Planners Buy Time to Be ‘Weaned’ Off Growth Caps

Fearing a building boom when its temporary housing cap expires Feb. 21, the San Diego City Council has agreed to extend its Interim Development Ordinance for three months while city planners determine how to remove the growth controls gradually.

Voting late Monday night, near the end of a marathon council session devoted primarily to land-use issues, the council extended the Interim Development Ordinance to May 21.

The controversial ordinance limits residential construction to 8,000 homes annually between Aug. 21, 1987, and Feb. 21, 1989, though some areas of the city are exempt from the ban.

The extension “gives (planners) time to come up with a way of weaning themselves from growth caps,” said Tim O’Connell, Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s land use adviser.

Hope to Avoid Boom

There has been a backlog of more than 12,000 requests for building permits with the IDO in place, O’Connell said. While council members intend to phase out growth caps, they hope to avoid a construction boom after the end of growth controls, he said.

Planners’ options include a gradual lifting of the building ceiling or removal of the ordinance in a limited number of neighborhoods, O’Connell said.

The council also approved a monthly monitoring of construction activity and requests for building permits to guard against a surge of home building in individual neighborhoods. And it ordered its Transportation and Land Use Committee to begin work on a new, standby version of the interim cap that could be put in place on an emergency basis if construction began to outstrip a neighborhood’s facilities.

The actions marked the council’s first attempt to develop a growth-management plan in the wake of the Nov. 8 defeat of slow-growth ballot propositions H and J. Both measures would have capped residential construction citywide and enacted protections for hillsides, canyons, wetlands and flood plains.

Management By Ordinances

With its own post-election poll showing continued strong support for many of the elements of Proposition H, the city-sponsored growth control plan, the council has agreed to pursue growth management by enacting ordinances. Citywide building caps, however, are no longer part of the plan.

Council members Judy McCarty and Bruce Henderson dissented from Monday’s 7-2 vote. McCarty said Tuesday that the presence of a monitoring plan on construction activity would lead to the building caps that council members say they want to jettison.

The council also voted to extend the life of its interim environmental protections, known as the Resource Protection Overlay Zone, while planners develop language to strengthen them. The council also ordered staffers to propose a method of enacting a permanent program to preserve single-family neighborhoods. A current, interim ban on replacing single-family homes with multifamily units expires in August.

In a related matter Tuesday, the council approved two more contracts governing construction of 676 new homes on 180 acres of the sharply sloped “county island” area in the city’s northern tier.

The council has now approved “development agreements” covering 12,182 new homes since the failure of the slow-growth measures Nov. 8. The council had delayed the agreements, under which developers trade early construction of schools, parks, roads and other public facilities in return for a guaranteed right to build the homes, until after the election.