Conservation Column: Holiday Talking Points for the 2020 Elections

By Frank Landis, Chair Conservation Committee

As I write this in November, it’s quiet on the conservation front, although this is certainly the lull before a storm of CEQA documents that will probably bring, well, strong emotions to my holiday season. Because some important issues are coming up in the March 2020 election, I wanted to use this month’s column to talk about one of them, the Save Our SanDiego (SOS) initiative within the County. CNPS-SD officially supports this initiative, and I wanted to go into some detail as to why.

None of this is news if you regularly read the newsletter. What may be news is that there’s a lot of money lining up against the SOS initiative, including from developers and people employed by developers. Since you’re likely to get bombarded by stuff designed to either confuse you or make you not want to vote, here’s what the SOS initiative is about the bigger context, and how it relates to native plants and CNPS issues.

As you probably already know, the SOS initiative covers unincorporated San Diego County, although everybody in the County votes on it. The process the SOS proposes is:

• IF a development project requires a General Plan Amendment (GPA), AND

• IF that project proposes to increase housing density over what the County General Plan specifies for that parcel (with certain minor and common-sense exceptions), AND

• IF the supervisors approve the GPA, after it has gone through the normal development and environmental reviews,

• THEN it goes to the voters for final approval.

What SOS does not do is:

• Block any development that follows the County General Plan.

• Make the voters in charge of approving development by initiative (as with the initiative to develop Lilac Hills Ranch while bypassing the environmental review process entirely).

• Have anything to do with affordable housing (it’s about density, not type).

• Stop development in the unincorporated County.

These last are important, because that’s what the anti-SOS rhetoric has alleged.

The story being spread around is that this will stop affordable housing. Since none of the big GPA projects the County approved over the last two years had any affordable housing to speak of, this is simply wrong. There’s a lot of affordable housing zoned for in the current County Plan. If it was allbuilt, we wouldn’t have a housing crisis. Indeed, some of it is getting approved and built. You haven’t read about it here because there was no reason to get CNPS involved in those planning processes, because it had no native plant issues worth mentioning.

Moreover, if a developer proposed a GPA that had massive affordable housing, San Diego voters could pass it under the SOS initiative, just as they could pass any GPA. That’s why theinitiative is not anti-growth. It just adds another step so that people get their voices heard. That additional step is important, because it’s otherwise hard for voters to make their desires heard on GPAs.

GPA developments that propose to build thousands of high- end homes (homes worth $500,000 and up) stand to gross hundreds of millions to billions of dollars if they are fully built. With that much money at stake, substantial contributions to political parties, funding litigation, or fighting initiatives are all trivial costs. And, since the county gets a lot of property tax for every one of these units, there’s a collective financial incentive for the County to approve as many as possible. And since fires and other disasters don’t happen every year (o revery decade) and there are term limits on most elected offices, it is a reasonable gamble that whoever approves a dangerous project won’t be in office to deal with it being destroyed in a fire, flood, or earthquake, nor will they take the blame. This is not a partisan analysis, simply to point out that if the only things people analyze about developments are the money to be made and risk of loss, these GPA developments look like good investments. The problem here is that the developer gets the profits, while the county only gets the tax revenue until disaster strikes, at which point we are stuck with the cost of dealing with the mess.

You may think that, as an urbanite, problems with back-country developments do not affect you and are therefore none of your business. Unfortunately, that is not true. While there are attempts to get new developments to pay for their share of utilities and infrastructure, ultimately everyone’s taxes pick up the slack, which includes costs for roads, power (especially if we go to Community Choice Aggregation), sheriffs, emergency response, and disaster response. These last two are where things can get really expensive, because someone has to pay for fighting big, wind-driven fires.

An example is the Woolsey Fire in 2018, which burned hundreds of homes in Malibu. While not all of those homes were owned by the super-rich, everyone in LA and Ventura Counties paid to fight that fire and protect the people in Malibu. That is money that otherwise could have gone to improving the conditions in lower income, urban neighborhoods. If mansions are built in Proctor Valley (following Otay Ranch Village 13 or 14), then everyone in San Diego will help cover the costs of fighting fires to save those houses. The money we pay to allow protect people’s expensive homes from fire could be used to underwrite affordable housing elsewhere, but a GPA forces us to pay to protect those homes.

Since everyone is affected, everyone should have a say in it. That is a principle that I think most people across the political spectrum agree on.

There are some other rumors going around about the SOS initiative, that it’s an experiment in radical leftist politics and that it will make housing unaffordable in San Diego County. Neither of these are particularly true.

San Diego isn’t the first place to try this in California. Thatfirst place, to my knowledge, is the City of Ventura (1995). Since then the County of Ventura has adopted it (1998), as have eight other cities in that county. In 2016, Ventura County voters reapproved the idea and stretched it out to2050. It’s withstood challenges all the way up to the State Supreme Court. Ventura’s Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources (SOAR) continues to champion this approach, because it protects them from being assimilated by suburban sprawl from next door LA County.

Ventura County is marginally more liberal than San Diego County (39% voters are registered democrats vs. 35% here), so we’re not talking about a wild utopian experiment. Nor are we talking about a legally untested one.

As for the idea that it will make San Diego unaffordable, according to an article on Marketwatch.com (May 24, 2019), of the five best and most affordable places to live in California, four (Oxnard, Ventura, Simi Valley, and Camarillo)were in Ventura County. I don’t think there’s any evidence that putting developments before the voters automatically results in making a place more unaffordable. If anything, it might make San Diego County more livable.

Finally, there’s the question of why CNPS is involved in this. For us, this is about loss of habitat for natives, about fire, and about climate change. The loss of native plants is an obvious problem, but not all GPAs have that. Lilac Hills Ranch is mostly on farmland, for instance. However, we have a statewide policy that we don’t support destroying native plants to put people in danger from wildfire. As an organization we especially do not support destroying rare and sensitive plant species, or ecosystems for that matter, to put people in danger from wildfires. That’s what gives CNPSers standing to speak up against projects to protect both plants and people.