Plan to Put Lid on Growth Goes to Council

With little of the fanfare or public rancor that marked the 1988 ballot contest over growth control, a potentially far-reaching growth-management plan for San Diego is heading inexorably toward a crucial vote of the City Council on Tuesday.

The plan, which has undergone four lengthy reviews by the Planning Commission, would limit yearly construction of homes and other developments to the amount of population growth that can be accommodated by existing roads, schools, jails, sewers, major parks and fire and police stations, along with the facilities scheduled to be built that year.

Those yearly limits would be linked to a 20-year plan of construction to be adopted by the city in an effort to make up for a more than $1-billion citywide shortfall of those public services. New development would pay for all the costs of the population increase that it would bring.

Perhaps most crucial is the tenet that new growth not worsen congestion on the vast majority of city roads and freeways beyond an agreed-upon level, where traffic largely flows smoothly during rush hours.

At the same time, the council will decide on an ambitious proposal to establish a new category of developers’ fees that would raise $800 million over the next 20 years to pay for some of those public improvements. The so-called “citywide impact fees” would be used to build and maintain facilities used by all San Diegans, such as a new central library, Mission Bay and Balboa parks, major roadways and some police and fire stations.

But just because the city has so far been spared a repeat of 1988’s bitter, multimillion dollar political campaign--which resulted in the November defeat at the polls of two growth-control measures for the city and two more for the unincorporated areas--does not mean that growth-management advocates and building industry representatives are not deeply at odds over the plan.

At Thursday’s Planning Commission meeting, growth-control leader Peter Navarro accused a task force of city planners of gutting the plan first presented to the council in January by removing some of its key provisions.

The task force was charged with melding ballot initiatives proposed by the growth control-group Prevent Los Angelization Now! and the builder-dominated San Diego 2000 Committee, along with an ordinance proposed by Mayor Maureen O’Connor.

On Thursday, Navarro again threatened to take his group’s initiative before voters in November if the council does not adopt tough growth-management standards. PLAN and the San Diego 2000 committee have agreed not to put their initiatives on the June ballot to allow the council to adopt a new plan.

Navarro said he will ask the council to scrap the conceptual framework developed by the task force and approve the ordinance proposed by O’Connor in January. That document relied heavily on PLAN’s initiative.

A coalition of builders and civil organizations, meanwhile, argued that existing growth controls have caused the huge drop in home construction, from 19,180 building permits authorized in 1986 to 6,235 in 1989. Growth controls also are responsible for a corresponding increase in home prices, they said.

“It doesn’t take an economist to see what is happening,” said Julie Dillon, president of the Building Industry Assn. She was joined by representatives of San Diegans Inc., the San Diego Taxpayers Assn., the San Diego Apartment Assn., the San Diego Board of Realtors and others. “That’s why we have a rise in housing prices, and that’s why we have a rise in land prices.”

In addition to the 20-year capital improvements plan and the yearly growth limits, the wide-ranging plan headed to the council Tuesday includes:

Tough protections for the “future urbanizing zone” in the city’s northern tier that is largely off-limits to development until later this decade.

A call to establish an “environmental tier” consisting of a linked open space system.

A proposal to fund low-income housing through a “linkage fee” on development.