Council OKs Anti-Growth Plan for Ballot

An initiative designed to check urban sprawl in the city’s northern reaches will be placed before voters in November, the San Diego City Council decided unanimously Monday after almost two hours of raucous debate.

The council’s vote, considered perfunctory because the slow-growth initiative has qualified for the ballot with more than 75,000 signatures, signaled the end of the first act in a growing public drama over who will control the city’s growth.

But council discussion also provided a foretaste of the kind of bitter debate that is sure to surround the issue before it is decided by voters.

“Apparently, the sleeves are going to be rolled up in this campaign past the elbow,” Councilman Mike Gotch said when the dust settled Monday afternoon in the council chambers.

The initiative seeks to stop development in an area called the “future urbanizing zone,” a stretch of nearly 18,000 acres in north San Diego that is supposed to be exempt from development until 1995. City planners created this “urban reserve” hoping to arrest urban sprawl and promote development closer to the city’s core.

Environmentalists, however, say they are unhappy with City Council votes since 1979 to permit planning for and development of more than 7,500 acres in the reserve. The council’s decision in September to allow development of the 5,100-acre La Jolla Valley project was the “straw that broke the camel’s back,” they say, and they began work on the initiative.

The measure would require a citywide election on any development proposal in the urban reserve. If the initiative passes, it would wrest control over northern city development from the City Council and give it directly to voters.

Councilmen Bill Cleator and Uvaldo Martinez knocked the slow-growth measure during public debate Monday. Cleator said he resented implications that he and his colleagues had violated the city’s growth management plan.

He defended a 1983 decision to allow development of the 785-acre Fairbanks Ranch Country Club in the reserve, noting that the city received 600 acres of the project as a park in exchange for permission to construct 341 homes and a golf course. The city would have been hard-pressed to buy the park land with public money, Cleator said.

“I think if you’re going to waltz around with your exaggeration bag of tricks, then you should look in the mirror,” Cleator told initiative backers in the auditorium.

Martinez, who is heading the drive to defeat the initiative, argued that the measure is “elitist” and would result in more crowding in the inner-city neighborhoods, where public services are already beginning to be strained under the demands of a growing population.

Martinez also said the initiative is too broad because it would call for a citywide vote on development projects after 1995, the year when the urban reserve theoretically should be thrown open for development.

But Mayor Roger Hedgecock and other council backers of the measure offered stern rebuffs to critics of the initiative.

“I believe the City Council has gotten what it asked for, a revolt of the people,” said Councilman Bill Mitchell.

Hedgecock, who lost a dear political battle when the council approved the La Jolla Valley project, sounded much like a schoolteacher as he lectured council members.

At one point, he held up a map and, as if conducting a geography class, pointed to the different projects that have been allowed in the urban reserve because of council votes. Later, Hedgecock said his colleagues “caved in” to special interests on the La Jolla Valley vote.

San Diegans, he said, “see a City Council incapable of stopping the Los Angelization of our city.”

“When you look at the freeways today, as opposed to five years ago; when you look at the air quality today, as opposed to five years ago; when you look at the quality of parks and services, as opposed to five years ago . . . the fact is that people see the same symptoms of the deterioration of the quality of life going on around them,” Hedgecock said.

“And they cannot help but believe that these are not inevitabilities.”

By placing the proposal on the ballot, the council rejected a move to simply approve the measure and spare the public the expense of including the initiative in the November election.

The council also decided Monday to deny a request by Councilman William Jones to place his own version of a managed-growth alternative on the ballot. Council members said they did not want another measure to confuse voters during the November showdown.

Mary Hanson, vice chairwoman of San Diegans for Managed Growth, which sponsored the initiative, said after the meeting that she expected a divided council to put the measure on the ballot, although she urged its immediate adoption.

Now, both sides in the debate say they will take the next couple of weeks to plot strategy for the November vote. Hanson said her group plans to conduct a grass-roots campaign, during which volunteers will canvass neighborhoods in support of the measure.

Martinez, heading a group called Citizens for Community Planning, said he is worried that the initiative is not important enough to conquer voter apathy and draw enough people to the polls to help defeat it.

City attorneys are scheduled to submit proposed ballot language for the initiative for the City Council’s approval by July 29.

The growth initiative has already overcome a recent challenge in court. Pardee Construction Co. filed suit to void the measure because of a technicality on the supporting petitions, but a Superior Court judge threw out the suit last Tuesday, paving the way for Monday’s vote by the council.