Escondido Puts Limit on Residential Growth

Escondido’s new slow-growth City Council majority fulfilled what it considered a mandate from voters late Wednesday night by approving an interim ordinance to cap the residential growth in a city that recently held the title of the state’s fastest-growing area.

When it becomes effective in early September, the ordinance will have the effect of a moratorium on residential construction until next year because the maximum building-permit cap has already been surpassed.

Some Kinks to Resolve

Despite protests from small builders that the measure would bankrupt them and despite threats of lawsuits from larger builders, the slow-growth trio gave initial approval to the ordinance and scheduled a public hearing Aug. 17 to try to resolve individual problems created by the measure.

City officials resorted to issuing tickets for entry into the new domed City Council chambers after an overflow crowd last week taxed the capacity and disgruntled the city’s fire inspector.

Wednesday night’s overflow crowd, most of whom were opposed to the strict limits on residential building, filled the 250 seats within the chambers, and an additional 100 or so were forced outside to listen via loudspeakers.

Councilwoman Carla DeDominicis, author of the controlled-growth plan, told the hostile audience that she and Councilmen Kris Murphy and Jerry Harmon were elected partly on a pledge to place controls on Escondido’s runaway growth.

DeDominicis acknowledged Wednesday night that rough edges remain, but she said further delays urged by builders would only add to the confusion. During the month before the measure goes into effect, she promised, staff studies and public hearings will resolve many of the problems. Other problems will be worked out on a case-by-case basis, she said.

Moral Commitment

“If not a mandate, we have a moral commitment,” DeDominicis said of the passage of the growth-control measure.

A petition drive is continuing, she said, and, when sufficient signatures are gathered, she will ask that the initiative be adopted as a permanent growth-control program.

“If we go to a vote, developers will raise $1.5 million to oppose it as they did in Orange County,” she said. “We don’t have to fight the same battle over and over again.”

The measure adopted Wednesday night by a 3-2 vote expires Dec. 31.

It sets a building cap of 430 to 610 housing units annually for the city, about one-fourth of the existing rate, and is designed to gear down population growth to a rate that will allow the city to keep pace with services.

Passage of the growth-control measure also ruffled the feathers of a few citizens who have spent the past year and a half revamping the city’s General Plan. The revisions propose growth accommodation for some areas of the city and an eventual Escondido population lid of 185,000 residents--double the city’s current 93,000 population. DeDominicis’ measure calls for a lower eventual city population, between 150,000 and 165,000.

Harmon and DeDominicis were appointed by the council to meet with the General Plan task force to find ways to merge the study group’s proposals into the new growth-control strategy.

6,800 Plans in Works

City Planning Director Bob Leitner said there are about 6,800 housing units “in the pipeline” of city processing--more than 10 years’ worth of backlog under the new growth-control plan.

Murphy and DeDominicis defended the growth-control measure from a parade of opponents Wednesday who protested that the ordinance would bring on another economic crisis for the city similar to one experienced in the early 1960s. It was assailed as being “elitist and discriminatory,” and it was contended that it would inundate the city in an avalanche of legal challenges.

Murphy said the city population is gaining by 2.3% a year, contrasted with a state average of 1.7%.

“We are putting in place a program with teeth, a plan which forces the city to expand its infrastructure to keep up with growth,” he said.