First Shots Fired Over Development Referendum : Growth: Campaign pits homeowners against political and business interests.

With less than three weeks to Election Day, partisans on both sides of the issue of voter-imposed restraints on development fired the first shots in the campaign to repeal the city’s 3-year-old Growth Management Initiative.

Proponents of Proposition O, the repeal measure, began circulating flyers that attacked the initiative’s across-the-board limits on building as a danger to jobs and revenues. Those in favor of keeping the slow-growth measure hit back with charges that their opponents are threatening the character of the city.

The “Yes On Proposition O” group has hired political consultant Lynn Wessell, a frequent presence in pro-developer causes, to direct the campaign in favor of repeal.

Wessell has been involved in campaigns all over Southern California in recent years, helping to defeat a 1988 slow-growth measure in Orange County that many experts had predicted would win easily and leading a successful effort against another such measure in Santa Clarita this year.

“Don’t let slow-growth mandates choke off the lifeblood of our city,” said the first Wessell-produced flyer, now being circulated by proponents of repeal, a broad-based coalition of political and business interests.

At the same time, leaders of Pasadena Residents in Defense of the Environment (PRIDE), the group that succeeded in 1989 in winning voter support for the Growth Management Initiative, were urging the voters to keep it in place.

“The citizens don’t want to go back to business as usual,” PRIDE Treasurer Anthony Thompson said.

The growth restraints--approved by voters after a series of large, unpopular developments in the city--set strict annual limits of 250 residential units and 250,000 square feet of commercial development. They are necessary, PRIDE leaders said, because the City Council and city staff can’t be trusted to restrain unbridled growth.

The referendum on the Growth Management Initiative stems from negotiations between the city and the plaintiffs in a lawsuit. The Pasadena Chamber of Commerce, the Urban League and others had sued to overturn the growth restraints, claiming that they were unconstitutional.

In an out-of-court settlement, the city agreed to rewrite Pasadena’s General Plan--particularly the parts dealing with future development and traffic patterns--and to put the initiative back on the ballot in November.

The idea was, city officials said, to gauge community sentiment about where development is acceptable so across-the-board growth restraints would not be necessary.

The Draft General Plan was approved by the City Council last month after 11 months of public meetings designed to involve residents in long-range planning issues.

Proponents of the repeal say the General Plan adequately protects the city from overdevelopment by reducing the potential for growth in the city by 85% when compared to current zoning restrictions. Although there are no annual caps, development is largely prohibited in large areas of the city. Potential growth is concentrated in six areas that are predominantly non-residential.

PRIDE is playing the role of David against Goliath in this campaign, with the City Council, the Chamber of Commerce, the Urban League and other business and civil rights groups against it.

Repeal opponents concede that they have just begun raising money for their campaign and that funds are coming in small amounts. “Money is coming in daily, $10, $25, a few 100s,” Thompson said. “We have about $5,000 so far.”

But as of Sept. 1, the “Yes On Proposition O” group had raised almost $45,000, most of it from a $25,000 contribution of cash and services from the Chamber of Commerce and $5,000 from the Ralph M. Parsons Co., a local engineering firm.

Wessell, president of the Burbank-base Wessell Co., is known for producing blizzards of hard-hitting campaign materials, including mailings that look like tabloid newspapers, and for sending out armies of canvassers. His campaigns typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In his most recent foray into the San Gabriel Valley, he was beaten in 1987 by a well-organized group of Azusa homeowners who were fighting a plan to convert the Azusa Greens Country Club into a massive residential and commercial development. The would-be developers, in a Wessell-led effort, spent $103,000 in their initiative campaign to the homeowners’ $3,000, but lost in a close race.