Names New But Growth Looms as Vote Rerun

“It’s worse than a cap. It’s an absolute stone wall blockade for development of any more housing. And they apply it throughout the community.”

--Herb Cawthorne, co-chairman of the San Diego 2000 Committee, on rival Planned Growth Initiative.

The initiative’s “intent is not to solve problems. It is simply to obfuscate, to confuse and to defeat.”

-- Peter Navarro, chairman of Prevent Los Angelization Now!, on rival Traffic Control and Comprehensive Growth Management Initiative.

Haven’t we heard this before?

The organization names have changed, and the ballot measures are new, but like the actors in some bizarre “Twilight Zone” episode that never ends, builders and growth-control activists are back on the streets, jockeying for position in an election six months away.

Just 13 months after the construction industry clobbered four slow-growth measures in the November, 1988, election, both sides are circulating petitions to place rival measures on the June 5 ballot in yet another attempt to grapple with San Diego’s growth.

Of course, there are new twists this time. On Friday, Mayor Maureen O’Connor positioned herself behind the growth-control advocates, urging her colleagues to adopt their initiative as city law and strengthen environmental restrictions when they meet to consider both ballot measures Jan. 11.

With an environmentalist majority now seated on the council, a head-to-head contest at the polls could be precluded if the council goes along with O’Connor or adopts parts of both initiatives.

Instead of working for the defeat of the ballot measures, the building industry has written one this time. Last year, the San Diego City Council and county Board of Supervisors sponsored two of the ballot initiatives; this year, there are no plans for either panel to put a measure on the ballot.

But much of the overall plot already is shaping up as a rerun of 1988. Expect more nasty, personal rhetoric about growth control and the people behind each ballot measure, particularly from Navarro and Cawthorne, whose vehemence was unrestrained during last year’s contest. Expect the builders to spend a good deal of money (they spent nearly $3 million in 1988) and the poorly financed slow-growthers to seek all the free media attention they can get.

And expect growth-conscious city of San Diego voters to be confused, perhaps until shortly before they walk into the booth and vote on the sixth and seventh growth-related ballot measures they have faced since 1985.

“In a way, these (initiatives) are different from 1988,” said Tim O’Connell, land-use adviser to Mayor Maureen O’Connor. Last year’s battle “was more focused on the numerical limit issue, whereas these are more oriented toward imposing some requirements that solutions be found.”

The 1990 face-off pits Prevent Los Angelization Now!, successor to Citizens for Limited Growth, against the newly formed San Diego 2000 Committee. PLAN is circulating its “Planned Growth Initiative” solely in the city of San Diego, whereas the San Diego 2000 Committee is attempting to qualify “Traffic Control and Comprehensive Growth Management” initiatives for both city and county ballots.

Circulators hit the streets with the San Diego 2000 Committee’s citywide initiative Monday, a week after signature gathering for the county ballot measure began. PLAN says it has collected 10,000 of the 51,000 signatures it needs to qualify for the ballot.

PLAN is made up largely of the core group that led Citizens for Limited Growth’s failed effort to cap housing construction in the city and county last year. It is headed by University of San Diego academic Peter Navarro and includes UC San Diego professor Richard Carson, environmentalist attorney Leo Wilson, San Diegans for Managed Growth leader Bob Glaser and others.

The San Diego 2000 Committee is co-chaired by former state Sen. Jim Mills, now chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Development Board and former Urban League President Herb Cawthorne, neither of whom has direct ties to the building industry. Cawthorne is a vice president of the Greater San Diego Chamber of Commerce.

That choice of leaders obscures the fact that the initiative is largely a product of the building industry. According to Cawthorne and Mills, who helped develop the document, main contributors include Kim Kilkenny, formerly legislative counsel for the construction industry and now an employee of the Baldwin Co., a major home construction firm; Greg Smith, Baldwin’s president; and Mike Madigan, an executive with the Pardee Construction Co., another major homebuilder. None of the three returned phone calls to their offices last week.

Don Faye, vice president of Home Capital Corp., the real estate arm of HomeFed Bank, also acknowledged offering suggestions on the initiative and said that it was circulated to a wide range of concerned groups.

The committee has hired Jean Andrews, political consultant for the local construction industry, who organized the builders’ controversial 1988 campaign against the four slow-growth measures.

Neither initiative includes the numerical caps on home construction that were so controversial last year, and very little attention is given to preserving hills, wetlands and other sensitive environmental topography that formed a major portion of the 1988 initiatives.

The builders initiative, however, includes a “killer clause” that provoked much debate last year. Under its terms, if the competing city initiatives each receive more than 50% of the vote, the one with more votes wins.

Navarro claims that inclusion of the clause proves that the San Diego 2000 Committee is interested primarily in defeating PLAN’s measure. Mills countered that the measures are so incompatible that it would be senseless to try to enact both, or even parts of each measure, if both are approved by voters.

Even though they have been on the street just a few weeks, friction between the sides already is developing. Jerry Mailhot, who is leading PLAN’s petition effort, claims that by paying a higher rate, the San Diego 2000 Committee has been able to siphon petition circulators away from his firm, forcing PLAN to rely on volunteers to qualify the measure for the ballot.

When some of those circulators showed up for organizational meetings advertised by Jane Kingsley, president of the San Diego 2000 Committee petition group, they found that the petitions were not yet available, Mailhot charged. He claims that Kingsley was merely attempting to keep PLAN circulators off the street.

Kingsley denied the charge, saying that the initiative petitions sometimes are held up by unavoidable circumstances.

The San Diego 2000 Committee says that its initiatives will raise at least $643 million, and perhaps more than $1 billion, over the next 20 years to build roads, freeways and mass transit lines “needed to reduce the traffic congestion choking San Diego.”

The money, which would be generated by fees on development, is targeted toward completion or improvement of major roadways such as California 52, California 125, Interstate 905 and California 78, plus expansion of the trolley and rail systems. It also requires builders to provide roads, schools, parks and other infrastructure at the time a new development opens.

The San Diego 2000 Committee city initiative establishes a goal of having no more than 55% of motorists driving to work alone by 1996; calls for mandatory use of reclaimed water in new developments, water conservation, water and air quality assurance plans and the reservation of land for child care sites. In the city of San Diego, it establishes as a goal recovering 50% of all recyclable waste via curbside pickup within seven years after passage of the measure. It requires the county to establish a curbside recycling program.

“Ours is a proposal which is designed to finance (solutions to) the problems of growth that haven’t been addressed in the past,” Mills said.

But O’Connell, the mayor’s land-use adviser, said that the initiative consists almost entirely of goals that are less ambitious than those already set by the city, particularly in the areas of traffic control and curbside recycling. “Our existing goal is larger than what they’re proposing us to target in seven years,” he said.

In addition, it is unclear, O’Connell said, whether the initiative’s requirement of a developer’s fee of no more than $200 per “average daily trip” made by the residents of each new home will provide more money for road construction than the city receives through its current system of negotiating development agreements with builders.

“I don’t think the (San Diego) 2000 (Committee) one does anything,” O’Connell said. “It requires the city to do this and the city to do that, but it doesn’t require anyone else to do anything.”

Although it also focuses largely on traffic, The Planned Growth Initiative takes an entirely different approach to what it now calls “managing” growth. It establishes citywide minimum standards for traffic congestion, and requires any new development project that would add to traffic to ease the impact by improving the transportation system, changing the development, phasing construction of the development over time or paying fees to the city in proportion to the extra traffic that would be added.

Where traffic already is worse than the citywide standard, the council would have to make a finding of pre-existing deficiency and the new development could not add to the deficiency, according to Navarro.

It also requires the city to establish minimum standards for provision of jails, schools, fire stations, libraries, sewage treatment, trash disposal facilities, parking and open space. New development could only occur if such facilities were available at the time a project goes up, or, if that is impossible, the city enacts a plan to address the deficiency and the developer pays a full proportionate share of providing those facilities.

The measure mandates that existing residents shall not pay higher fees to provide infrastructure and services required by new development. It calls for the city to demand water conservation and water reclamation measures by developers, drastically restricts development in the areas around three city reservoirs and exempts housing for the poor from its requirements.

O’Connell, who generally favors the PLAN initiative, said that he believes that it could force the council to deny building permits in an area where traffic congestion is extremely bad.

“It’s feasible,” he said, “that the effect of this language is that in some areas that are so congested, and there are no mitigation measures . . . the council would be required to deny the project.”

Janet Fairbanks, a principal planner with the city’s Planning Department, said that one fault of the PLAN measure is that it rigidly applies the same traffic congestion standard throughout the city, without taking into account the varying levels of congestion in different neighborhoods.

“We feel that it’s really very rigid and it’s not flexible. In a community that is heterogeneous like San Diego, it needs to be more flexible,” Fairbanks said.