Azusans OK 1,250-Home, Mixed-Use Development

Plans for a housing development on 500 acres in northeast Azusa won overwhelming approval from city voters Tuesday night.

With all votes counted, 75% of voters favored the plan.

The Monrovia Nursery plan was designed by more than 200 residents at community meetings and approved early last year by the City Council.

But the 1,250-home development became ensnared in court because a community group that wanted fewer homes built on the site sued the city, the City Council and the nursery to submit the issue to a vote.

The City Council in January preempted a court decision by placing the issue on a special ballot.

Under the plan, the new housing would be offered first to Azusa residents and then to the public at large.

Four-year resident Robert Minnick, 28, who voted in favor, said, “I think it will enable some of the middle-class families to own houses easier. “

Residents voted on two issues Tuesday: the specific plan and the development agreement. Both passed with 75% of the vote.

“They deserve what they get,” said Michael Tyner, a former member of Azusans for Responsible Growth, which opposed the project.

He voted against the so-called Monrovia plan.

“They deserve a mediocre project when they could have a great project,” Tyner said.

“Don’t come crying to me in five years when it takes them an hour and a half to get home from Irwindale [Avenue] and Foothill [Boulevard] or they have a bunch of low-end apartments that have been turned into slums.”

It is estimated that the Monrovia project will generate about $1.7 million annually in new revenue for the city, along with other benefits such as a new elementary school.

“I think it will provide nice homeownership, it will fill a housing niche that is badly missing in Azusa,” said Councilman Dick Stanford, who voted to move forward with the project. “It’ll mean a resurgence of downtown, it’ll mean a big supermarket.”

Azusans for Responsible Growth, along with a newer online offshoot at www.AzusaVoteNo.com, had called for fewer homes on larger lots and a reduction in the number of apartment-type housing units.

The group originally protested the Monrovia plan by gathering 2,347 signatures on a petition to take the matter to a community vote. They had defeated plans for a 1999 development on the same site.

But the second time around, the city rejected the signatures as invalid and the two sides ended up in court.

Lana Grizzell, the spokeswoman for Azusans for Responsible Growth, said that her group was not against development but wanted a better plan for what they saw as a beautiful piece of land.

Tuesday’s vote was a big test for a version of “smart growth” development, said former Azusa City Manager Rick Cole.

Cole, now city manager of Ventura, has been a proponent of the approach -- involving the community to help design a mixed-use building plan that is economically and environmentally sound -- since the project’s beginning stages.

The question Tuesday was, “if the city takes people through this type of process and reaches consensus but not unanimity, whether the inertia of the status quo is enough to kill the project or whether smart growth really does offer a better way to do business in Southern California,” Cole said. Still a resident of Azusa, he voted for the plan to continue.

“A victory for the Monrovia Nursery specific plan is a profound vote of confidence in the new general plan and the new process which we used to develop it -- which was to use hundreds of citizens,” Cole said.

“It will also set the stage for the emergence of the university district ... the next stage of revitalization of downtown and Azusa taking a much more prominent role in the regional context.”

“I think that this vote opens the door to Azusa becoming a model of smart growth in an older suburb,” he said.