Escondido Speeding Toward Development

The newly elected members of the Escondido City Council move into high gear today to change the city’s strict stance against residential development and make the city more “user-friendly” toward developers.

A growth management ordinance to be discussed at a City Hall workshop would ease the current requirement that all city facilities be in place in a certain area before development could go forward.

Also, under the proposed ordinance, developers would no longer be required to pay to fulfill all of the city’s so-called “quality of life standards”--such as the number of books per person in the library or the response time for police.

The changes come in the wake of the election of Lori Holt Pfeiler and Elmer Cameron, who, along with sitting Councilman Sid Hollins, are expected to form a more developer-friendly voting bloc on the five-person council.

“That was part of my campaign, that we needed to be more pro-business,” Pfeiler said.

The city staff said the new council has a different view of development, which has sparked the change.

“It’s taking a more realistic look, I think, and a little more reasonable approach toward development,” said Mark Cano, a senior planner with the city.

Some developers, however, are still cautious, but note that the new ordinance will be a good test to see how much the city has actually changed.

“Developers basically don’t trust the city because the city had all these plans for improvement but didn’t know how to implement them and didn’t have any idea what it was going to cost,” said Skip Lench, a general partner of Sterling Homes.

Lench said his firm lost $600,000 in a venture to build 47 single-family homes in the city. After 2 1/2 years of negotiating with the city, Sterling Homes pulled out, Lench said.

“Our project was destroyed . . . they wiped us out,” Lench said.

“It’s like the black plague. It was a joke, because you couldn’t get a straight answer from the council on what they really wanted,” said Lench, who is now building homes in Palm Springs.

The council had developed quality of life standards that it felt developers should pay to maintain. Under the proposed ordinance, developers would only have to pay for 25% of the cost of those standards, since that is how much more the city’s population is estimated to grow.

“We were beginning to feel that maybe it was unfair to make new developers pay for all of developers’ past ills, but have the new ones pay their fair share,” Cano said.

Cano agrees that developers are taking a wait-and-see attitude, but he also feels that the new ordinance would signify a dramatic shift in the council’s attitude toward growth.

Cano and Pfeiler both indicated that there may be more easing on growth restrictions, depending on the fate of the proposed ordinance, which could return to the council for a vote in the next month.

“We’re just looking at ways to streamline permit processing, so not only would we be backing off on fees to have developers pay for everything, but also to get them done more quickly,” Cano said.

Mayor Jerry Harmon, the leading architect of the current general plan and head of the slow-growth movement that dominated the previous city council, could not be reached for comment.