Citizens Group Rejected in Attempt to Alter Growth Measures on Ballot

The San Diego city attorney’s office Thursday rejected a citizens group’s demand for changes in the wording and order of two rival slow-growth measures that will be on the Nov. 8 ballot.

The decision leaves Citizens for Limited Growth, which is sponsoring the slow-growth Quality of Life Initiative, with no remedy other than a court order to alter the initiative’s positioning on the ballot and change alleged “factual errors” in language used to describe a rival growth-control plan sponsored by the San Diego City Council.

Spokesmen for Citizens for Limited Growth said they will decide by Monday whether to take legal action.

“We did not get equal treatment by the city attorney’s office, as required by law,” said Peter Navarro, economic adviser to Citizens for Limited Growth.

No Changes Planned

After reviewing claims filed by Navarro and other citizens-group members last week, Chief Deputy City Atty. Ted Bromfield said Thursday that he would make no changes.

“I am satisfied that the city attorney’s office acted in a fair and impartial manner,” Bromfield said in an interview. “The city attorney (John Witt) has been briefed on the issue and he found no fault with either the language or the order.”

Citizens for Limited Growth will have little time to obtain a writ of mandate from a Superior Court judge if it decides to follow that route. The county registrar’s office must complete its final writing of sample ballots and the ballots themselves by Sept. 12, said Keith Boyer, the county’s assistant registrar of voters.

Although changes can be made after that date, the process would be expensive and there would be an increasing risk of failing to get the amended sample ballots to all 534,000 registered city voters as the election neared, Boyer said.

The city plan, which would cap residential construction at 7,590 homes annually for the next three to five years, will compete with the citizens group’s initiative, which would limit home building to as few as 4,000 units annually by 1991. Both measures contain protections for the city’s hillsides, wetlands, flood plains and canyons.

Many of the differences in the ballot language appear to stem from the fact that Bromfield wrote the Quality of Life Initiative ballot summary, while Deputy City Atty. Janis Sammartino-Gardner and consulting attorney Katherine Stone, who helped the council draft its plan, wrote the city plan’s summary.

Language Inconsistencies

In reducing the lengthy plans to short passages that will appear on the ballot, the attorneys chose to cut different sections in different ways, leading to inconsistencies in the ballot language. For example, sections on protections for environmentally sensitive lands, which are substantially similar in both plans, read differently on the ballot.

The city plan, Proposition H, “preserves environmentally sensitive lands, including wetlands, flood plains, steep slopes, biologically sensitive lands and significant prehistoric and historic sites” according to the ballot language.

The citizens group’s plan, Proposition J, “would preserve sensitive environmental lands as provided in the initiative,” according to the ballot language.

Other Complaints

Navarro also complained bitterly about sections of the two measures that refer to standards for air quality, water supply, traffic congestion, sewage disposal capacity and trash disposal capacity. The standards are a prime element of the citizens group’s plan; home building would be sharply limited until the city meets specific tests in each of the five areas.

The city plan also mentions the five standards but merely establishes targets that the city should try to achieve.

On the ballot, however, that difference is not made clear, and the standards are not mentioned in the summary of the group’s initiative. The summary states only that home building will be limited “until standards as designated in the initiative are met.”

The city measure “establishes regional standards for air quality, water, sewage treatment, solid waste disposal and transportation” according to the ballot summary.

Name Removed

Navarro and Richard Carson, another economic adviser to Citizens for Limited Growth, also complained that the name “Quality of Life Initiative” had been taken off the ballot, and that their measure is positioned one notch below the city’s measure on the ballot.

As late as Aug. 9, Bromfield told the council that the citizens group’s initiative would appear above the city’s measure on the ballot. And as late as Aug. 15, the city clerk’s office was distributing memos calling the measure the “Quality of Life Initiative.”

But Bromfield said that he switched the order of the ballot measures in accordance with state law and took “Quality of Life Initiative” off the citizens’ measure in the interests of neutrality.

Bromfield denied Navarro’s charge that council members pressured him into making the changes.

Sammartino-Gardner, in an interview, said that Citizens for Limited Growth should have pointed out its concerns about the language before Aug. 9, when the City Council formally placed the slow-growth plans and five other initiatives on the ballot.

“They dropped the ball on this question,” she said. “Why weren’t they there that night?”