ELECTIONS / SANTA CLARITA : Measure A’s Defeat Blamed on Foes’ Funding, Economy

Supporters of a Santa Clarita slow-growth initiative Wednesday blamed its defeat on the weak economy and a well-financed opposition campaign that they said confused the voters.

But opponents said the initiative, known as Measure A, lost because it was poorly written by a group of overconfident, self-serving residents.

Measure A would have allowed the city to approve only 475 new housing units annually through 2002.

It attracted only a 44% favorable vote, according to preliminary returns, doing poorly throughout the city, even in Canyon Country, where proponents predicted that rapid development during the past two decades would catapult it to victory. Although the measure failed to capture any of the city’s 49 precincts, it did worst in Valencia, a master-planned community, where it dipped to as low as 33%.

In the same election, two City Council candidates who opposed the initiative won election.

Incumbent Councilwoman Jan Heidt, a bookstore owner, and George Pederson, a retired captain in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, defeated 14 other candidates by comfortable margins.

Heidt received 6,602 votes, or about 20% of the total cast. Pederson got 5,536 votes, or about 17%. Mike Lyons, a parks commissioner who supported Measure A, was in third place with 3,510 votes, or about 10%.

About 32% of the city’s 57,870 voters turned out for the election Tuesday.

Despite Measure A’s poor showing, Santa Clarita voters do not want unbridled development, opponents of the initiative said Wednesday.

“All of us want responsible, managed growth,” Pederson said. “Some of us just didn’t want that particular inflexible measure.”

“There’s a high degree of satisfaction with the city and its services,” Heidt said. “But the voters still expect us to take a good, hard look at development projects.”

Early polls taken by both sides indicated that before the campaign began, more than two-thirds of the electorate supported limiting growth in the semi-rural area. But in the end, voters saw little need to approve a cap on housing construction because the recession had already slowed building in the area, said John Drew, co-author of the measure.

“Our timing was wrong,” Drew said.

But Lynn Wessell, a political consultant hired by the measure’s opponents, said he helped defeat a slow-growth measure in Orange County in 1988, before the economy took a turn for the worse.

“It sounds like they are just being crybabies,” Wessell said. “We simply out-campaigned them.”

The group that hired Wessell, Santa Clarita Citizens for Managed Growth, spent about $275,000 to defeat the initiative, more than 27 times as much as its supporters, said Renee Ramsey, campaign manager for the opposition group. The effort was primarily funded by developers, but drew volunteers from among local business leaders and community activists.

In a flurry of campaign flyers mailed to most of the 38,000 households in the city, the group claimed that the measure would hurt the local economy and chase new projects into the surrounding unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, causing overdevelopment there. Radio spots and other mailers also attacked Drew, saying he was using the initiative to further his career as a political consultant.

Councilman Carl Boyer III, one of four members of the five-member council to oppose Measure A and a frequent critic of Drew’s, called the defeat “a vote for representative government, instead of government by the wanna-bes.”

The most effective attack on the measure claimed that it would allow “unlimited low-income government-subsidized housing in our neighborhoods.” Under state law, cities must provide lower-cost housing, so Measure A’s authors included a provision that would have allowed the council to exempt some or all low-income housing from the growth restrictions.

Although supporters claimed in their literature that Measure A would limit low-income housing, “we were just overwhelmed” by the opposition’s attack, Drew said.

“Low-income housing was the fatal flaw of the initiative,” Drew said. “People didn’t know which way to vote after hearing about it, so they voted no.”

Failure of the measure came as a relief to developers Wednesday, particularly those whose projects were threatened by the proposed restrictions.

“We’re going to Disneyland to celebrate,” joked Sam Veltri, vice president of planning for the Anden Group, which is seeking permission to build 3,000 housing units on a 1,000-acre parcel in the center of the city.

* MORE ELECTION RESULTS: B8