Rural Boom Sowing Revolt at Ballot Box

Along with jobs and a fat state budget surplus, California’s boom has produced something less predictable--a ballot box revolt against growth.

There are about 50 local and county initiatives dealing with growth issues on Tuesday’s ballot--the most in a decade. A handful are pro-development, but the overwhelming majority seek new limits.

Up and down the state, in small towns and rambling counties, the proposals reflect increasing public frustration with elected officials’ willingness and ability to manage the latest wave of subdivisions and malls swallowing up lettuce fields and coastal hillsides.

Though so-called ballot box planning may not be the best way to shape a community, “you can’t blame people for their concern,” said Tony Lettieri, president of the California chapter of the American Planning Assn. “They see a lot of lip service paid to ‘smart growth.’ But when they look at their communities, they see the same old subdivisions constructed.”

The citizens of Tracy, a Central Valley farm community discovered by Silicon Valley commuters, will decide whether to slash the number of houses that can be annually built within city boundaries. Placer County residents in the Sierra foothills will vote on whether to increase their sales tax by a quarter-cent to finance land preservation programs.

Ballot measures in the Orange County towns of Newport Beach and Brea would subject many major developments to citywide votes.

And two widely watched initiatives in Sonoma and San Luis Obispo counties would require a public vote on zoning changes of agricultural land and open space, essentially stripping county government of its power to approve development on farmland.

Leslie, a 53-year-old nurse who has lived in San Luis Obispo County for three decades, virtually hisses when he talks about spreading development near Arroyo Grande.

“I’ve seen a beautiful place destroyed,” he said, adding that he will probably vote for the growth control proposal, called Measure M. “The county government doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

San Luis Obispo County covers 2.1 million acres, the equivalent of a couple of small Eastern states. More than half is agricultural: rolling hills of oaks and grazing land, rich valley bottoms planted with vegetables, and a rapidly growing number of vineyards.

Several hours’ drive from the sprawl of the Bay Area and Southern California, it is a place people escape to. They attend Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and never leave. They retire here. They treasure the classic California landscape as if it were a winning lottery ticket.

But parts of the county are beginning to look like suburban anywhere. Leslie, who declined to give his last name, was buying groceries in a new shopping center next to U.S. 101. Housing tracts run up and down the nearby hills like lines of ants.

That and similar scenes spurred environmentalists to put Measure M on the ballot.

Called Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources, the initiative is similar to ones approved in Napa County in 1990 and Ventura County in 1998.

The measure would prohibit agricultural, open space and rural residential land from being rezoned for development during the next 30 years without a countywide vote.

The initiative campaign is a contentious one. Ranchers, farmers, Realtors and the development industry have united against the proposal, paying for television ads and color mailers fiercely denouncing it.

Measure M will take away local control, they argue, require public votes for minor land use decisions and hurt farmers by robbing them of flexibility to run their operations as they see fit.

What’s more, anti-M spokesman Don Warden said the proposed controls aren’t necessary.

“You can’t compare us to Orange County or Los Angeles County,” said Warden, whose family has been ranching outside San Luis Obispo since 1868. “This area has a much higher level of consciousness about controlling growth and sprawl and the quality of life.”

The pro-M forces have responded with their own aggressive TV ads, accusing opponents of distorting the initiative and lying about its impact.

As for local control, it hardly exists now, they maintain--not when a supervisor from one part of the county can tip the balance in favor of a development unwanted by a community in another part of the county.

“It’s a response to a system that is breaking down,” said Measure M spokesman Tom Murray. A 49-year-old building contractor from Arroyo Grande, Murray is one of many who moved to the area to attend Cal Poly and stayed.

He says he started paying attention to growth when his children’s elementary campus “went from a small, intimate school to split classes” because of leaping enrollment.

“For me,” he added, “it’s about the quality of our neighborhoods and our communities. Yeah, that’s the party line--but it’s real.”

The arguments are much the same in Sonoma County, which is facing intensifying development pressure as high-tech and telecommunications firms move to the area.

“Everybody knows these are high stakes,” said AnnaLis Dalrymple of Greenbelt Alliance, a Bay Area environmental group supporting the “Rural Heritage Initiative.”

State Leads in Ballot Measures

California’s fondness for initiatives is long-standing. The state leads the nation in the number of local land-use ballot measures, and over the years, the slow-growth side has won a majority of the time, according to the California Planning and Development Report, a monthly newsletter for city and county planners.

Analyzing growth initiatives since 1986, the report found they were more common in coastal counties than inland and more plentiful in times of economic prosperity--when builders are more active--than in recession.

“There’s clearly a relationship” between a good economy and interest in growth control, said William Fulton, the planning report’s editor and publisher. “It’s very tangible. . . . People very often are responding to traffic, to what they see every day.”

It is not since the last boom, in 1990, that California voters have faced as many planning measures as they do this year.

Initiatives and urban growth boundaries setting physical limits on a city’s growth are increasingly favored. More than 20 urban boundaries have been adopted in the past five years, many of them in Ventura and Sonoma counties, the report found.

“It’s popular to not trust elected officials and [the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources initiative] plays on that,” said Fulton. The increase in growth boundaries, he said, stems from a feeling “that earlier growth restrictions didn’t work.”

Government officials aren’t thrilled about the ballot box planning trend because such measures often reduce their options, said Dan Carrigg, legislative representative of the League of California Cities.

Still, he said, “there’s also an awareness that when some of these pass it’s driven by a public concern that planning on a local level is not responsive.”

California is not alone. Nationally, anti-sprawl and open space measures are growing in number. A Brookings Institution study of the 1998 election identified 240 state and local ballot proposals dealing with growth, parks or conservation--up more than 50% from 1996. More than two-thirds passed--a record number, according to the study.

A Brookings survey of this year’s ballot indicates that a majority of the American population will have a chance next week to vote on growth-related ballot measures, including statewide anti-sprawl initiatives in Arizona and Colorado.

Not all the measures, either in California or nationally, are aimed at curbing development. Some would loosen controls or allow a specific project to move forward.

One such initiative, backed by prominent California developer C.C. Myers, would clear the way for a 3,000-home subdivision in Sacramento County. The measure asks voters to rezone 2,000 acres of grazing land he owns to allow a gated golf course development.

Myers was denied permission to build by the county because the land lies outside the county’s urban growth boundary. Irked by that result, Myers has spent $1.8 million asking voters to grant him an exemption, making the campaign one of the most costly ever fought over a local land use measure in California.

Measures such as these, establishing growth controls or relaxing them, are not likely to end soon, planner Lettieri said--at least until the state develops a statewide growth management plan.

“Absolutely not,” he said. “Hopefully it will energize elected officials to come up with a more comprehensive solution.”

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Times staff writer Jenifer Warren contributed to this story.

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Land Battles

Cities and counties across California have a range of growth-control initiatives on the November ballot---the most since 1990. Measures include limits on development, taxes to buy land for open space and urban growth boundaries. A handful would allow more growth.

Sources: California Offices of the Surface Transportation Policy Project and California Planning and Development Report