Sweeping Growth Cut in La Jolla Rejected

The San Diego City Council Tuesday night rejected a proposal to dramatically slash the size of office buildings and reduce density in downtown La Jolla, but agreed to begin work on a milder plan to ease the upscale community’s growth pains.

Before a boisterous crowd packed into the Mandell Weiss Performing Arts Center at UC San Diego, the council voted, 6-2, to order the city Planning Commission to study recommendations made by Councilman Ron Roberts.

Roberts’ proposal included a call for the reduction of office space in downtown La Jolla from the current limit of 10,000 square feet per lot to 5,000 square feet, regardless of the size of the lot.

Height Limit Unchanged

He also recommended that the current building height limit of 30 feet remain unaltered, but that planners begin outlining sections of downtown La Jolla where future office and commercial buildings should be limited to two stories instead of three.

Finally, Roberts suggested that the maximum density for condominiums and apartments be reduced from 43 units per acre to 29 units per acre. The Planning Commission is to study the suggestions and return the proposal to the City Council within 60 days.

Councilmen Bob Filner and Bruce Henderson cast the dissenting votes.

For decades a quiet village nestled between steep coastal hills and the Pacific, La Jolla has grown increasingly congested in recent years. Office and commercial construction has boomed and traffic along major roads has multiplied.

Pushing for Change

Irked by those developments, some residents began pushing for changes in the key planning document that governs land-use decisions in La Jolla. They contend that the height and size of future office buildings should be trimmed and the density of condominiums and apartments slashed.

The changes under review by the council Tuesday were recommended by an ad hoc planning group composed of members from the La Jolla Town Council and the La Jolla Community Planning Assn.

For the past eight months, the group has been drafting the proposal, which it says is needed to keep traffic woes from getting worse and to veer the “visual density” of the downtown back toward the days when smaller buildings dominated the landscape.

As proposed by the group, the changes covered four key areas. First, the office space on a single lot would be limited to no more than 1,000 square feet, regardless of the lot size. The size and floor space of many of the new buildings also would be slashed in half.

In addition, new-building heights would be limited to 24 feet instead of 30 and two stories instead of three. Finally, residential densities for new condominiums and apartments in the downtown region, which stretches north from Pearl Street to the Pacific, would be reduced by about 50%.

Although members of the group that drafted the measures suggest they enjoy wide community support, opposition has mounted in recent weeks, in particular from a group called La Jollans for Responsible Planning. The group took out a full-page newspaper advertisement and manned the phones to get its message across in the days before Tuesday’s hearing.

Members of La Jollans for Responsible Planning maintain the issue should be put off until October, 1989, the five-year anniversary of the original land-use blueprint that now applies to La Jolla. That document, called the La Jolla Planned District Ordinance, was approved in 1984 after a drawn-out battle.

Those who want to alter the document point to the historical record for support. They say the council promised when it approved the ordinance that it would be interim in nature, something to be reviewed and perhaps revised after a city traffic study was completed.

That study was finished in September, 1985. Among the conclusions, the report suggested that traffic along major roads in La Jolla would reach intolerable levels because of the building densities that were being allowed in the downtown region.

Currently, La Jolla has about 1 million square feet of office space, about 200,000 of it still unoccupied, La Jolla planners say. Supporters of the proposed changes argue that severe restrictions on new office development are needed to ease the risk of traffic worsening.

Opponents of the changes say the proposals need to be more thoroughly studied. Some suggest they go too far in restricting property owners.