Petition Drives for Slow-Growth Measure Not Quick to Catch On

In San Juan Capistrano, a key activist who collected signatures on behalf of a citywide slow-growth initiative is refusing to turn them in.

In Santa Ana, activists are fighting among themselves over whether to participate in a slow-growth petition drive.

And in south Orange County, thousands of petition signatures have had to be collected a second time because of clerical errors.

With the deadline for submitting signatures less than two months away, leaders of the movement to get a slow-growth initiative on the June, 1988, ballot concede that their petition drive is encountering difficulties. Bad weather and an expected holiday slowdown in volunteers’ signature-gathering activities have left advocates of the initiative depending on a major, last-minute, direct-mail campaign to pull the effort out of the fire.

“We’re going to do a lot more mail than we had planned,” said Russ Burkett, a leader of the petition drive. “Time is running out.”

Already, more than 150,000 brochures and copies of the petition--along with stamped, pre-addressed envelopes--have been mailed to south Orange County residents, and thousands more have arrived at mailboxes in Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. Mailings are being planned for other cities, including Huntington Beach and Cypress, as well.

The deadline for submitting petition signatures is Feb. 9 to get the Sensible Growth and Traffic Control initiative on the June ballot, and 66,000 of them are needed to secure a countywide vote. Thousands more are needed to put similar measures on the ballot in each of the county’s cities.

Without the citywide initiatives, the measure’s restrictions would apply only to unincorporated areas. Voters in each city may see two nearly identical measures on their local ballot--one for the county and one for the city--and they are legally entitled to vote on both.

Although Burkett and Tom Rogers, the other front-line leader in the effort to get the slow-growth measure on the ballot, said they are confident of ultimate success in the countywide signature-gathering effort, they expect trouble. They said they have at least 40,000 signatures so far countywide, but with less than two months remaining, Rogers said, “it will be close.”

Burkett and Rogers pointed out that if they don’t meet the Feb. 9 deadline, they can continue to gather signatures another 30 days in an effort to make the November, 1988, ballot.

They acknowledged that signature-gathering efforts in the county’s individual cities are doing well in only a few, including San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente, Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach. They said the absence of home-grown slow-growth organizations has crippled efforts on behalf of municipal measures in Santa Ana, Garden Grove and Anaheim, and for now they have written those cities off.

“We’ll just keep picking off cities one by one if we have to,” said Rogers, a San Juan Capistrano rancher. “We’re not going to go into a city where we’d get clobbered right now, and that’s no problem as far as I’m concerned.”

The petitions being circulated outline measures--varying slightly from city to city--that would condition future growth on adherence to strict traffic standards, public safety service levels and the availability of parks and other public facilities.

Advocates of the measures contend they do little more than codify existing development and traffic policies that have never been enforced by local governments. But critics say they would be costly to implement and would put people out of work.

With the measure’s most vocal supporters conceding that in some cities it is unlikely that the initiative will be on the ballot next year, there is widespread speculation about whether developers will rush to take advantage of opportunities in those areas.

John Erskine, executive director of the Building Industry Assn.’s Orange County chapter, and some developers, such as Jim McCormack, say there will be an exodus from areas controlled by slow-growth ordinances.

But others, including Ray Catalano, professor of social ecology at UC Irvine and an Irvine city councilman, strongly disagree.

“The developers will still have to see what the return on their investment will be,” Catalano said, “and it’s not clear that in Garden Grove or some of the other cities the return will be so much greater that it would cause all developers to change their plans.”

No Organized Campaign

Burkett said a Garden Grove councilman interested in circulating slow-growth petitions had complained recently that there were “no activists in town” willing to help out.

In Santa Ana, a local slow-growth advocate invited Burkett to address her organization--Santa Ana Merged Society of Neighbors (SAMSON)--but at the appointed hour she didn’t show up and Burkett experienced what he says was “the worst night I’ve had so far.”

Nobody could agree on anything at the meeting, he said, and so--even though people are circulating petitions--there is no organized campaign in Santa Ana.

It’s the same in Anaheim, Buena Park and Fullerton, although signature-gathering efforts are scheduled at shopping malls there in January.

Placentia Councilman Norm Eckinrode is leading a petition drive in his city, and various activists have small campaigns under way in Brea, Orange, Seal Beach, Villa Park and Yorba Linda. Seal Beach has an unrelated slow-growth measure that already has qualified for the ballot. It is aimed at taking land-use decisions away from the City Council, which is considered pro-growth.

A campaign to put a version of the Burkett-Rogers measure on the ballot in Tustin is just getting started, and only a few mobile home park residents are involved in a similar effort so far in Westminster.

In some cities, Burkett and Rogers are banking on elected officials adopting slow-growth measures or placing them on the ballot without signature drives.

Taking It to City Council

In Laguna Beach, for example, Councilman Robert Gentry plans to ask the City Council to consider adopting the initiative as a local ordinance in January, or placing the measure before residents for an advisory vote. Laguna Beach environmentalists have been working hard on the countywide measure, however.

In Newport Beach, a combination of direct mail and signature-gathering at shopping centers is under way to help qualify the countywide initiative, but not a city measure.

John Gardner, a veteran Newport Beach-Costa Mesa activist who has helped Burkett and Rogers computerize their mail operation, said the reason there is no effort to qualify a city version of the county initiative in Newport Beach is that a competing measure sponsored by local environmentalists already has qualified for the ballot.

That measure would amend an existing ordinance--which already requires developers to pay for traffic improvements--by eliminating the City Council’s ability to grant exceptions and delays.

In Irvine, where Mayor Larry Agran leads a three-man slow-growth majority on the five-member City Council, activist Bill Speros said he has collected more than 2,000 signatures for the effort to qualify the countywide initiative for the ballot. That has been accomplished, he said, with the help of eight to 12 hard-core volunteers and about 15 other people working in their own neighborhoods.

None of that effort has gone toward qualifying a measure for the city ballot, he acknowledged. The plan, he said, is to leave it to the City Council to adopt a citywide slow-growth measure sometime next year.

C. L. Snider, a San Clemente activist, said petition circulators in his city have about 1,300 of the 1,900 signatures they need to put a citywide measure on the San Clemente ballot. “We’ll be finished soon,” he said. “There’s no problem in getting people to sign it. . . . They love it.”

Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach have two of the county’s strongest slow-growth campaigns, utilizing armies of volunteers at shopping centers and supermarkets, as well as mail campaigns.

Gardner estimated that 4,500 signatures have been gathered in Costa Mesa, 3,500 of them by one citizens group and 1,000 by another.

Tom Harman, president of Huntington Beach Tomorrow, sponsor of that city’s slow-growth initiative, said 150 to 200 volunteers from his group are out collecting signatures. He said that so far, about 7,000 out of 12,000 needed to qualify the measure for the city ballot have come in.

“We’re standing in front of stores, post offices, theaters--anywhere lots of people tend to congregate, and so far we’re pretty pleased with the results.”

Harman says about three of every four people contacted want to sign, but some can’t.

“At shopping malls we’ve found a lot of out-of-towners,” he explained. “They say they wish they could sign it, but we tell them, unfortunately, that they have to be registered to vote in Huntington Beach.”

It is in San Juan Capistrano that the slow-growth campaign may have had its most successful--and most unusual--experience.

Activist Al Aarps, a mobile home park resident, and several volunteers have collected thousands of signatures, possibly enough to already to qualify a citywide measure for the June, 1988 ballot.

But Aarps refuses to hand over the signatures.

He said he fears economic or political reprisals against mobile home park residents who signed his petitions.

Burkett said Aarps is legally required to turn over the signatures but that he and Rogers won’t force the issue for the time being.

What does Aarps plan to do with the signatures?

“I don’t know,” said the retired high school coach. “But I’m not telling anyone where they are.”