City Tries to Bring Vision of Its Future Into Focus : Planning: Effort seeks public consensus on development issues. The hope is to then set an agenda for carrying the ideas through.

City officials are calling it the most ambitious attempt in state history to elicit community participation in developing a vision for a city.

“We’re literally taking it to the block level,” said Councilman Rick Cole, co-chairman of the General Plan Coordinating Committee.

The idea is to hold a series of town meetings and community get-togethers, develop a consensus on the kind of city Pasadenans want to live in, and then fashion citizens’ ideas into a document called the General Plan.

It all begins Monday at 7 p.m. with a citywide forum at the Pasadena Convention Center. “To define a future that meets all of our needs, residents and businesses are encouraged to participate,” said Planning Director Ann Odell.

The citywide forum will be followed by workshops at the Convention Center on Wednesday, at the Jackie Robinson Center on Thursday and at Pasadena High School on Nov. 25. Then come a series of smaller meetings among church groups, community associations, business groups and others.

Pasadena already has a General Plan, though city officials consider it to be obsolete because it doesn’t reflect the city’s diverse population and strong neighborhood identities.

The city is committed to revising the meat of the plan--the land use and mobility sections, which address all of the planning and development issues that have excited interest in recent years--by the end of August, 1992.

The process was touched off by a series of political and legal battles that pitted slow-growth groups against business-minded people.

In 1989, voters approved the Growth Management Initiative, placing annual caps on housing and commercial development in the city. But a 1990 lawsuit questioned the initiative’s constitutionality. In an out-of-court settlement, the city agreed to first update the General Plan by the end of the summer of 1992, and then to put the Growth Management Initiative back on the ballot the following November.

The thinking was that should the voters repeal the Growth Management Initiative, which permits a yearly maximum of 250 housing units and 250,000 square feet of commercial space, the revised General Plan would provide a community point of view in future development.

PRIDE--Pasadena Residents in Defense of our Environment--the group that put the growth initiative on the ballot, has thrown another ingredient into the mix. The group plans to circulate petitions for an amendment to the City Charter that would require voter approval of the General Plan.

Initially, PRIDE proposed that any amendment to the General Plan be submitted to the voters, but now the group wants a requirement that voters ratify only citywide plan revisions.

If PRIDE gets enough signatures to put the amendment on the ballot next June, it would require a vote on the revised General Plan next November at the same time voters are considering the growth referendum.

All cities are required to have General Plans, but rarely is there broad citizen participation in writing them, city officials say.

Often the document is merely a “phone book-sized list of regulations,” which “sits on a shelf and becomes the basis for lawyers to go to court,” Cole said.

But in Pasadena the concept of a unified identity is something that has long been cherished. Many Pasadenans have identified with an evolving vision of their city, from the bucolic little campus town that the city founders envisioned a century ago to the headquarters city, with new corporate headquarters and office buildings from the 1960s and 1970s.

Now, they see a new stage emerging, and the options facing current Pasadenans are broad, city officials say.

City planners will discuss two extremes at Monday’s meeting, Cole said. The city could either freeze everything, permitting no new development at all, or extend allowable development to the limits under current zoning guides.

Business groups complain that, with the passage of the Growth Management Initiative, the first scenario is already virtually in place, depriving the city of investments and revenue and stifling free enterprise. “I think people can see that it doesn’t offer a very bright future for Pasadena,” Cole said.

Slow-growth groups say unrestricted development could happen under the second scenario.

According to David Watkins, the city’s principal planner, current zoning guidelines could accommodate 104 million square feet of new residential development--three times as much as already exists--and more than 13,000 new units of housing, which could sustain as many as 40,000 new residents.

“A lot of people assume that nothing has changed in the past 10 years, so nothing is going to change,” Cole said. “But a developer could walk up to the permit counter at City Hall tomorrow and propose to build a condominium complex (in a neighborhood of single-family homes) or an auto repair shop where the neighborhood dry cleaner used to be.”

Many such developments are permissible under current zoning guidelines, city officials say.

“The extremes force you to ask: What kind of limits do you want?” Cole said. “And that begs the question: What kind of city do you want?”