San Clemente’s New Growth Law Is Slowing Business, Critics Say

The owners of a San Clemente gas station recently approached the city with a seemingly simple request: Could they move next door 100 feet so they could have more room to expand?

But city planners, taking a close look at the Chevron station on Avenida Pico at Interstate 5, concluded that this was not such a simple request after all. Calculating that the new station would generate more traffic, the city ordered the station’s management to come up with a detailed traffic analysis to comply with San Clemente’s new slow-growth law.

Station manager Keith Frobish, meanwhile, is left scratching his head about why the service station was ever affected by the law in the first place.

“Our contention is that a service station does not generate more trips but that we just serve existing traffic,” Frobish said last week. “When was the last time you sat at home and said, ‘Gee, I think I’ll go get some gas and come home’?”

Frobish’s frustration is typical these days among business people in Orange County’s southernmost city. In the view of many business and civic leaders there, the Citizens’ Sensible Growth and Traffic Control Initiative is anything but sensible and has created so many roadblocks to development that business growth has fallen to practically nothing.

The measure, approved by San Clemente voters June 7 and modeled after a countywide slow-growth initiative that fell to defeat that same day, affects commercial developments totaling more than 10,000 square feet or generating more than 130 new car trips per day. It also affects any residential development of more than four units.

The law requires affected builders to prepare a traffic analysis; prepare a hydrologic study for 100-year flood control protection; provide parkland, if necessary, within a reasonable distance for residents of the surrounding area, and compile reports on whether police, fire and ambulance units can reach the site within five minutes.

Terms of the law are so complex that the City Council has imposed a six-month freeze on major building projects to give its planning staff time to implement it. The freeze, imposed in July, applies to project applications filed after the measure was passed and to applications filed before that date that had not received final approval. The freeze is to be lifted Jan. 4.

Affected are between 50 to 60 projects and an additional 20 or so that were in the first stages of construction. Builders of the latter must now prepare growth-related reports before they continue.

The biggest commercial project stalled by the moratorium is Rancho San Clemente business park, where numerous offices are planned over 100,000 square feet. City planner Bob Golden said most of the city’s commercial projects affected by the law are in that business park.

The freeze also affects four planned residential developments being built in the backcountry, Golden said. They include the 5,000-unit Talega Valley, the 2,931-unit Rancho San Clemente, the 2,500-unit Forster Ranch and the 1,300-unit Marblehead.

Because of this, local officials say they expect that potential new businesses will steer clear of San Clemente, whose voters in 1986 passed another

growth-control measure limiting new development to 500 units per year.

“At the rate we’re going, we’re going to become a ghost town because no businesses are going to want to come here,” said Diane Neville, a San Clemente planning commissioner.

The crux of the problem, many agree, is the inflexibility of the law, which was known as Measure E on the ballot.

Although Measure E was directed primarily at controlling growth in San Clemente’s backcountry, critics of the law say it is forcing central-city businesses, such as the Chevron station, to conduct the same, cumbersome studies.

Measure E was worded almost identically to the countywide slow-growth initiative known as Measure A, as well as a slow-growth measure in Seal Beach, also defeated on June 7. San Clemente voters approved Measure E 64% to 36%.

The measures were drafted by county activists who began meeting in early 1987 to discuss ways to solve the county’s growth and traffic congestion problems. Out of those meetings came a measure that the group tried to place on the ballot of every city in Orange County. They succeeded only in getting it placed on the San Clemente, Seal Beach and countywide ballots.

The measure is on the Nov. 8 ballot in Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa and San Juan Capistrano.

Even some proponents of the San Clemente law agree that it is too restrictive and needs rewriting. The City Council voted 4 to 1 last week to retain a slow-growth legal specialist to review the ordinance and recommend modifications at its meeting Sept. 7.

Mayor Thomas Lorch, a staunch Measure E advocate, cast the lone dissenting vote, arguing that the action was premature. Lorch said it is not uncommon to “clean up the language” in new laws, but said that should not be done until it is known precisely what needs to be changed. The city won’t know that, he said, until the law is implemented.

Councilman Brian J. Rice, another measure proponent, said it is too restrictive and fails to differentiate between development in the backcountry and in the more established part of the city.

“My feeling has been all along that the intent is to limit growth and make sure growth takes care of itself,” Rice said. “(But) I think it might have to be rewritten.”

680 Sign Petition

Some people would like to see it repealed.

Rick Anderson, a local contractor, appeared before the council Aug. 10 bearing 680 signatures on a petition asking that the law be thrown out. After a two-hour discussion, the council accepted the petition but took no action on it.

Anderson later said he led the petition effort after the city forced him to hire a consultant to determine how a Mexican restaurant he wants to build would affect downstream neighbors in the event of a 100-year flood. Anderson said he has no downstream neighbors: The restaurant would be at sea level near the San Clemente Pier.

“What the hell am I going to flood downstream?” Anderson said.

On Wednesday, Measure E also was the subject of a hearing in Orange County Superior Court, where the Irvine-based Lusk Co. and Marblehead Ltd. partnership filed a lawsuit against the city challenging the law’s validity.

Superior Court Judge John C. Woolley, who heard arguments, is expected to rule this week.

Outside court, the law has weakened under its own weight. Council members Aug. 10, for example, had to delete the provision for a five-minute police response time after the city attorney deemed it unenforceable.

Because parts of San Clemente are remote, Holloway explained, patrol cars cannot be expected to arrive within five minutes.

Paramedic Response Time

Another problem that has yet to be resolved involves the provision for a five-minute response time for paramedics, Holloway said. The San Clemente Fire Department, however, employs mostly lesser-trained emergency medical technicians.

“How do you provide paramedic service where it isn’t existing?” Holloway said.

One way is to hire more paramedics. But given the city’s economic state, it can hardly afford to do so. Councilman Rice pointed out that the city is already dangerously close to having to dip into its emergency reserve.

Part of the city’s costs have come in trying to implement the law. About $100,000 has been allocated by the council for staff and outside consultants to conduct traffic and flood control studies. The studies are needed, Holloway said, so the city will have information against which developers’ studies can be compared. The studies are expected to be completed by January.

Mayor Lorch said the studies could have been completed by now if city staff members had not dragged their feet in asking the council for money to conduct them. Lorch said the city engineer, for example, had asked the city manager the past two years to include money for a traffic report in the annual budget but was turned down each time.

City Manager James B. Hendrickson, on vacation last week, was unavailable for comment.

The city’s budget constraints could imperil enforcement of two other key provisions in Measure E. San Clemente is already short two fire stations, making it difficult to enforce the five-minute response time for fire vehicles, said Mary Jo Douherty, a member of the city parks commission.

Strained Parks Budget

The city is also having a tough time keeping up with maintenance of its existing parks without having to contend with the new parkland required under Measure E, Douherty said.

“The problem comes in that the city does not have enough money to maintain the parks we have,” she said.

Some Measure E proponents argue that the economic woes stemming from the law are only short-term and will be worked out in time.

“The moratorium is really a short-term effect,” Lorch said. “Once the city goes through and has the proper plans for growth in place, people will know what they have to do.”

Lorch added that the law will generate long-term benefits for the local economy.

“Development will be more able to go forward without reaching emergency impasses, where all of a sudden there is no sewage capacity or all of a sudden they are in gridlock,” Lorch said.

Holloway, too, predicted that the city will quickly rebound.

“We won’t lose out on development; it will be just postponed,” he said. “The market is so hot that it would be hard to imagine how any development will go away.”

San Clemente’s population of 36,000 is expected to roughly double over the next two decades.

The local business establishment is less confident about the future. Tom Davis, president of the San Clemente Chamber of Commerce, said a downturn in the national economy and an increase in interest rates could plunge the city into a recession.

“We are land-rich but development-poor,” Davis said. “We have a window of opportunity and we’re not taking advantage of it.”