Residents Share Their Vision for the Future : Government: Hoping to eliminate the need for the Growth Management Initiative, officials take comments from the public on a draft General Plan, which the City Council will vote on next month.

Most of the people with questions stood and hollered them out, hoping that others who had gathered in the sweltering gymnasium to talk about the city’s General Plan could hear them.

But Pat McLaughlin jumped out of her seat and swept across the gym floor to the big map near the front, seizing a microphone as she went.

“Now, the mayor said specifically that we’re interested in keeping the single-family houses,” McLaughlin said, pointing at a purple patch on the map in East Pasadena. “Yet they’re putting in this industrial park here, this environmental thing nobody knows what it is, and the single-family houses--are they being eliminated?”

This happened at a meeting last week on the General Plan--the latest in a series of about 50 since November--and a restive group of East Pasadena residents had jammed into the Victory Park gym on one of the hottest nights of the year to hear city officials go over it one more time.

In the last 10 months, city planners have gotten about 2,500 people--the majority of them residents such as McLaughlin with little experience in city government--to talk about how the city should plan for its future. There have been three citywide forums, meetings in each City Council member’s district and 21 community workshops, including three conducted in Spanish.

Homemakers and merchants have talked extensively about “keeping the city the way it is,” by preserving historic structures and limiting traffic. Corporate executives and non-English-speaking factory workers have studied different scenarios, seeking to understand the hard choices planners face.

Participants have examined maps, studied position papers, listened to hours of explanation by tireless city staff members and--with a wariness born of Pasadena’s long history of development battles--sifted through long-range plans for their own neighborhoods.

“We were really trying to provoke discussion,” Mayor Rick Cole said. “We weren’t at all shy about it.”

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Out of just such meetings as last Monday’s gathering at Victory Park, city planners have modified the draft General Plan, a kind of blueprint for the future.

It’s a broad-brush, idealistic document, describing a city with fewer cars, more places to stroll, more affordable housing and human services, thriving businesses, and a wealth of recreational resources--all in a wholesome atmosphere of controlled growth and “arts enrichment.”

It also maps out neighborhood-by-neighborhood planning goals and traffic patterns.

Community groups, business associations and individuals have all left their imprint on the plan, city officials say. For example, residents of a sedate neighborhood around Hill Avenue objected to a planned light-rail station at Hill and the Foothill Freeway (210); the station will be two blocks east on Allen Avenue.

Now the process is drawing to a close.

After a public hearing on Wednesday by the Planning Commission and two hearings by the City Council in September, the council will vote on it. The draft General Plan, which will replace a plan that has not been updated in 15 years, will then become a rough guide for developers and planners.

The result will be some powerful constraints on growth, officials say. Pasadena has 32 million square feet of commercial space, with a potential for 136 million under current zoning guidelines. When the zoning code is revised next spring to conform to the draft General Plan, the maximum will be 48 million square feet, an 85% reduction, city officials say.

The constraints on residential units are more modest. There are 53,000 housing units now, with a potential for 66,200. Under the new zoning guidelines, the maximum will be 63,000.

And growth is largely concentrated in “specific plan areas,” currently underdeveloped sections of the city.

But rarely has there been as hard a sell for the draft General Plan as the crowd of about 150 in the Victory Park gym, most of them homeowners from the Hastings Ranch and Daisy Villa neighborhoods. “This is the Howard Jarvis crowd, which hates government no matter what,” one city official said with a shrug.

The sweeping generalizations about human service, arts enrichment and the like didn’t seem to bother this audience, although some worried that City Hall hadn’t given sufficient consideration to the fiscal implications.

“Unless you address that succinctly and clearly, you’re going to run Pasadena into deficit spending,” one speaker said.

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Added another: “Underline that 60 times, just to be sure you get it.”

But it was some well-meaning planning goals for East Pasadena that had the crowd buzzing like a nest of wasps. There was, for example, the projected expansion of the Hastings Ranch Shopping Center--”the Sears center” for most residents--at Foothill and Rosemead boulevards. The idea was to “enhance the retail shops, improve pedestrian access and give more service to the people who live in the area,” Planning Director Ann Odell said.

“The neighborhood doesn’t want it,” an elderly man said.

“The residents have said time and again that they want the neighborhood to stay the same,” another said.

Then there was the proposed expansion of the industrial and office area south of the shopping center, including the possible establishment of an “environmental park,” a complex of businesses that specialize in improving the quality of the environment.

“Just what is an environmental park?” someone asked.

Did it have anything to do with recycling plants, wondered Cliff Benedict, president of the Lower Hastings Ranch Neighborhood Assn. “If it means a plant, it’s a no-go,” he said.

Odell examined the purple patch on the “land use” map, then laughed with embarrassment. There had been a tiny mistake, she said. Somehow a small residential neighborhood had been colored purple, as part of a special industrial area.

“You’re right,” Odell said, “we need to put yellow in there.”

City officials like to talk about the General Plan process as a smooth-running exchange between citizens and City Hall, with the enthusiastic voices of thousands of citizens forming an idealistic mosaic. “It’s been educational participation,” Cole said. “There’s a climate now of much greater understanding.”

But the 10-month series of meetings and exchanges was prompted by bitter dissension, and it will probably continue to be framed by hot debate until the November election, when the voters will consider a referendum on the city’s 3-year-old Growth Management Initiative.

In 1989, a majority of Pasadena voters, fueled by anti-growth sentiment, approved annual caps on housing and commercial development in the city. The measure placed an annual limit of 250,000 square feet of new commercial space and 250 units of new housing.

But a 1990 lawsuit, brought by business interests and minority advocates, questioned the measure’s constitutionality. Development screeched to a halt in Pasadena, the plaintiffs said, and the measure was stifling commercial life.

Faced with what legal experts thought would be a long, expensive legal battle--and the good possibility of losing--the City Council agreed to an out-of-court settlement. The city would update the General Plan, or at least the “land use” and “mobility” sections that addressed planning and traffic goals, by the end of this summer and then put the Growth Management Initiative back on the ballot in November.

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The idea was, officials have said, to make Pasadena’s planning goals clearly the will of the people rather than the product of planners and developers, obviating the need for the controls spelled out by the growth initiative.

“We shift away from the static, win-lose issue of ‘how much growth’ to the more useful one of ‘what kind of growth and where,’ ” Cole said.

But Pasadena Residents in Defense of the Environment (PRIDE), the slow-growth group that promoted the growth initiative, has responded to the City Council compromise agreement with outrage. Its members have vowed to oppose supplanting the growth initiative with the draft General Plan.

“(The City Council is) trying to convince citizens to discard their trump card: citizen-control of development,” said Anthony Thompson, a PRIDE executive board member.

PRIDE members like the draft General Plan, Thompson said. “But it doesn’t have teeth in it,” he said. It leaves too much to the discretion of the City Council, whose present membership of controlled-growth advocates could be replaced by more development-minded members, Thompson said.

The two planning approaches could coexist, PRIDE members insist, with the growth initiative imposing numerical limits and the General Plan providing guidelines for permissible growth.

“I’d like to believe that future City Councils would not cave in to development pressures,” Thompson said, “but we see it happening all the time.”