attempt to sway voters in November.

‘It Gives You a Yardstick’

The city’s current General Plan “is filled with goals that were never achieved,” Giles said. “But a standard is quantitative. It gives you a yardstick to measure up to. It either measures up or it doesn’t measure up.”

However, Stephen Coury, a spokesman for the Building Industry Assn., said that “the council has taken an already-harsh document and made it even harsher with the adoption of the regional standards. . . . At this point, things are looking very bleak. There is little in the mayor’s growth-management plan that would be acceptable to the BIA.”

Councilwoman Judy McCarty, who was able to kill stricter requirements last week, said Monday that it is deceptive to include in the plan requirements that the city has no hope of meeting.

O’Connor nearly withdrew her support for the plan when Councilman Ron Roberts attempted to amend provisions built into the plan to protect the city’s hillsides. Roberts’ amendment would have allowed developers to trade open space in various parts of the city or land within a development site for the right to build homes on hillsides that otherwise would be protected.

Wolfsheimer, O’Connor and Councilman Bob Filner--the council’s three strongest supporters of the environmental standards--criticized the proposal, as did city planners.

The proposal is “a technical thing that affects an enormous amount of property,” Filner said. “It goes farther, much farther, than the (building) industry’s position.”

Roberts withdrew the amendment after O’Connor and Wolfsheimer threatened to withdraw their backing for the entire 35-page Growth Management Plan.

The council postponed until today a proposal to immediately enact the environmental protections and a companion plan prohibiting demolition of single-family homes to allow construction of apartment buildings.

The six other ballot propositions approved by the council will join 29 state initiatives and at least five county measures, presenting voters with a formidable list of complicated decisions when they enter the voting booth Nov. 8.

The six other measures are:

- The Quality of Life Initiative, which would cap home building at 4,000 to 6,000 units annually by 1991 and protect environmentally sensitive lands. The council had no choice but to put the measure on the ballot because it qualified through the petition-gathering process.

- A measure to nominate and elect council members in district-only elections. The initiative was also qualified by a citizens group.

- Two conflicting proposals to amend the City Charter by creating a new civilian review board to guard against police misconduct.

Under a plan offered by the city’s Charter Review Commission, the mayor and council would appoint the panelists, who would have their own staff and be empowered to subpoena witnesses who would testify under threat of perjury.

Under a competing plan written by Councilman Ed Struiksma, the board would be appointed by the city manager and would have no subpoena power.

- An advisory measure requested by Councilman Bruce Henderson to gauge citizen support for a schedule of staggered work hours to reduce traffic during morning and evening rush hours.

- A proposal by Roberts to exempt the American Agar Co. factory at 1751 Hancock St. from a 30-foot height limit imposed on buildings west of Interstate 5 so that a chimney and cupola could be built and the historic building preserved.