City to send general plan mailings

Leaders vote to send Newport residents newsletters about vote on policy that will guide growth.A newsletter explaining the update to Newport Beach’s general plan will hit residents’ mailboxes next month, kicking off a 10-month informational campaign leading up to the Nov. 7 election.

The newsletter is one of 12 residents can expect to receive, as part of a $508,000 consulting contract the City Council approved, by a 5-1 vote, Tuesday. Dick Nichols voted against the plan.

The general plan is the document that guides how land is used in the city. City officials and a committee of residents are working on the first major overhaul of the plan since 1988, and it’s expected to be placed on the November ballot for voter approval.

Council members voted to hire M4 Strategies, a Costa Mesa firm that runs business, government and political campaigns. The firm will design the mail campaign; put more information about the general plan online; and create a guide to help people digest the plan, which is about five inches thick.

“We have spent probably close to $2 million on the general plan process to date, and now that it’s coming to conclusion in this last year, it just makes sense to us that we make sure the residents know what they would be voting on,” City Manager Homer Bludau said before Tuesday’s meeting.

“A lot of the policy statements will guide land use in the community for the next 20, 25 years.”

One community activist questioned the decision to hire a firm that handles political campaigns and tries to sway public opinion. Phil Arst, a leader in the slow-growth Greenlight Committee, protested the choice of M4 Strategies in a letter to the council.

“Is that right for the city to be waging a campaign with taxpayer dollars to sway their own citizens?” Arst asked Tuesday.

M4 Strategies has worked for the cities of Newport Beach and Costa Mesa as well as the California Chamber of Commerce and the New Majority, a moderate Republican fundraising group.

Bludau pointed out that the city isn’t allowed to campaign for the update, only to distribute facts.

Arst has no such limitations and, in fact, said he will be stumping for votes against the general plan changes. He believes they allow excessive development that will worsen existing traffic and that they’re contrary to what residents said they want in community surveys in 2002.

“We think Newport Beach is an environmental treasure, and loading it with high-density buildings rather than preserving access to the beaches and bay, we think it’s wrong,” Arst said.

Right now, Greenlight is gathering signatures for a ballot proposal that would circumvent some of the changes to the general plan by requiring a public vote on projects that exceed existing development by a given size or density.

The measure is a follow-up to the group’s successful 2000 initiative that calls for public votes on development projects based on how much they exceed what’s allowed in the current general plan.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers government and politics. She may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or by e-mail at alicia.robinson@latimes.com.