Encinitas May Weaken Review Panels : Growth: Costs and the way the committees are run are blamed, but some say the pioneering grass-roots system has become dominated by the very developers it was designed to keep in check.
After five years of being mired in marathon meetings, a frustrated Peter Tobias finally walked away from what was once a passionate avocation as a grass-roots community planner.
One night earlier this year, the 46-year-old biochemist strode up to the public podium at an Encinitas City Council meeting and announced that he was resigning his unpaid position on one of the city’s five community advisory boards, or CABs.
It wasn’t the mercilessly long hours that spelled his end--the twice-monthly night meetings that often edged toward midnight or the frequent weekends spent poring over blueprints and dryly written draft reports of proposed development projects for his Old Encinitas neighborhood.
The community advisory boards--the unique, homespun vehicle that Encinitas’ founding fathers chose upon incorporation in 1986 to maintain neighborhood character and stem the tide of runaway suburban development--were slowly being overrun by the developers themselves, Tobias says.
The boards were the first of their kind in California, allowing people in diverse neighborhoods throughout the city--engineers, housewives or a scientist like Tobias--to provide the first level of design review of would-be development projects in their own back yards.
Slowly, however, the five-member boards became dominated by developers, wives of developers or friends of developers, Tobias and others say. Now, the City Council is set to decide whether to do away with the CABs altogether.
Last month, the Encinitas Planning Commission recommended that the role of the advisory panels be scaled back due to the high costs and paperwork required to maintain them.
Under proposed changes to be considered by the council next month, the CABs would review projects only informally--without research help from the city staff--prior to a project’s submission to the Planning Department.
Developers who appeared before the CABs under the proposed new arrangement would do so early in the design process--even before detailed plans of their projects were drawn up--and would be allowed to decide if they wanted to incorporate the CABs’ suggestions into their plans.
Under the present system, builders of housing projects must first appear before one of the CABs representing the city’s communities of Old Encinitas, New Encinitas, Olivenhain, Cardiff and Leucadia.
The panels also approve minor-use permits and minor code variances. Builders of larger projects can appeal most CAB decisions to the citywide Planning Commission--the next step in the design review process beneath the City Council.
For Tobias, the changes signaled rough waters ahead for an activist hometown planner.
“The tenor of things changed, and I finally decided there was no sense batting my head against the wall anymore,” he said. “My interests--what I wanted to do with the CABs--was no longer being supported by the city.”
Encinitas Mayor Gail Hano says the CAB system may have outlived its usefulness.
The panels have just become too cumbersome, she said. And some board members have developed their agendas and biases, slowing the review process. Besides, she says, the grass-roots system was getting expensive.
The $60,000 spent annually for the city’s land-use decision-making process could be trimmed by almost $40,000 with cutbacks in the CABs, according to a city report.
“There are five CABs with five members each,” Hano said. “It’s costing too much money for staff to answer all of their questions. And the paperwork! These things were the biggest paper chase going, with all the reports necessary on each project.”
Her biggest concern, however, is that too many CAB members have begun to overstep their bounds.
“Instead of one or two meetings, the process turned into six meetings on some projects,” the mayor said. “And a lot of their concerns have become nit-picking. It’s getting out of hand.”
For many Encinitans, the changes to the city’s grass-roots design review mechanism are disturbing, and signal a distinct shift in political course for the North County coastal city.
In five years, Tobias and others say, the City Council--which appoints CAB members to two-year terms--has been transformed from a strongly no-growth panel to one with aims of facilitating commercial and residential development in the community of 50,000 residents.
The result, they fear, is a drop in the quality of life, with developers given free rein to build, ruining the city’s small-town atmosphere.
“There’s a shift in power going on here, but whether or not that reflects the will of the people is another question,” said Rick Shea, who stepped down as a city councilman in November.
“It seems to be the wish of the present City Council to diminish the roadblocks to development,” he said. “And that scares me.”
Councilwoman Maura Wiegand, one of two members to take office in November, says she’s no developer’s shill, insisting she ran on a slow-growth platform. Her qualms with the CAB system, she says, are not to pave the road for developers but to save the city some much-needed revenue.
Critics, however, say the new council is feathering the CABs with pro-development members.
In February, 15 new CAB members--out of a total of 25 positions--were appointed by the City Council. Two new representatives were also named to the Encinitas Planning Commission. Some say the choices were made as an aid to developers.
Marjorie Gaines, a former city councilwoman who was instrumental in the formation of the CABs, says the behind-the-scenes changes in the character of the neighborhood boards--as well as their possible dismantling--is betraying the promises made to residents when Encinitas incorporated.
“I’m really alarmed at what’s going on with these CABs, and I think the public needs to know they’re going on,” said Gaines, a slow-growth advocate who lost her council seat in November.
“The way these community boards were set up, the people who sat on them were responsible to the community, not the developers. But now most, if not all, of these new CAB members being appointed are in some field related to development.”
Hano dismisses much of the criticism over the recent appointments.
“It’s sour grapes,” the mayor said. “This has got nothing to do with growth. What you have are a lot of former CAB members who don’t like being out of a job.
“It’s really kind of nervy for these people to think they should stay in their positions indefinitely,” she said. “I mean, life goes on. You have to give other people a shot. I don’t expect to stay a city councilwoman forever.”
But Tobias and others say they can point to several appointments in which residents with development backgrounds have been appointed to replace other highly qualified board members.
One involved Lee Rotsheck, a building design consultant whose father owns several Encinitas properties and is president of the Chamber of Commerce.
After a two-year appointment on the Old Encinitas CAB, the younger Rotsheck was recently appointed to the Planning Commission--a five-member panel whose members are selected by the council from the five CABs.
Meanwhile, Tucker Lewis--a property manager for one of the elder Rotsheck’s real estate holdings--was appointed to fill one of the vacant seats on the Old Encinitas CAB.
“I just found that whole episode appalling,” Tobias said. “Lee Rotsheck was never critical of developers while a CAB member. Now he’s upstairs in the Planning Commission. And look who replaced him.”
Rotsheck says he’s heard all the criticism about being a rubber stamp for local developers. “My mission here definitely is not a selfish one anymore than anyone else’s,” he said.
Rotsheck says his insider knowledge on development issues helped his decisions as a CAB member. But he too often saw legitimate businessmen “get the runaround” from CAB members--one reason he says the system should be “fine-tuned and stream-lined.”
“I have a better background on development aspects than people trained as engineers or political scientists,” he said. “I represent all interests, and if business interests are included, so be it.”
Rotsheck also says he’s not alone.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone (on the CABs) whose wife or husband doesn’t have some business connection in the community,” he said. “I mean, everybody’s brother is either a tile layer or involved with one of the trades.”
Meanwhile, ripples of discontent have grown among many business owners and developers who complain that they have lost money by waiting for two months or more for many projects to get past CAB review--a process they say often placed unfair demands on applicants.
“The honeymoon is over in Encinitas,” said Robert Sirovy, executive vice president of the Chamber of Commerce. “Initially, the activists who got into city government were no-growthers. But I don’t think the no-growth attitude is here any longer.”
In March, the chamber sent a letter to the Planning Commission advocating the discontinuance of the CABs, saying that any land-use review could be done quite satisfactorily by Planning Commission members.
“The characters of the individual communities have been established,” Sirovy said in an interview. “The CABs are just another unnecessary level of government. They should be eliminated altogether.”
Former CAB members acknowledge that there have been abuses to the system--scenes such as board members yelling at applicants.
“There are CAB horror stories,” said Adam Birnbaum, a senior planner for the city of Del Mar who recently lost his Encinitas CAB seat. “People abused the system. They took the attitude, ‘Here’s what I’ve always wanted to see on that corner,’ rather than looking at the plans at hand.
“But most of us got involved because we wanted to see better designs for our city without placing any more stress on the owner or developers,” Birnbaum said. “And I think we made a difference.”
Come June, he and others know, it’ll be showdown time for the CABs and a grass-roots way of reviewing design in Encinitas.
City officials say that if the panels are retained in a purely advisory role, the new process will assist developers--who in the past have spent thousands of dollars on plans only to have them reversed by the CABs--and get the CABs involved earlier in the design review process.
But Mayor Hano says it’s still too early to tell which way the council will lean.
“Even if the CABs are completely dissolved, the Planning Commission will still provide a design review process here,” she said. “And the people who care about these things will be out there giving their two cents.”
But ex-Councilman Shea isn’t so sure. A design review plan that relies on the Planning Commission--whose five members are often not wholly familiar with individual neighborhoods--is exactly the situation the city wanted to end with the County Board of Supervisors when it incorporated in 1986.
He’s sad to see the grass-roots CAB system--unique in the state and one he helped create--become a “paper tiger.”
“Political times change,” Shea said. “And those who felt penalized by having local people involved in the system have exerted their money and power to swing things the other way. But when development goes crazy in this town, maybe people will realize there was something to quality growth control.”
In the end, whatever happens, Tobias partially blames himself.
“I’m irritated that the direction of the council could change so fast in five years,” he said. “But I also blame myself. The voters put the community no-growth activists in power. But then we made a fatal mistake.
“We sat back. We didn’t pay enough attention to what was going on.”
CITY OF ENCINITAS Population: 53,793 Anglo: 80.8% Hispanic: 15.5% Black: 0.4% Other: 3.3% Area: 17.95 square miles Average household Income: $46,183 Median household Income: $39,329 Source: Encinitas Chamber of Commerce
