Santa Clarita Growth Battle Turns Heated : Development: The city is divided over a proposal to limit building to 475 units per year. Rumors of phone taps and other dirty tactics abound.

The meeting between backers and opponents of a Santa Clarita growth-control initiative ended with an angry warning.

“It’s not going to be very pleasant around here over the next few months,” slow-growth proponent Maureen Focht said of the battle brewing over a proposed ballot measure to clamp down on growth in the city.

So far, Focht has been right.

In the three weeks since she made her pronouncement, representatives of both sides have exchanged nasty remarks during a public debate, and rumors are flying around town about dirty tricks, including phone taps, hate mail and even pilfering documents from a desk at City Hall.

“What’s happened so far is just a forerunner of what it’s going to be like,” said Councilman Howard (Buck) McKeon, who opposes the growth cap. “It’s going to be rough. There are fanatics on both sides of the issue.”

Lost in the sea of accusations and innuendo is a serious debate over the fast-growing city’s future. Santa Clarita’s founders, a disparate group of business leaders, environmentalists and retirees who revolted 3 1/2 years ago against Los Angeles County’s laissez-faire development policies, now find themselves bitterly divided over how to manage growth.

The political stakes are high.

Four of the five City Council members oppose the proposed growth cap, including two--McKeon and Jan Heidt--who are running for reelection in April. The initiative could become the central issue in the election if its backers succeed in collecting the 5,757 signatures needed to put it on the ballot.

Two citizens groups have been tussling over growth control for almost a year. In one corner is the Citizens Assn. for a Responsible Residential Initiative on Growth, or CARRING, which wrote the initiative under the tutelage of John Drew, a political consultant and local college professor. In the other is Santa Clarita Residents for Responsible Planning, or SCRRP, led by Scott Voltz, a real estate appraiser.

If the initiative passes, the council would be allowed to approve only 475 housing units each year through 2002, with some exceptions. The council could approve a project with thousands of housing units, but the dwellings would have to be built in phases.

Developers would have to compete for building approvals under a point system that would give highest marks to projects that best preserve the environment or provide public services. Other provisions of the measure would exempt areas annexed by the city in the future from the 475-unit limit and prevent the council from approving any housing units when water use is restricted.

“It just gets my Republican dander up,” Mayor Carl Boyer III said of the proposed measure. “I’ve always believed in a free-market system.

“I’m also against it because it won’t work. Developers will just build outside the city” in the surrounding, unincorporated portions of Los Angeles County, he said.

But Councilwoman Jill Klajic, a member of CARRING, said the initiative would spare residents from “spending six months of their lives down at City Hall trying to make sure a development doesn’t ruin their neighborhood. This way, it will all be set down in a law.”

The remarks of Boyer and Klajic are mild compared with others heard in town recently.

At a public debate punctuated by snide remarks last week, Voltz labeled Drew an “economic clone” of former Democratic Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., potential fighting words in the staunchly Republican community.

Drew shot back, sarcastically, that Voltz should bone up on mathematics, referring to controversy over his reporting of campaign financing.

Left unspoken at the debate were occasionally vicious rumors that have buzzed through the city questioning the background, integrity and private lives of people on both sides of the slow-growth issue. Some people are rumored to be conducting background checks to find dirt on their adversaries. Another rumor held that a civic activist rifled through a desk at City Hall in search of information.

Santa Clarita’s slow-growth ordinance was conceived during a bitter development battle that erupted last year over a condominium project called Santa Catarina. After five months of lengthy and often rancorous public meetings, the 1,452-unit project was killed, breathing new life into the local slow-growth movement.

For more than a year, members of CARRING met in each other’s living rooms to draft the initiative and also held several forums to gather public comment. Members said they consulted with six lawyers to gird the measure against a legal challenge from the building industry, which has frequently filed lawsuits against such ordinances throughout the state.

Some members of CARRING, including Allan Cameron and Bob Lathrop, got a taste of politics in the cityhood movement and during Klajic’s successful campaign in April, 1990. But the group relied heavily on Drew, who is trying to establish a reputation as a political consultant.

A 34-year-old adjunct professor of political science at College of the Canyons, Drew grew up in Newhall, but left in the 1980s to study politics and pursue a teaching career. In 1988, he ran unsuccessfully on the Republican ticket for the state House of Representatives in Massachusetts before returning to Santa Clarita.

But for all of its members’ political experience, it took CARRING eight months to prepare the final draft of the initiative, leading some outsiders to believe that it would never happen. When the group accidentally mailed out an early draft to reporters in November and then refused to comment on it for two days, it appeared unorganized if not inept.

“People were wondering if we were serious, which is startling to us because we always were,” Drew said.

But Voltz never doubted CARRING’S sincerity.

Concerned about the potential effects of a growth cap on the local economy, he and a group of union officials and business leaders formed SCRRP last fall. Like CARRING, several of SCRRP’s members are longtime residents or city founders, including former Planning Commissioner Connie Worden and Jeff Brown, past president of the Canyon Country Chamber of Commerce.

The group hired an Orange County political consultant, Adler Wilson Campaign Services of Laguna Hills, to help win support for a consensus approach toward growth management. Ideally, the group says, the City Council would appoint a task force on growth made up of diverse elements from the community, from developers to environmentalists.

Voltz refused to reveal how much the firm was paid for preparing mailers and holding forums advocating the group’s point of view.

Unlike CARRING, SCRRP does not have to file periodic finance reports because it has never registered with the state as a political committee. Early this year, in an effort to force SCRRP to reveal its contributors, Lee Schramling, a candidate for City Council who supports CARRING’s initiative, filed a complaint with the Fair Political Practices Commission against the group.

But the commission ruled in May that by merely advocating a consensus approach, instead of campaigning directly against the initiative, SCRRP is on solid legal ground and does not have to register.

In the eyes of SCRRP members, the growth control initiative is “trash, absolute trash,” Brown said, but the group is officially for a consensus approach to growth management, not against the initiative.

After the FPPC’s ruling, SCRRP voluntarily disclosed that it had received $32,903 in contributions over the past year, including about $30,000 from Newhall Land & Farming Co., developer Jeff Stevenson, American Beauty Homes and Paragon Homes.

In contrast, CARRING has received $3,354 in cash and in-kind contributions, including $1,000 from Drew’s uncle, John Tonoyan, who owns Royal Thrift & Loan Co. of Calabasas.

Even Voltz said he is concerned that the “developer-backed” label will hurt the group’s cause. Whenever developers have supported a political campaign in Santa Clarita, it has been defeated, including the anti-cityhood movement and Measure P, a road tax that lost by a ratio of 4 votes to 1 in 1988.

But Brown hopes that residents will not automatically push the “yes” lever when considering the initiative. “Since when did developers become the bad guys, anyway?” he said. “Most people wouldn’t be living up here without them, and they supply thousands of jobs.”

Voltz said SCRRP members discussed the possibility of putting a competing initiative on the ballot, but decided against it “because there isn’t enough time left” before the April election.

The group is still considering its strategy, but among its options is an all-out campaign against the initiative using direct mail, newspaper ads and “aerial shots of rush hour in Thousand Oaks” to demonstrate that cities with strict growth restrictions still have traffic problems, Voltz said.

But CARRING is confident that it will triumph without running an expensive campaign, said Lynne Plambeck, a Newhall resident who owns a film recycling business in the San Fernando Valley. Plambeck said the group is “going to go out there and talk to people like crazy and, frankly, it’s not going to take much talking” to persuade them.

Councilwoman Jo Anne Darcy said the public should question CARRING’s real motives and suggested that its members may be using the issue to catapult themselves into the political arena.

“We have a nice little city here and then they come along with their little spears, poisoning public opinion,” Darcy said. “It’s polarizing the whole city.”