Council Watered Down Measure, Group Says : Coalition May Oppose Slow-Growth Initiative

San Diegans for Managed Growth, the coalition that led the fight for a ballot initiative to protect San Diego’s topography, claims that the San Diego City Council has gutted the measure and is preparing to withdraw its support during the upcoming election campaign.

Although no formal vote will be taken until Aug. 16, all eight members of the 12-member organization attending a Monday night meeting expressed opposition to environmental restrictions that will be part of the city’s growth-management plan to be placed before voters Nov. 8, SDMG members said Tuesday.

Rejection by the very group that wrote the “environmentally sensitive lands” protections could hurt the city’s campaign to win voter approval for its growth-control blueprint, especially if SDMG members take the additional step of endorsing a competing plan that will also appear on the ballot Nov. 8.

No decision on whether to endorse the competing plan--a similar, but generally more restrictive citizen-backed initiative dubbed the Quality of Life Initiative--was made at the Monday night meeting, SDMG members said.

‘Just Can’t See It’

“SDMG will not support the city. I just can’t see it,” said Leo Wilson, a member of the organization who attended the Monday-night meeting. “I don’t know of anybody in SDMG or the environmental community who will support it as it is now.”

The environmental group believes that a single provision of the city plan, which allows the council to exempt home building from the environmental protections if a developer can win six votes of the nine-member council, effectively undermines the entire plan.

“It’s so easy to get six votes on land issues in the city that are development-oriented,” said David Kreitzer, SDMG’s chairman. “It’s a piece of cake for the developers.”

“We could not support it as it is,” added Emily Durbin, an SDMG member and former chairwoman of the local Sierra Club chapter.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor was critical of that all-or-nothing posture Tuesday. “I don’t think it’s a situation to take all your marbles and go home,” O’Connor said. “That is the strongest sensitive-lands (restriction) of any city and we’ve come a long way. The developers are screaming that we’ve shut down the city.”

But Peter Navarro, a member of Citizens for Limited Growth, the community group sponsoring the competing measure, said that SDMG’s position will bolster his group’s campaign.

“The people who have followed this debate on the non-developers’ side of the fence have been very disappointed with the propensity of the council to weave loopholes throughout their document and water it down,” Navarro said.

Deep Division

In contrast to its position on the city’s environmental restrictions, SDMG is deeply divided over whether to support a similar measure that proposes environmental restrictions for the county’s unincorporated lands, its members said.

The hang-up on the county measure is also about exemptions, but on that initiative, SDMG is about evenly split, several members said. In a straw vote taken last month, the group was evenly divided on the proposal. No vote was taken Monday night.

With the county Board of Supervisors scheduled to complete deliberations on its plan today, the group is adopting a wait-and-see attitude, members said.

But, after five days of meetings and votes last week, the city plan is complete. All that remains is for city planners to meld measures that restrict home-building on hillsides, wetlands, flood plains and canyons into the city’s overall growth-management blueprint and for attorneys to review the language. The council is scheduled to take one more vote next week, placing the proposal on the fall ballot.

Because that vote has yet to be taken, SDMG will not commit itself until the Aug. 16 meeting. But most, if not all, believe that the plan has been eroded too much from its original writing to be endorsed.

Made up of representatives from the Sierra Club, Citizens Coordinate for Century III, and several community planning groups, the 12-member group gained local prominence when it led the upset victory of a 1985 ballot proposition that blocked development of a parcel of land in the city’s future urbanizing zone.

SDMG originally wrote this year’s environmental restrictions without an exemption provision, and began gathering petitions in January and February to place them on the ballot as a citizens’ initiative. Unable to muster the resources to gather the more than 80,000 signatures needed, the group abandoned its effort in April and agreed to work with a city advisory task force writing a growth-management plan for the council.

Because of Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s insistence that the plan include an exemption provision, the group agreed to a clause that allowed exemptions if seven of the nine council members concurred, Kreitzer said. The committee, acting on language proposed by development industry attorney Paul Peterson, lowered that number to six. In its deliberations last week, the council ratified that provision.

The cooperation with the council was a marked contrast to SDMG’s strategy in 1985 of taking its position directly to voters. At least one member is now bitter about the decision.

In 1985, “we were told over and over and over again that, if you would only work within the system, we could address these goals within the system,” said Bob Glaser, an SDMG member who has not decided whether to support the city plan.

“Here we are in 1987-88, and we worked within the system . . . and what came out at the end is so different from what went in.”

“It’s tough to say goodby to a child that you’ve nurtured for the last year of your life,” he added. “I’m looking for a way to support it, but I don’t think it’s going to be possible if the final version comes out the way I’ve read in the papers.”