Slow-Growth Plan Already Outdated : Population: A survey suggests that 20% more people live in the city than had been believed. City officials are surprised.

Much to the surprise of city officials and planners, a city-commissioned study released Monday suggests that Glendale’s population is about 20% larger than previously estimated.

The immediate impact of the survey is that it renders the city’s week-old slow-growth plan outdated and unrealistic, city officials said.

After reviewing the survey’s results, Glendale Mayor Jerold Milner said Tuesday that Glendale’s population has already reached 190,000.

Based on the survey’s projections, Milner acknowledged for the first time that both the goals and the methods of the slow-growth plan, which seeks to limit the population to 200,000, are obsolete.

City planners--using past estimates of a citywide occupancy rate of 2.4 persons per unit and a total population of 165,000--sent notices to homeowners last week proposing to reduce by half the number of new units allowed in neighborhoods zoned for apartments, condominiums and townhouses.

Such a reduction, planners said, would practically ensure the success of the City Council’s protracted campaign to limit the city’s population to close to the 200,000 ceiling recommended in the General Plan.

However, city officials learned Friday from a phone survey conducted by Silny, Rosenberg and Associates that the city’s occupancy rate is about three persons per unit--almost 20% higher than previously estimated.

Without zoning changes, the population would grow to 350,000 before the city is fully occupied, the new numbers show. And even if the proposed zoning changes introduced last week were to become effective, the population would still exceed 260,000.

“It blew me away,” Milner said.

Milner said he wants to try to limit the population to about 230,000. To accomplish that, he proposed reducing the number of new multifamily units allowed by significantly more than half.

The mayor would like to see neighborhoods that are now zoned to allow eight units on a typical 50-by-150-foot lot limited to only three units per lot, and neighborhoods zoned to allow four to six units per lot reduced to two units per lot, he said.

Milner said city officials were not at fault for launching the slow-growth plan only days before receiving the new population data because the city had been working on the proposal for several months and had used numbers they thought were accurate.

“We needed to get the process started,” Milner said. “We needed to propose something concrete for the public to discuss, and we couldn’t wait.”

The possibility of going back to the drawing board to prepare a new slow-growth plan based on the updated figures is completely out of the question, Milner said. The process of writing the new proposal, setting up hearings and mailing informational flyers to the city’s 24,500 multifamily property owners would take up to four months--a delay that the city cannot afford, Milner said.

Glendale is well into its second year of a moratorium on multifamily building construction, which was adopted to prevent an overflow of building permit applications while the city worked on zoning reductions.

Council members want to have a slow-growth ordinance in place before the building freeze enters its third year, because the courts have consistently refused to uphold building moratoriums for much longer than two years.

City attorneys have cited such problems as school overcrowding, heavy traffic, parking shortages and increased crime as the legal basis for wanting to slow the city’s runaway growth.

But some developers and homeowners have complained that zoning restrictions reduce the value of their properties and violate the spirit of the constitutional right to private property.

Residents will have the opportunity to comment on the city’s slow-growth plan in a series of upcoming hearings and informational meetings. The first hearing is scheduled at 7 p.m. Wednesday for North Glendale and Verdugo Canyon residents at Clark Community Center, 4747 New York Ave.