Coalition Launches New Attack on Growth Limits : Pasadena: Foes this time are armed with studies that forecast negative impacts of the voter-approved initiative.

Opponents of the city’s 1989 Growth Management Initiative have launched their second campaign against the growth controls with a flurry of negative statistics.

A suit by the opponents was settled last week when city officials agreed to put the measure to a second vote by residents in November, 1992. Voters originally approved the measure, which restricts residential and commercial development, in March, 1989.

The opponents--the Pasadena-Foothill Branch of the Los Angeles Urban League, the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance of Pasadena and others--argued that the growth controls harmed minority and low-income groups by limiting jobs and the supply of low-income housing.

At a press conference Tuesday at the Urban League’s Pasadena offices, opponents released studies that forecast growth control-related losses by 1999 of nearly $2 billion to the Southern California economy, 3,093 housing units in Pasadena and up to 47,480 jobs in Pasadena, of which 47% would have been held by Latinos or blacks.

A $20,000 study was prepared by Peter Gordon of the USC Planning Institute. It relied on federal statistics and a computer-generated forecasting model.

A second study, prepared by the Construction Industry Research Board, showed a decrease in Pasadena building activity under the first full year of growth controls. In 1990, the city approved $99.8 million worth of building projects. That contrasted with a yearly average of $149.4 million from 1980 through 1990.

The studies were prepared for the lawsuit against the measure, to demonstrate “conclusively, scientifically and with a reliable body of evidence” the negative impact of the initiative, said attorney Carolyn Carlburg, who filed the suit in June, 1989.

Opponents of the measure now intend to use the studies as a key part of their campaign to defeat the growth controls.

Carlburg said backers of the limits relied on assumptions rather than hard data. “Our position is that there really hasn’t been a public debate on growth controls,” Carlburg said. “What you had is a campaign consisting primarily of cliches. . . . ‘Preserve our way of life’ and, ‘Do you want to Pasadena to be beautiful?’ ”

Calling Pasadena voters literate and sophisticated, Carlburg said she believed they would avoid falling for emotional appeals a second time.

But architect Mike Salazar, one of the leaders of PRIDE, Pasadena Residents in Defense of Our Environment, a citywide organization that devised the growth controls, criticized the studies.

“It’s amazing they can predict nine years into the future exactly what jobs will be lost,” Salazar said. “We just don’t see how that’s possible.”

He pointed out that development interests always argue against development controls by saying they will hurt the poor and minorities. “This is nothing new, just a bigger smokescreen by the development people,” he said.

The primary reason the job losses will affect minorities, he added, is because the city is predominantly black and Latino, with whites making up only 44% of the population.

The downturn in construction activity cited in the second study occurred because the city shut down all construction activity for four months, while city planners devised ways to implement the initiative, he said.

PRIDE devised the controls as a way to limit what members said was uncontrolled growth in Pasadena. The controls limit annual residential construction--houses, condominiums and apartments--to 250 units, and limit commercial construction of large projects to 250,000 square feet a year. Commercial projects less than 25,000-square feet are exempt, as is affordable housing.

The settlement provides for the suit to be reinstated if voters approve the growth limits a second time.