Bid to Halt Extension of Jackson Drive Lags : Environment: Petition effort has just 10% of signatures necessary at halfway point of drive.

Nearly halfway through a 200-day signature-gathering drive, the effort to overturn the San Diego City Council’s 1990 vote to extend Jackson Drive through Mission Trails Regional Park is faltering and may be dropped if financial backing cannot be found, leaders of the initiative said Thursday.

Petition circulators for the proposed Parks and Wildlife Protection Initiative, which also seeks to safeguard the North City’s undeveloped urban reserve, have gathered just 10% of the 79,689 valid signatures needed by Nov. 1 to qualify for the ballot, said Jay Powell, who is coordinating the petition drive.

All the signatures have been gathered by volunteers and without the about $50,000 needed to sustain a petition campaign by paid circulators, the measure will not garner the needed support to qualify for the ballot, said Dave Kreitzer, chairman of San Diegans for Managed Growth, sponsor of the initiative.

Representatives of environmental groups met Wednesday night at the Sierra Club’s headquarters to determine if resources for such a bid are available, given preservationists’ competing desire to work on this fall’s City Council elections, upcoming hearings on air pollution regulations and other key environmental issues, said Barbara Bamberger, conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club.

“At this point, we’re facing a pretty uphill battle in terms of qualifying,” Powell said.

“It would be a real Herculean task at this point, and that’s why we’re looking at a lot of different options,” Bamberger said. One of those options includes renewing Councilman John Hartley’s effort to have the City Council place the initiative--or some of its key provisions--on the ballot, Bamberger said.

Hartley, who supports the ballot measure drive, won the backing of Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer and former Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt before resorting to the petition drive in February. Five votes of the nine-member council are needed to place a measure on the ballot.

Opponents of the four-lane, 2.4-mile Jackson Drive extention, approved by a 5-4 vote Nov. 27, also have filed a lawsuit to block the road project.

The initiative would give voters the final say over any decision to build a road wider than 32 feet through city parkland. Without a vote of the electorate, developers would be prohibited from building more than one home per 10 acres in the 12,000-acre urban reserve on the city’s northern fringe unless they dedicated open space to the city.

Kreitzer said, however, that the initiative drive would not be dropped before a thorough search for financial backing is conducted. No decision is expected until San Diegans for Managed Growth’s steering committee discusses the matter soon, he said.

“I think the option is to discontinue, but we haven’t made any final decision,” Kreitzer said.

Kreitzer declined to say how much the group has raised through mailers and phone calls but said the group lost about $1,000 when it was forced to redraft the initiative after it published and began circulating a version listing the date of a council vote incorrectly. Powell said the inaccurate date was furnished by the city’s Planning Department.

An aide to Councilwoman Judy McCarty, who led the campaign to win approval for the road extension, said the initiative drive’s difficulties show that city residents understand the issues surrounding the Jackson Drive approval.

“I think it shows that the public is exercising good judgment and wisdom in being careful about what they sign,” said Cynthia Vicknair, McCarty’s chief of staff.