Government, Business Coalition Pushes Growth Initiative

A coalition of government and business leaders announced Thursday that it intends to place initiatives aimed at controlling growth and unclogging roadways before both city and county voters on the June 1990 ballot.

Leaders of the San Diego 2000 Committee said the organization’s “Traffic Control and Comprehensive Growth Management” initiatives would require new development to pay at least $643 million toward construction of mass-transit lines, freeways and roads over the next 20 years. The blueprint would also curtail growth in areas where roads, parks, schools and other vital infrastructure are not available.

“If the infrastructure isn’t there, they don’t build,” said San Marcos Mayor Lee Thibadeau, a committee member. “And so they either put in the infrastructure along with the development, or, in the case of smaller development, they pay fees toward the infrastructure.”

The announcement appeared to set up a confrontation between competing growth-control measures in the city of San Diego similar to the costly, bitter contest waged in 1988. Prevent Los Angelization Now, the successor organization to Citizens for Limited Growth, announced Oct. 19 that it will attempt to place a “planned-growth initiative” on the June ballot.

In the November, 1988, election, competing slow-growth measures sponsored by Citizens for Limited Growth and the San Diego City Council were defeated after a nearly $3-million spending campaign against the measures by the building industry. Similar initiatives covering unincorporated areas, sponsored by Citizens for Limited Growth and the county Board of Supervisors, met the same fate.

Leaders of the San Diego 2000 Committee said the new initiatives are not sponsored by the Building Industry Assn., despite the presence among their leadership of Bruce H. Warren, vice president of H. G. Fenton Material Co., a commercial and industrial land developer. They expressed the hope, however, that some developers would back the measure.

“This is not a BIA-sponsored measure,” Warren said. But, he added, “I doubt they would be opposed.” BIA leaders could not be reached for comment Thursday.

The group listed former State Sen. James Mills, now chairman of San Diego’s Metropolitan Transit Development Board, as one leader, and Herb Cawthorne, Chamber of Commerce vice president, as spokesman. Cawthorne, who in June suddenly resigned as president of the San Diego Urban League amid reports of financial improprieties, was one of the leaders of an organization that unsuccessfully stumped for the City Council-backed growth-control measure in 1988.