Roberts Seeks Ballot Issue on Open Space

San Diego City Councilman Ron Roberts announced Wednesday that he will press for a bond issue of as much as $100 million to purchase and preserve the city’s open space, parks and canyons.

Roberts told a council committee that he will ask the council to place the issue on the ballot next June and that he had been told by city attorneys that it would require the approval of a simple majority of voters.

“Within the city of San Diego, we have some very sensitive areas that it would be very advisable for us to acquire,” Roberts said in an interview. “The longer we wait, given the escalation of (land prices), it may become prohibitively expensive.”

Site Review Urged

The bond issue would be targeted at purchasing land within the city that is scheduled to be part of regional parks in the San Dieguito and Tijuana River valleys, but also would be spent to buy urban canyons and parkland, Roberts said. On Tuesday night, he asked the city’s community planning groups to begin reviewing possible acquisition sites in their neighborhoods.

The measure would cost San Diego homeowners $23 for every $100,000 of assessed valuation of their homes.

Roberts’ announcement surprised County Supervisor Susan Golding, who in February called for a $250-million countywide open-space bond measure as part of her State of the County address.

Although Roberts, the city’s appointee to Golding’s Open Space Bond Working Group, has discussed the possibility of a city bond measure with her, Golding said she was not aware that Roberts was ready to act.

“It will make it more difficult for the rest of the jurisdictions in the county--all the cities and the unincorporated areas--to put something on the ballot at the same time,” Golding said of Roberts’ plan. “It would look like the measures are competing.”

Roberts acted after Deputy City Atty. Harold Valderhaug advised him that a simple majority, rather than a two-thirds, approval by city residents would be required to approve the bond. The bond would be issued by a special district to preserve open space, created by voters before July 1, 1978, when the terms of Proposition 13 began requiring a two-thirds majority vote for approval of such bonds.

The special district covers the entire city of San Diego.

County Has No Choice

Roberts, noting that the county has no choice but to try to achieve a two-thirds majority vote for a bond issue, said he wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to raise the money with a simple majority in the city. He said he hopes that Golding’s group will seek approval of small taxation districts near the regional parks to raise money in jurisdictions outside the city.

But Golding, who was a San Diego city councilwoman in 1978, when the district was created, said the council had promised voters that the open-space preservation funds would not come out of property taxes. The $65 million raised that year was generated by utility franchise fees.

The two-thirds vote requirement has proven difficult to achieve. In November, 1987, voters defeated two separate ballot measures designed to raise bond money for renovations in Balboa and Mission Bay parks. The measures received more than 61% and 59% of the vote, respectively, short of the 66.7% needed for passage.

Last year, a simple majority of voters approved a bond measure designed to raise $1.6 billion to build new courts and jails, but a Riverside Superior Court Judge struck down the measure as an unconstitutional circumvention of Proposition 13.