Crowded Now? Wait 25 Years for 58% More : Population: Sandag expects county to increase by 1.9% a year from now until 2015. That rate is still slower than in the 1980s.

Nearly 4 million people--almost half of them minority members--will live in San Diego County by the year 2015, a population increase of 58% from 1990, according to a forecast released Friday by the San Diego Assn. of Governments.

County population will rise by an average of 59,000 every year, a brisk 1.9% growth rate that will outstrip state and national increases but won’t match the 3% average annual rate of population gains in the 1980s, Sandag predicts. Overall, the population will jump from 2.52 million in 1990 to 3.99 million in 2015.

Sandag’s study predicts that job creation and housing construction will more than match the population growth. The county will add 736,000 jobs and 646,000 homes in the next 25 years, according to the forecast.

Another study due next summer will estimate where in the county the growth in population and jobs will occur.

The study released Friday, which is still preliminary, offers few surprises for county residents and public officials who grapple daily with traffic, pollution, crowding, water shortages and public service restrictions that are the effects of the county’s seemingly inevitable increase in size.

“There’s nothing startling there,” said Paul Downey, spokesman for San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor. “The issue is still how and where we’re going to grow. Those issues still have to be resolved.”

“The growth is going to be there,” added Frank Panarisi, president of the local Construction Industry Federation. “And we can either plan for it, or find ourselves in a lousy place to live.”

Critics such as Peter Navarro, chairman of Prevent Los Angelization Now!, agree that comprehensive planning is essential but say that local elected officials lack “the political will” to make tough decisions to rein in growth because they are beholden to developers for campaign contributions.

“PLAN! has put concrete goals on the table, and we are ready to act,” Navarro said. “The construction industry offers rhetoric.”

Through a signature-gathering campaign, PLAN! placed a growth management initiative on the June 2 ballot, but a Superior Court judge removed it Wednesday, saying that some provisions violated legal requirements restricting such measures to single subjects. PLAN! and its allies have not yet decided whether to appeal.

Sandag, made up of representatives of the county’s 19 local governments, assists municipalities and the county Board of Supervisors with planning and analysis. As a result of the passage of Proposition C in 1988, the organization also has written a draft growth-management plan for the region, which is now under review by the local governments.

The study by demographer Jeff Tayman released Friday is the latest in a series of population projections written by the organization. It is an update of the organization’s 1989 projection, using new information unearthed by the 1990 U.S. Census.

Sandag predicts significantly less growth than a state Department of Finance study for the year 2005 and somewhat less than projections by the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy for 2000.

The Census’ finding that county fertility rates rose significantly during the 1980s, from 1.8 to 2.4 children per household, caused Sandag to increase its population projection in the new study by 550,000 to 3.71 million in 2010, Tayman said.

The higher fertility rate partly reflects the continued increase in the county’s Latino population, Tayman said. Latinos tend to have much larger families than whites, blacks or Asians.

The so-called “natural increase” in the county’s population--the number of births minus the number of deaths--was responsible for about a third of the county’s growth in the 1980s. But the Sandag study shows that it will cause about 48% of the population growth during the next 25 years.

Migration, which accounts for the rest of the growth, will slow as the rate of job creation declines, Tayman said.

Asians and Latinos will experience the most growth over the next 25 years, a trend that will increase the minority portion of the population from 35% in 1990 to 48% in 2015. The Asian population will grow by 134% and the Latino population will rise by 122%. The number of blacks will increase 77%, while the white population increases by 27%, the report predicts.

Population Change In percentage change: San Diego Region: 58.4% California: 47.8% United States: 15.4% Source: San Diego Association of Governments