All City, County Measures to Curb S.D. Growth Lose

SAN DIEGO —  All four San Diego County growth-control measures went down to stunning defeats Tuesday, devastated by a $2.1-million building industry campaign to persuade voters that the home-building caps were not the proper solutions to the problems caused by rapid growth.

The surprising rejection of Propositions H and J in the city of San Diego and Propositions B and D in the county’s unincorporated regions places the cloudy future of growth control back in the hands of the San Diego City Council and the County Board of Supervisors.

Only Proposition C, an advisory measure that calls for the establishment of a regional board to oversee development countywide, won easy passage Tuesday night.

Disappointed supporters of all four growth-control measures attributed their defeats, which came by substantial margins, to the building industry’s advertising blitz and the competition among the rival propositions.

“Clearly, money and lies are still able to prevail in San Diego,” said slow-growth Councilman Bob Filner. “The developers had a divide-and-conquer strategy that the environmentalists played right into. The environmentalists were fighting the council and the council was fighting the environmentalists. And the developers won.”

Council Action Predicted

Councilman Ron Roberts, who led the committee that wrote Proposition H, predicted that the council will soon consider whether to impose much of the growth-control measure by approving ordinances.

“It may be that we enact a large part, if not all of that, through council action,” Roberts said.

Citizens for Limited Growth, which placed Propositions D and J on the city and county ballots, promised to press for immediate council adoption of growth controls and environmental protections. Campaign coordinator Linda Bernhardt said the group would place a growth-control ordinance on the ballot next November if the council takes no action.

The victorious builders took a conciliatory stance and pledged cooperation with both governmental boards.

“What this campaign has taught us is that San Diegans want real solutions to growth,” said Mike Madigan, spokesman for San Diegans for Regional Traffic Solutions, the builders’ campaign committee. “We pledge to be part of any solution that provides adequate public facilities such as roads, schools and parks.”

The defeat of all four measures shocked many of those involved in the three-way campaign, who were privately predicting as late as Election Day that at least one county growth measure would succeed and held out the possibility that Proposition H would be approved in the city of San Diego.

The vote in San Diego ended an unprecedented attempt to cap home building in a major U.S. city, an effort that resulted in the most costly local election campaign in county history and one that all sides agreed would have a major effect on the regional quality of life for years to come.

Voter Frustration

Born of voter frustration with traffic jams, vanishing open space and crowded schools and parks, the growth-control measures followed an era of expansion throughout San Diego.

The county population jumped by more than 465,000, a 25% increase, from 1980 to 1988, and more than 172,000 new homes were built during the period. More than 102,000 of those homes were constructed in the city of San Diego and the county’s unincorporated regions, the targets of the growth caps placed before voters Tuesday.

A Times poll taken in May showed that 78% of voters wanted growth control, even if the measures harmed the local economy. But less than a month before the election, a Times poll found a large number of voters undecided about the specific proposals on the ballot.

Measures Took Shape

The city growth-control measures began to take shape more than a year ago. In February, 1987, Mayor Maureen O’Connor appointed the panel that would write the foundation of the city’s growth-control plan. It was reworked by the San Diego City Council and placed on the ballot this August.

Citizens for Limited Growth began work on Propositions D and J in the fall of 1987, after the City Council passed a temporary growth-control ordinance that the citizens group considered weak and full of loopholes. The citizens group placed D and J on the ballot by collecting signatures on petitions in support of the initiatives.

Early this year, the county supervisors, led by Susan Golding, began the work that would result in Proposition B being added to the ballot to compete with citizen-backed Proposition D.

Proposition H, the City Council measure, would have capped home building at 7,590 units annually and provided protection from construction for much of the city’s unique topography. Its rival, Proposition J, the citizen-backed measure, included a tighter construction cap designed to dip to as few as 4,000 homes annually by 1991 and stronger, but similar, protections for wetlands, canyons, hillsides and flood plains.

Corresponding Limits

The citizens measure also called for corresponding limits on commercial and industrial development in order to slow the rate at which new jobs were created and the demand for housing.

Propositions B and D, aimed at the unincorporated areas, followed a similar pattern. Both included growth caps and environmental protections, with citizen-backed Proposition D the more stringent of the two.

The supervisors also placed Proposition C, an advisory plan calling for regional management of growth, on the ballot.

With the building industry pledged to defeat all four measures, the divergent approaches to growth control created a three-way campaign marked from its outset by acrimony and, in its waning days, by vehement condemnation of the building industry’s advertising campaign.

Wide-ranging arguments were waged over the measures’ effects on housing prices, rents, jobs, traffic, pollution and the local economy--with builders claiming that propositions D and J would be particularly devastating to the regional economy. Citizens for Limited Growth economists said the claims were unsupported by any nonpartisan forecast.

Backed by a $2.1-million budget raised by San Diegans for Regional Traffic Solutions, the builders’ political committee, the developers focused heavy radio, television and direct mail advertising solely against propositions D and J until the final week of the campaign. Only then did it also attack propositions B and H.

In the end, the ads sparked heated condemnation from Citizens for Limited Growth and Mayor Maureen O’Connor, rivals who were nevertheless united in their belief that the builders were guilty of “distortions” or outright “lies” in a heavy-handed effort to defeat the ballot measures.