PLAN! Straining Under Mountain of Debt

As growth-control advocate Peter Navarro intensifies his campaign for mayor of San Diego, the organization that brought him to local prominence stands at the brink of collapse, paralyzed by debts it cannot repay.

Prevent Los Angelization Now!, the group Navarro founded three years ago, as abandoned its latest effort to place a police protection measure on the November ballot, halted its fund-raising and called off a membership drive.

Its office sits largely empty, occupied by a lone staff member who cannot carry out the group’s quest to bring a “managed-growth” program to San Diego.

“Basically, you’re looking at an idled organization,” said PLAN! attorney Leo Wilson.

The cause of PLAN!’s troubles is the $30,000 in legal fees it owes to attorneys for Taxpayers for Economic Stability, who succeeded last October in persuading a judge to throw the Planned Growth and Taxpayer Relief initiative off the June, 1992 ballot.

Judge James Milliken’s ruling that PLAN!’s initiative violated the California Constitution’s prohibition on initiatives containing more than one subject thwarted a $120,000 campaign by PLAN! that had qualified the growth-management initiative for the ballot through public signature-gathering.

Unable to pay the legal fees, PLAN! refuses to raise any cash for its next ballot initiative out of fear that the attorneys at Gray, Cary, Ames & Frye will seize the money when they enforce Milliken’s order awarding them the legal fees.

“Everything is just on hold,” said Beckie Mann, PLAN!’s executive director. “I can’t raise money. I will not take my members’ money and allow it to go to a builder’s front group.”

PLAN! officials call the bid for legal fees a direct attempt to crush PLAN!, the city’s preeminent growth-control organization and a force in local politics, freeing builders from the cost of opposing its efforts.

“This isn’t about money,” Mann said. “This is about political power. They don’t want the voters to decide if they want growth management.”

But the victorious plaintiff in the lawsuit claims that PLAN!’s complaints are absurd, an effort to transform an expensive political and legal gaffe into sympathy for PLAN! and political points for Navarro.

“We did not in any way, shape or form set out to attempt to impact PLAN! as an organization,” said Mac Strobl, one of two people who filed suit against PLAN!’s initiative. “What we set out to do was remove from the ballot an illegal initiative that PLAN! had chosen to pursue.

“If this is the consequences of their actions, they have no one to blame but themselves,” he added.

Strobl and his attorney, Kathryn Karcher, pointed out that PLAN! was not originally a defendant in the lawsuit, which was initially filed against the city of San Diego.

The City Council has the ultimate responsibility for deciding which measures appear on the ballot. It is required to place any initiatives signed by sufficient numbers of people before voters or enact the measures itself.

PLAN! sought and won intervenor status in the lawsuit, making itself a party in order to defend its initiative, Karcher noted. After Milliken struck down the lawsuit, PLAN! refused an out-of-court-settlement on the legal fees that would have cost it just $12,500, she said.

The city and a plumber’s union that had bankrolled the PLAN! initiative opted to settle, paying $25,000 and $19,000 in legal fees, respectively.

Strobl and co-plaintiff Robert Lichter have not yet decided whether to pursue the legal fees, Karcher said, because they are unsure whether the expenditure of time and money would be worthwhile.

With only a few thousand dollars in the bank, no assets and debts of about $20,000, $12,000 of which is owed to Navarro, Mann said there is little for the lawyers to take.

Most of PLAN!’s antiquated computer equipment has been leased to Navarro’s mayoral campaign, she said. The worktable in the group’s Kearny Mesa office is a large door placed across two sawhorses. The bare room sports a few pieces of leased or personally owned equipment, a borrowed radio and a donated, secondhand microwave oven.

“You’re looking at a group that runs on fumes,” Wilson said. “There’s no way we could raise $12,500 or $15,000 or $30,000” for legal bills.

The group is planning an appeal of Milliken’s order on the legal fees, claiming that, under state law, Strobl and Lichter, as a “front group” for the building industry, are not entitled to the fees because they had a financial interest in the outcome of the lawsuit that kept PLAN!’s initiative off the ballot.

That argument did not sway Milliken, and Karcher said it is a poor interpretation of the law. Strobl said his lawsuit was partly financed by business groups of all kinds.

In the meantime, discussions are under way to have a separate, unidentified group adopt and circulate petitions for PLAN!’s latest initiative, which ties growth control to the number of city police officers.

In that case, PLAN!, which succeeded Citizens For Limited Growth’s unsuccessful 1988 effort to impose growth control through ballot initiatives, might just fade away.

Wilson said the group also is talking with attorneys who might help it appeal Milliken’s ruling on First Amendment grounds.

“The issue transcends the organization,” Wilson said. “If this were allowed to stand, it would affect not just PLAN! but organizations throughout California.”