New Resources Chief Raises Hopes : Development: Naming the former Sierra Club executive to the post shows that the Administration takes the threat of unlimited growth seriously, environmentalists say.

Growth management advocates, some of whom were skeptical of Gov.-elect Pete Wilson during the fall campaign, have hailed his appointment of former Sierra Club executive Douglas P. Wheeler to head the state Resources Agency as a sign of the incoming Administration’s commitment to confronting the problems caused by urban development.

Traditionally, California’s resources secretary has concentrated more on parks, fish and game, forestry and water issues than on the consequences of urban and suburban sprawl. Wilson has not said his nominee’s official job description will be any different.

But Wheeler’s professional background and his public comments on the issues have given rise to hope within a network of growth management activists that the Wilson Administration will take seriously the threat that unchecked suburban sprawl poses to farmland, wildlife, water and other resources.

“Doug Wheeler has a lot of sensitivity to the pressures urban development can create for natural resources,” said Larry Orman, executive director of the Greenbelt Alliance, a nonprofit organization that works on Bay Area growth issues. “In a Cabinet session, Doug is going to know these issues as they come up. He has the ability to be an internal ambassador on these things if he wants to exercise it.”

Like Wilson, Wheeler does not believe that government can or should regulate the rate of growth, a philosophy known as “growth control.” Instead, he said, he hopes to help local governments manage development in a way that causes the least harm to the environment.

“Growth is inevitable,” Wheeler said. “But it can be channeled in ways which do not destroy the qualities people wish to protect.”

Growth management advocates, for example, would steer new development toward places where public services already exist and at the same time protect sensitive land such as canyons or wetlands from destruction. In the past, Wheeler has worked as a mediator between developers and citizens’ groups to try to allow growth to occur without damaging the environment.

As executive vice president of the World Wildlife Fund and Conservation Foundation, a Washington-based environmental group, he ran the foundation’s “Successful Communities” program, which provides grants and other forms of support to local groups struggling with the problems caused by rapid growth.

Wheeler also was a founder and president of the American Farmland Trust, a national nonprofit group dedicated to protecting prime agricultural land threatened by successive waves of migration from inner cities to outlying areas. California’s Central Valley, which has suffered a loss of acreage to residential development, may be the nation’s foremost example of that problem.

Wilson reportedly intends to have his growth management policy shaped by his Office of Planning and Research, which is to be headed by Los Angeles lawyer Richard Sybert. But Wheeler said he has already discussed the issue with Sybert and expects to “be a player” in the development of the Administration’s plans.

“I see growth management as a conservation strategy,” Wheeler said in an interview. “You cannot sustain the kind of growth California has had and will continue to have without an adverse impact on natural resources unless that growth is managed.”

Wilson has long been an advocate for growth management and was considered a pioneer in the field when he was mayor of San Diego, where he fashioned a plan that was supposed to stop “leap-frog” development and direct growth instead to areas closer to the central city. But many critics contend that his policies as mayor failed to match his rhetoric.

During the gubernatorial campaign, Wilson often alluded to the need for better management of the state’s booming population but opposed Democrat Dianne Feinstein’s call for regional councils with the power to overturn local land-use decisions.

Growth management advocates also were leery of Wilson because, while he sometimes said he authored California’s landmark coastal protection act, the legislation he wrote as a young assemblyman actually was a more modest bill that would have left control of coastal development in the hands of local governments--which then were considered part of the problem, not the solution.

For these reasons and others, leaders in the movement were heartened by Wilson’s selection of Wheeler. Many believe that he will reinvigorate an area of public policy that they think was all but ignored by the administration of Gov. George Deukmejian.

“This issue needs some coordination at the state level,” said Michelle Perrault, a Contra Costa County activist and international vice president of the Sierra Club. “The local communities cannot fight this all by themselves. Doug Wheeler understands that.”

Perrault worked with Wheeler when he was executive director of the Sierra Club from 1985 until 1987 and again at the Conservation Foundation, when Wheeler steered a modest grant to a Contra Costa citizens’ group that was fighting the county’s approval of a development project in the town of Oakley.

The group had sued the county to stop the project and used the money from the Successful Communities program to hire a private planning consultant to review the county’s rewritten plan for the area. Wheeler’s program also supported efforts by the California Environmental Trust to mediate growth disputes in Modesto and in Orange County.

“He brings to this post a kind of national perspective,” said Joe Bodovitz, president of the Environmental Trust, a group of builders, developers and environmentalists seeking a consensus on growth issues. “He’s aware of how these issues are dealt with in other areas of the country. Given that so many people feel California has not been a leader in growth management for a long time, it seems to me a tremendous plus to have somebody who understands what has been successful in other states.”

Bodovitz and others said they hoped Wheeler will push for state guidelines on regional planning, even within the constraints created by Wilson’s professed respect for local control. One possibility is legislation passed in Florida but unsuccessful so far in California that would require local governments to ensure that the infrastructure--the roads, sewers, schools, etc.--is in place before development gets a final approval.

Wheeler, then, appears poised to serve as a bridge between Wilson and the environmental movement. The governor-elect apparently considers Wheeler to be the perfect person to explain the Administration’s centrist policies to hard-core environmentalists, who in turn see the nominee as the best chance they have of getting their ideas through to Wilson.

“Where we in the environmental movement differ with Gov.-elect Wilson, Doug Wheeler will be able to articulate those differences in a manner that Wilson is comfortable with,” said Bob Hattoy, Southern California director of the Sierra Club. “It won’t be adversarial; it will be as an insider.”