Slow Going Since Primary for Fans of Slow Growth

Three months ago, Orange County was aflame with the passions of slow-growth advocates and their staunch opponents.

On June 7, Measure A, the countywide traffic control initiative, was soundly defeated, 56% to 44%.

The smoke rose from the battlefield; an eerie silence fell.

And since then:

- Slow-growth activists have been in disarray but are hoping to regroup in time for the Nov. 8 elections. On that date, residents of Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach and San Juan Capistrano will vote on city measures similar to the countywide slow-growth initiative that failed in June.

- Efforts to recall supervisors Thomas F. Riley and Harriett M. Wieder over their alleged bias favoring developers have become almost invisible.

- The development industry and its hired guns who successfully managed the campaign that defeated Measure A have turned their attention to San Diego and Riverside counties, where new slow-growth initiatives are on the November ballot.

- And for the slow-growth forces, some things are just not happening.

Gregory A. Hile, treasurer of Citizens for Sensible Growth and Traffic Control, the group that sponsored Measure A, is more than a month late in filing a post-election accounting of the organization’s receipts and expenditures.

In an interview Friday, Hile blamed his own illness and a lack of information about donors’ occupations and addresses. He promised to file the mandatory disclosure documents with Registrar of Voters Donald F. Tanney’s office today.

Tanney’s staff said Hile faces fines of $10 for each day that the documents are late. Hile said, “Of course, we’ll pay them.”

“We’re embarrassed,” said Russ Burkett, co-founder of the group. “Here we are complaining about how the other side does things, and we can’t get our own bookkeeping in order.”

Tom Rogers, who also co-founded the slow-growth group, says he and Burkett have had trouble all summer trying to get the organization’s board members together for a meeting.

Rogers himself was hospitalized and underwent eye surgery a few weeks ago, and so he says he has been unable to do much about the effort he launched last May to recall Riley.

“There are some people in Laguna Niguel and Laguna Beach who want to do this thing, but I haven’t been able to meet with them and get this thing moving again,” said Rogers. “But we’ll do something soon, I’m sure.”

The effort to recall Wieder, led by Doug Langevin of Huntington Beach, is further along. Said Langevin: “I have about 5,000 petitions on the street right now, 10,000 more printed up, and 5,000 more on the way.”

But veteran political consultants Bob Nelson and Harvey Englander, who are managing Riley’s and Wieder’s anti-recall campaigns, both say they are unimpressed by what has happened so far.

Englander said the recall efforts are virtually doomed because the activists spearheading them did not strike “while the iron was hot” in May and June, when votes by the Board of Supervisors were causing so much controversy.

If there is a focus to the slow-growth movement now, it appears to be the city elections in November.

Huntington Beach Tomorrow is typical. This group of several hundred activists was dormant during the summer, according to vice president Loretta Wolfe, but plans to discuss campaign strategy for gaining passage of Proposition J on the citywide ballot at a Sept. 21 meeting.

Meanwhile, John Simon, the Newport Beach attorney who organized Citizens for Traffic Solutions, the group that spent $2,315,000 to defeat Measure A on June 7, says his work remains unfinished.

“We still owe $125,000 in campaign debts, which I’m trying to pay off,” Simon said. “And I’m in a continuing effort to promote traffic solutions. That was part of our name, and I’m serious about it.”

Simon would not elaborate except to say that his work may involve a proposed ballot measure, including the possibility of a half-cent sales tax for transportation projects, sometime in 1989 or 1990.