Group May Go to Court Over Ballot Wording

Leaders of a citizen group sponsoring a slow-growth initiative on the Nov. 8 ballot said Monday that they will go to court to force changes in the wording of a rival measure sponsored by the San Diego City Council if a last-ditch plea to the city attorney’s office is rejected.

The decision to seek a writ of mandate from a Superior Court judge was made by Citizens for Limited Growth’s leadership during a Sunday night fund-raising event. The group says it has uncovered additional “factual errors” in the wording of the council’s initiative that is to appear on the ballot.

The organization will today submit new, more specific, information to the city attorney’s office claiming that the ballot wording is slanted in favor of the city-sponsored slow-growth plan, said Richard Carson, an economic adviser to Citizens for Limited Growth. The group has placed the Quality of Life Initiative on the fall ballot.

The group is also calling for a review of the wording by either City Atty. John Witt or Assistant City Atty. Curtis Fitzpatrick--who were not directly involved in the drafting of the city measure--and has asked for a meeting Wednesday to again press its demand for a rewrite of the council measure, said Carson, a UC San Diego faculty member.

Confused About Measure

“A large percentage of people will walk in (to voting booths) cold,” Carson said. “Without being very, very familiar with (the measures), a lot of people will be confused and think the city measure is actually the Quality of Life Initiative.”

The Quality of Life Initiative would cap home building in the city at as few as 4,000 homes annually by 1991. Its city-backed competitor would limit housing starts to 7,590 annually for the next three to five years. Both measures contain restrictions on home building on city hillsides, canyons, wetlands and flood plains.

Chief Deputy City Atty. Ted Bromfield rejected the citizen group’s claims of bias last Thursday and said that Witt had approved that decision. Bromfield said Monday that Deputy City Atty. Cristie McGuire, who reviewed the group’s claims last week, will review its latest documents today and determine whether to set up a meeting.

McGuire said a reversal of Bromfield’s decision was unlikely unless the citizens group could show some new information. She said that Peter Navarro, another economic adviser to the citizen group, told her that the meeting was an attempt to exhaust the group’s administrative remedies before it goes to court.

Carson and Navarro said they now believe that the ballot wording used to describe the city’s growth management plan is based on a July 11 draft of the measure. Before completing the document Aug. 8 and 9, the council made several important amendments to the plan that are not reflected in the ballot wording, they said.

Bromfield denied the charge, saying that a deputy city attorney and a consulting attorney “were editing that (ballot language) at the last moment.”