Budget Puts Pall on City Design Job

Four years after Mayor Maureen O’Connor called for the creation of an Office of the City Architect, the office has been stripped of many powers and key employees. Now, some of its advocates fear it could be dissolved.

Blaming a tight city budget and an outside management audit that found little justification for the office’s existence, the city has yanked several responsibilities away from City Architect Mike Stepner.

Although city officials may believe they are doing their constituents a world of good by cutting costs and attempting to streamline the city’s Planning Department, their actions could assure the same mediocre planning and design that dominated San Diego through its 1970s and ‘80s boom years. Unfriendly suburban housing tracts and rampant, disorderly commercial development, such as that in the Golden Triangle, are but a few examples.

Critics of the city’s Planning Department say that planners are so mired in complex planning and zoning codes that there is little time for the kinds of long-range urban planning that could improve the shape of the city. Just when Stepner was hitting his stride, emerging as a design conscience in a city that had none, his office is being undermined.

Stepner’s staff was trimmed from 25 people to 11 during last spring’s city budgeting process. Essential, experienced employees were transferred to other city jobs, including seasoned downtown planner Larry Monserrate and veteran planner and historic preservation expert Ron Buckley.

Important powers were shifted to other city departments. Primary responsibility for planning and design review downtown, for instance, has been moved away from Stepner’s office to the Centre City Development Corp., the city’s downtown redevelopment agency. This is a significant and questionable move, since the CCDC has had a tendency to place economics ahead of design. Independent design review of CCDC projects is preferable.

As if these major changes weren’t devastating enough, in September city officials received the results of a management audit of the City Planning Department, commissioned after the City Hall scandal last year that led to Planning Director Robert Spaulding’s resignation.

Spaulding resigned after the City Council discovered a secret, $100,000 city payment to city planner Susan Bray, who had filed sexual harassment claims against Spaulding.

Partly as a result of the scandal, the city’s government was reorganized so that the Planning Department is less autonomous, answering now to the city manager’s office instead of directly to the City Council.

The audit of the Planning Department was written by management consultants from Deloitte & Touche in terse language, with no mention of San Diego’s need for improved urban design and planning, and no credit given for some of Stepner’s achievements. It claimed excessive overlap between the city architect’s office and other areas within the Planning Department, and concluded that:

“The city architect’s office should not be a separate office within the department, but a smaller staff function of one to five employees reporting to the Planning Department.”

Despite the obvious signs, Deputy City Manager and acting City Planning Director Severo Esquivel denied that the city architect’s powers are being stripped.

“We are going to have a city architect,” Esquivel said. “As part of a review of his duties, we reduced some of the staff and eliminated the duplication of the CCDC. There are other duplications that need to be looked into, but I don’t care to go into that.”

As city architect, Stepner has many supporters within San Diego’s design community. He has achieved progress in many areas and displayed a knack for reconciling diverse interest.

“I think that they’ve had a little trouble defining a distinct mission (for Stepner’s office),” said architect James Robbins, president of the San Diego chapter of the American Institute of Architects. “But I’m a supporter of Mike Stepner. I think he is a force for good. On the whole, I think Mike has been part of the solution, not part of the problem.”

Robbins singled out three of Stepner’s accomplishments as city architect.

Last year, Stepner placated opposing interest groups during the drafting of the city’s new “Multifamily Design Guidelines,” intended to improve the design of apartment and condominium buildings in San Diego.

A vocal group of architects and artists, led by architect Ken Kellogg, protested long and hard that such guidelines would hamper an architect’s creativity. Stepner gave Kellogg’s group a generous hearing, meeting with them regularly for several months until compromise multifamily guidelines were hammered out.

Stepner also gained the affection of the design community for lobbying against an elevated San Diego Trolley through the Harborview District north of downtown. Partly as a result of Stepner’s efforts, the trolley will run mostly on the surface or below grade, without destroying neighborhood view corridors.

And Stepner spoke out against a high-rise project that would have dwarfed the historic Gaslamp Quarter downtown. The council vetoed the Gaslamp area location, and its developer is now looking for an alternative downtown site.

Although Stepner is not as outspoken an advocate of good design and planning as he could be, he raised the design consciousness of the San Diego public in 1990 and 1991 through a series of “Town Meetings” organized by his office. These public forums, which he moderated, brought to town such important design and planning figures as architects Peter Calthorpe and Andres Duany, whose progressive ideas have the potential to curb unsightly suburban sprawl.

To this list, Stepner added his help in the creation of a new master plan for downtown, approved by the city in July of 1990, and a new Land Guidance Program designed to integrate land use and transportation planning.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor demanded the creation of an Office of the City Architect in her State of the City address in January of 1988, and the local design community hailed Stepner’s appointment to the $84,000-a-year position the following September.

Mayoral spokesman Paul Downey says O’Connor strongly favors maintaining the post of city architect, but she is not adamant that the position exist with its own office and staff.

“She is not taking a specific position yet on where it fits into the structure, but she is a strong proponent of the city architect’s position,” Downey said. “She proposed the idea and feels it is an important element in the planning process. Until we get a manager’s report (proposing any further changes to the office), it wouldn’t be appropriate for us to say how it should be structured. But, if it is reconfigured, we want to make sure it is still a powerful position with the ability to have input when that input will still affect the way a project is designed.”

So Stepner is left in limbo, stripped of powers and key people. The climate at City Hall is so tense that the usually friendly, talkative Stepner declined to comment on his office’s future or his reaction to the Deloitte report--although in September he fired off an indignant memo defending his office to Esquivel.

Facing an uncertain future, Stepner has also applied for the job of Planning Director. Esquivel said the position will be filled by May or June.

The possibility that the Office of the City Architect will be consumed by the Planning Department is disconcerting. While Stepner and his staff have always answered to the planning director, they enjoy some autonomy. They even have offices in a downtown high-rise separate from other Planning Department staffers.

If Stepner is moved into the Planning Department’s mainstream, he will be much less visible and closer to bureaucratic pressures to conform instead of criticize. Such a shift could undermine the good things he has started as city architect.

The loss of a separate, focused design conscience could cause good design and planning to slip quietly into the background as priorities, and that would be a shame in a city that already has a reputation for careless planning.