New Building Codes

Proposals for drastically reducing citizen participation in planning and land use decisions in San Diego are scheduled for a vote at City Council on Tuesday. These proposals would deny citizens the right to democratic participation in their government.

This legislation is presented as the first step toward an update of the San Diego Building Code, the need for which there is an undoubted united accord. However, what we are seeing does not deal with any actual building code regulations.

This legislation takes away the authority of the City Council to be involved in the approval process and delegates that power to the appointed Planning Commission and to the planning staff.

Citizens exercise their power by holding their government accountable. If we have the argument we can vote our representatives out of office. Appointed commissions and bureaucratic officials cannot be held accountable.

Planning Commission members are political appointees without technical or professional qualifications, and, with few exceptions, have a very narrow perspective on land-use matters.

Likewise, the Planning Department staff presently operates without leadership and without sufficient knowledge of neighborhoods or responsibility toward them.

If this first section of the building code is approved, citizens will be denied an important voice in decisions involving their quality of life, the use of their environmental resources, their home and property investments and their neighborhood’s welfare and integrity.

Since district elections for City Council were instituted, the development industry, which includes builders, architects, banks and real estate interests, has not been able to buy City Council seats.

With this proposed change, developers would have clear sailing for approval of their projects, since appointed commissioners and bureaucrats cannot be held accountable by the electorate.

If, in addition, the new regulations turn out not to be sufficiently sensitive to the requirements of San Diego’s various unique communities and only invite the building industry to provide bankrupt financing, pretend prosperity and haphazard building, then we will soon notice that we have become a Third World city with no real economic growth or vitality.

Citizens need to vigorously oppose this beginning step toward code update proposals because they would be denied their right to democratic participation in their government, and because it might offer to some council members the opportunity to become remote from their districts and not responsible to the people who elected them.

MERRIAM S. LEWIS, San Diego