Voters to Say Grow or No Grow

California voters on Tuesday will consider a diverse set of growth initiatives in a ballot-box war between anti-sprawl activists and real estate interests. They will decide two dozen local measures in coastal communities and small farm towns around the state.

From Alameda to Escondido, activists are campaigning to keep tracts of open space from being subdivided. Using ballot initiatives, they are trying to preserve untouched hillsides, put caps on the number of building permits issued and prevent construction of individual housing projects.

In response, home builders are spending heavily to promote their own visions of California’s future: the construction of new master-planned communities to address a statewide housing shortage.

Overall, it’s a Nov. 5 grow-or-not potpourri:

There’s an old-fashioned property-rights battle in rural Nevada County, a question of building heights in bustling Berkeley and a proposed resolution to a long fight over farmland in Watsonville.

In Southern California, Ventura County leads the way with costly and controversial ballot measures that could define the boundaries of growth in three cities for decades to come.

While the measures vary widely, the underlying issue is the same, said Paul Shigley, managing editor of California Planning and Development Report, a monthly newsletter.

“It’s all about grappling with the 500,000 new people California adds every year,” he said. “The question is, ‘How are we going to deal with that?’ ”

For the last decade, Ventura County -- a national pacesetter for growth control -- has let voters answer that question.

“Ventura County loves to vote on this stuff,” Shigley said. “It’s become part of the political landscape.”

Since 1995, every major city in the semi-rural suburban county has passed its own anti-sprawl law, requiring voter approval before projects can be built on farmland, open space or beyond set urban boundaries.

This fall, voters are seeing a backlash by landowners and developers. In Ventura and Santa Paula, where hot markets have nearly doubled housing prices, development interests have spent between $750,000 and $1 million sponsoring initiatives that would allow 1,390 and 2,200 new homes respectively to be built in scrubby canyons and on brush-covered hillsides.

At the same time, Ventura County has produced a second generation of growth-control measures that would further shrink the boundaries for urban expansion. That’s happening in Simi Valley, a fast-growing commuter enclave near the San Fernando Valley. If activists win, the vote would effectively block two major housing projects pending before the city.

“If the Ventura and Santa Paula measures pass that would send an encouraging signal to developers,” said author William Fulton, who heads a planning think tank in Ventura. “That is: A political campaign is a big hassle, but it’s not as big a hassle as going through the City Council first.”

If the Simi Valley measure passes, Shigley said, it’s possible that growth-control activists will follow suit in other cities, trying to shrink urban boundaries just a few years after voters approved the first set. “I could see them trying the same thing in Oxnard, Camarillo and even Ventura,” Shigley said.

In Northern California, on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, Alameda County is Ventura’s growth-control counterpart. There, half a dozen ballot measures focus on stopping construction on vacant land one parcel at a time.

“People are looking to Manhattan-ize the Bay Area,” said Jean Sweeney, chair of Alameda Open Space. “My attitude is we ought to put a cap on the number of people who can live here.”

Farther inland, communities struggling to keep their small-town feel are considering growth caps.

Halfway between Stockton and Sacramento, in the heart of the Delta Recreation Area, the city of Galt is one of the Central Valley’s fastest growing communities. Residents worried that Galt could become the next Elk Grove -- a burgeoning Sacramento suburb --want home building limited to 300 units a year.

Opponents argue that the restriction would force developers to build out of town, robbing the city of tax revenue.

Similarly, voters in Windsor -- a small town nestled in the Russian River grape-growing region of Sonoma County -- could tighten a cap on housing permits they adopted in 1997. Like other communities in Sonoma and Napa counties, the pioneers of California’s slow-growth movement, Windsor has a growth boundary. But the initiative would determine how fast homes get built inside that urban limit line to ensure that roads, sewers and schools can keep pace, supporters say.

Such fights over growth may only distract Californians from important regional planning efforts, says Gerald Raycraft, planning director of the Assn. of Bay Area Governments, a council of nine counties and 101 cities. The group last month unveiled a “smart-growth” plan for the Bay Area -- a 20-year vision to limit sprawl, provide affordable housing and preserve open space. It was less than enthusiastically received.

“It’s easy to say ‘more people’ is the problem,” Raycraft said. “Ballot-box planning tends to be a simplistic approach to fixing something that’s more complex.”

Peter Detweiler, a consultant to the state Senate Local Government Committee, attributes the trend to an absence of leadership at the state level. “As a result, the wider debate -- what kind of California should exist in the future -- has not been engaged for years,” said Detweiler, who has tracked such trends for 20 years.

“Communities are left to bludgeon each other with the only legal weapons they have in their grasp,” he said. “That results in unnecessarily caustic political debates that can divide friends, communities and families.”

An example is unfolding in Nevada County in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. That county, a popular retreat for Sacramento and San Francisco residents with weekend ranches and homes there, is center stage for a heated battle over property rights that has caught national attention.

A ballot measure would create a streamlined process for reimbursing landowners when county regulations prohibit full development of their property. The debate has pitted a mix of conservative property owners, retirees, farmers and environmentalists against one another.

Russ Steele, a 64-year-old retired Air Force pilot, said restrictions imposed by the county’s “liberal” Board of Supervisors have slowly eroded basic property rights.

“At stake is our personal freedom,” Steele said. “The government is supposed to be protecting us. It’s not supposed to be stealing from us.”

County Supervisor Izzy Martin, a 16-year resident who grows organic vegetables, said the landowners’ measure goes too far. She cites a study that predicts a $5-million to $10-million drain each year on county coffers.

“It represents a huge opportunity for speculators to make windfall profits out of the Nevada County general fund,” Martin said.

Election season is always “contact-sport time” in rural counties, Martin said. But this time, she said, she has been compared to the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center.

An Oregon initiative similar to the one in Nevada County was struck down by the courts last month, but Steele believes his can withstand legal challenge.

“The fact is, this is [a] groundbreaking initiative,” he said.

That is why many planning experts across the state are keeping a close eye on it. They’re also watching another local measure that could set a positive precedent.

In the farm town of Watsonville, near Salinas, a ballot measure represents a compromise between factions that have feuded over growth for decades.

Farmers, environmentalists, Latino leaders and business groups have agreed on a plan that outlines specific areas for urban growth, farming and open-space preservation, said Patrick McCormick, a state planning agency officer in Santa Cruz County.

After fighting an inconclusive annexation battle in 1999, the warring groups formed their own nonprofit agency to plan the community’s future, McCormick said.

“Everybody was willing to give up something because they all liked what they got,” he said. “For communities in California who are at loggerheads to resolve important public issues, it’s potentially a great model.”