Greenlight submits petitions for vote

NEWPORT BEACH ? Proponents of a ballot measure that would put major developments to a public vote delivered a stack of petitions with 9,106 signatures to the city clerk Tuesday.

The petitions submitted by the Greenlight committee must have 6,056 valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot. City Clerk LaVonne Harkless said she will turn the petitions over later this week to the Orange County Registrar of Voters, where the signatures will be verified. The city will have 30 working days to check the signatures.

If the measure qualifies, it will appear on the November ballot. The proposal, called Greenlight II, would place before voters projects that exceed existing development by any of three criteria: 100 housing units, 100 peak-hour car trips, or 40,000 square feet of building space.

Using volunteers and paid signature gatherers, Greenlight has worked since December to build support for the measure.

“It’s been a long six months,” Greenlight spokesman Phil Arst said.

But the work isn’t done. The group could begin discussing fundraising and campaign strategies as early as next week.

Coincidentally, the issue might share the ballot with the city’s general plan update, on which a vote is required because of Greenlight’s successful 2000 ballot issue, Measure S. That measure ? now part of the city charter ? has since led to two votes on projects, and some think it has stifled other projects from coming forward.

The general plan guides development in the city, all the way down to how many housing units can go in particular areas. It has not had a major update since 1988. City officials have been working on it for four years.

The new recommendations for some areas probably will exceed the thresholds of the existing plan, mainly because of additional housing, so some parts of the plan likely will need voter approval, Assistant City Manager Sharon Wood said. How much of the plan must go on the ballot and how it will appear has not been determined.

Although city officials can’t spend taxpayer dollars to campaign against issues such as Greenlight II or even for their own general plan, some will surely be talking about them.

“I was against the Greenlight initiative when it passed in 2000 and I think that this thing is even worse than that,” said Councilman Steve Rosansky. “I will be actively campaigning against it, not as a council member but as an individual, as a resident.”

Greenlight supporters complain that city officials would allow city streets to be clogged by thousands of new car trips, but Rosansky said the council has been working for the last several meetings to trim the plan to reduce housing and potential future car trips.

‘We’ve made cuts in virtually every area that we’ve looked at,” he said. “If you think the old general plan has too much traffic in it, the new general plan has even less.”

Arst disagreed. In his opinion, the council is reducing the number of allowed car trips on paper by shifting them away from places such as Banning Ranch, where it’s unclear when or if development would occur, and moving them to already choked city streets.

Greenlight II is important, he said, because it “gives citizens a chance to vote on smart or meritorious projects and not get the high density that the city is proposing for their developer friends.”

But Mayor Don Webb worried that if the ballot measure passes, residents who may not know what’s in the 700-page general plan will be asked to vote on projects about which they know equally little.

He and Rosansky said that what Rosansky called “ballot box planning” would be bad for the city.

“If we have to vote on every major decision that the city has to make, government will grind to a halt,” Webb said.dpt.31-petitions-kt-CPhotoInfo4S1RG5D920060531j03mnuncKENT TREPTOW / DAILY PILOT(LA)Phil Arst of Greenlight watches as some of the petitions are counted at the Newport Beach city clerk’s office Tuesday.