Voters Take the Initiative to Control Growth Themselves

While all eyes last week were focused on who would get the White House, voters from Yucaipa to Newport Beach also zeroed in on whether they would get a new Wal-Mart plopped in their backyard. Or a line drawn around their community to contain sprawl.

As the nation’s economic boom continues to generate new development, voters are increasingly wresting control of planning decisions away from bureaucrats and throwing the door open to a new era of civic planning.

A record number of growth-related initiatives were on ballots nationwide Tuesday--so many that a think tank studying the issue hasn’t even begun to count them all. Across the West, voters decided scores of slow-growth issues. In California alone, there were 60 of them--the most in a decade.

“We are charting new ground here,” said Phyllis Myers, a consultant for the Washington, D.C-based Brookings Institution. “There’s a struggle going on over who’s going to be in charge. It’s part of a remarkable national conversation we’re having on growth and planning.”

Experts say Tuesday’s results, although mixed, point to several emerging trends. Voters seem willing to offset effects of growth by buying open space, but remain leery of sweeping controls on development. And the more narrow or localized an initiative was, the better it did. A majority of California’s local slow-growth measures passed, but broad-brush initiatives in Arizona and Colorado that would have slammed the brakes on growth were trounced, as were similar measures in San Luis Obispo and Sonoma counties.

Backers of the Sonoma County anti-sprawl initiative put an ominous warning on their Web site: “Now is the time to act if we don’t want to end up like . . .Orange County.” The effort was bulldozed by 57% of voters.

They might have done better to follow the example of Newport Beach, where a local anti-growth initiative that sprang from concerns about clogged streets near a proposed resort sailed to victory. “The bad guys were winning for a long time,” said Tom Hyans, a proponent of the so-called Greenlight initiative. “Now, it’s time for the good guys to win.”

By “good guys” he didn’t necessarily mean environmentalists. Many slow-growth measures were supported by farmers worried about the loss of agricultural land, or neighborhood groups concerned about quality of life. In Newport Beach, Measure S was supported by a majority of the ritzy beach town’s wealthy Republican voters.

“Concerns about growth and the desire to get a handle on it is a mainstream issue,” Myers said. “It’s a movement where party lines blur.”

In fact, experts say Tuesday’s vote illustrates the complexity of the growth issue, and how the battleground is defined less by ideology than by myriad local issues.

“What happens depends on the community involved . . . what projects have been built in the past 10 years and whether people liked them or not,” said Paul Shigley, managing editor of a monthly newsletter for city and county planners. “It has to do with how bad traffic in a place has gotten--or not gotten--the health of the local economy, the competency of local government.”

The National Assn. of Home Builders was among the groups that campaigned hard against measures in California, Colorado and Arizona.

“There’s hardly ever a situation when intelligent land-use planning can be done at the ballot box,” said Clayton Traylor, the group’s vice president of political operations. “In Colorado and Arizona they were trying to rewrite a hundred years of land-use planning in one fell swoop.”

In California, the robust economy and ensuing building boom led to a surge in growth measures on the ballot Tuesday.

“There’s no question that this goes to one of the most fundamental issues in California today, and especially Orange County: How do you accommodate future growth given the fact that most of your areas are already urbanized?” said William Fulton, publisher of the California Planning & Development Report.

About 65% of California’s slow-growth efforts prevailed, with voters more likely to approve local measures than county measures.

In the San Bernardino County city of Yucaipa, neighborhood groups stopped construction of a Wal-Mart store. But in Palmdale, an initiative supported by labor unions could not halt a nonunion Wal-Mart there.

Ironically, measures that saw well-financed opposition--creating a David and Goliath battle--were more likely to succeed.

In Newport Beach, opponents of the Greenlight initiative say that may have tipped the election. Opponents received more than $400,000 from national developers and real estate agents associations.

“We played into their picture of developers running the city, which I don’t think is the case,” said former mayor Tom Edwards, who chaired the opposition’s campaign. He added wistfully, “I almost wonder if we had run no campaign, would we have done better?”

A look 70 miles to the south in San Diego County may portend what’s in Newport’s future.

In Escondido, voters passed a measure in 1998 that requires a citywide vote on major development plans. This year, eight projects were on the ballot. All failed.

Such a scenario is not unexpected--people are resistant to change. “It’s very hard to get people to vote yes on something. It’s much easier to get them to vote no,” said Mark Petracca, chairman of the political science department at UC Irvine.

Greenlight’s supporters say the measure will not stop all growth in Newport Beach.

“We were moderate in our growth control--I think of it as smart growth,” said proponent Phil Arst. “If a project is meritorious, it isn’t automatically blocked. If it’s just an office building dumping lots of traffic, I don’t think it will pass. It’s not a brick wall--it’s a wall of reason.”

The one thing everyone--pundits, supporters and developers--agrees on is that voters will have to be incredibly well informed on everything from environmental impact reports to traffic projections-issues normally handled by city staff. Critics say it will also be difficult for governments to do long-term planning on water, roads and other infrastructure if every development is put up to a vote.

Even where slow-growth measures failed, elected officials were disheartened by voter backlash against public planning. In Brea, just miles from Newport Beach, a measure that would have required voter approval of all hillside projects lost by a razor-thin margin. Rex Gaede, one of 11 former mayors opposing the measure, said that while he was glad it failed, “the trust has been lost.”

But activists were jubilant. In San Luis Obispo, a measure called Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR), was defeated by 59% of voters. But SOAR spokesman Tom Murray said the effort created a grass-roots movement that will endure.

“More than 30,000 people said they’re concerned about sprawl,” Murray said. Those residents, he maintained, will find other ways to combat it.

“It’s a speed bump,” he said of the defeat. “This was a battle, not the war.”

Times staff writer Peter Hong contributed to this report.