Grappling With Growth

A grim thought struck San Bernardino County Supervisor Barbara Cram Riordan earlier this year. What if slow-growth ballot initiatives in Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties all passed in the 1988 elections? Where would all that pent-up development pressure go? San Bernardino County, of course.

So Riordan proposed that San Bernardino head off the crunch, and the inevitable slow-growth battle that would accompany it, by proposing a task force to develop a more realistic approach to growth management in the giant county, which had weathered a county-breakup initiative in June. As it happened, the slow-growth initiatives failed in Orange, San Diego and Riverside counties. Still, San Bernardino has gone ahead with its task force, and it now is embracing in principle most aspects of a consensus plan that will help rationalize the effect of the growth that will occur in San Bernardino in any event. The Southern California Assn. of Governments has forecast that the county’s population will double by the year 2010.

One key to the success of the planning effort was to include a broad spectrum of interests in the task force, ranging from a representative of the Sierra Club to a major land developer. The agreement provides for regional fees paid by builders of new housing to finance roads, sewers, parks, libraries and other non-school facilities needed by the growing population. No amount has been fixed, but a range of $5,000 to $10,000 for each new house has been discussed. This is well within the scale being charged developers in other areas. The cost, of course, is passed on to the buyer.

The plan also seeks to channel new services into established communities to discourage leapfrogging development and to offer incentives to firms locating in the county so that fewer residents would have to commute to jobs in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Controversy continues over the financing of regional transportation facilities and whether to establish an acceptable countywide level of growth. The plan is being opposed by some cities within the county and by smaller developers who claim that the new home fees favor the big firms and hurt them.

The big developers say that they are willing to accept the proposals to gain some stability in the development business climate in the county, even though it might cost them some profit. The smaller developers claim that increased housing costs will price additional buyers out of the market, but development fees are a natural trade-off of lower property taxes imposed by Proposition 13.

The important point, however, is that San Bernardino County did not merely sit back and wait for development and slow-growth forces to declare formal war against each other with dueling initiatives that probably would not be in the best interests of all of the county. Without this sort of consensus planning, all of Southern California faces the intolerable consequences of irrational unrestrained growth.