Growth Management

The Measure A sales tax for road widening and road extensions merely solidifies the legacy that "traffic congestion will expand to fill available space." Measure A is not growth management. It is an open-ended, road widening/road extension "wish list" fund; it does not mandate specific improvements. It also lacks creative, long-range, environmentally sound solutions in addressing the transportation of goods and services. Were Ventura County residents caught in a shell game when they voted June 5 for Proposition 111, which will increase the gasoline tax by 9 cents a gallon?

Question: I am a disgruntled Bank of America Corp. shareholder. Is there reason to expect improved results? Answer: The question for shareholders is how quickly the company can put mistakes behind it, significantly improve its controls and use its enormous size to greater advantage. It became the biggest U.S. bank after acquisitions of Countrywide Financial and Merrill Lynch, but in coming months it's likely to slip into second place in assets, behind JPMorgan Chase & Co. Sluggishness stems from bad loans from acquisitions and from lax practices in the past.

Despite protests from educators that the plan does not adequately provide for school needs, the City Council on Monday night voted 4 to 1 to approve a set of long-range growth management policies and goals. Approval of the plan, called the "growth management element," makes the city eligible to share in millions of dollars from Measure M, the half-cent sales tax increase approved by county voters in November, 1990. Measure M requires participating governments to adopt growth management plans.

When the largest church in Boulder County, Colo., wanted to double its size two years ago, county commissioners said no. Rocky Mountain Christian Church already dominated a rural corner of the county northwest of Denver. If it became any larger, commissioners said, it would destroy the area's country atmosphere. But the church didn't accept the decision quietly.

Although this small city of 12,500 people is built almost to capacity, concern about exploding growth in neighboring cities prompted the City Council this week to approve a growth management plan. "Although we can't base our own plans and development on what goes on in these towns, we need to monitor what they are doing," Mayor pro Tem Robert P. Wahlstrom said. There are few undeveloped areas within the borders of Los Alamitos.

Gov. Pete Wilson on Friday opened his promised attack on California's helter-skelter growth by creating a state council to develop a program that would enable Californians to "shape our future, not just suffer it." The new state Council on Growth Management will include heads of state departments that oversee housing, transportation and other issues key to solving problems brought on by population growth.

One reason that some of the steam has gone out of the drive to manage California growth may be that there is not as much growth to manage. The state's net population gain dropped last year for the first time since 1983-84, the last year of the recession in the early 1980s, Department of Finance demographic studies show. In other words, the state grew, but not by as much as the previous year. In 1989-90, California's population grew by 834,000, but in 1990-91 the increase dipped to 670,000.

Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley on Tuesday proposed a $1.8-million growth management plan designed to give a new sense of unity and purpose to the city's patchwork of strategies for dealing with growth amid traffic congestion, overburdened sewers, housing shortages and air pollution. Bradley, who has been criticized in the past for reacting to those issues only when it was politically expedient to do so, caught many people by surprise Tuesday with a plan that seemed to come out of the blue.

The building industry's decision to orphan its own supposed growth-management ballot measures had us wondering: Could there be provisions in Propositions D and M that merit voter support of the package? Nah. The builders found themselves in a sticky position when the San Diego City Council recently gave tentative approval to citywide impact fees averaging about $1,000 per home for the first year.

San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock and Councilman Uvaldo Martinez set the battle lines Friday for what promises to be a lively, high-stakes campaign surrounding Proposition A, the growth-management initiative on the Nov. 5 city ballot. Proposition A would require a citywide election on any proposal to build in the city's urban reserve.

Lured by the promise of wealth in a booming economy, immigrants from North Africa, Latin America and other regions flocked to Spain in the last decade, quickly becoming Exhibit A in the Mediterranean nation's remarkable success story. But the surging economy -- which relied, to its eventual peril, largely on construction, tourism and service industries -- has crashed. In a real estate-fueled boom-and-bust cycle that mirrors remarkably the one in the U.S., Spain today is in the throes of a dramatic downturn.

Raising the specter of rampant development and a rising tide of street-choking traffic, a group of Santa Monica residents has begun pressuring friends and neighbors to vote in November for an initiative that would limit commercial construction for 15 years. Predictably, the Residents' Initiative to Fight Traffic, or RIFT, has created a schism in the city, where the desire to maintain the area's small-town scale and charms often conflicts with the need to create jobs and spur economic gains.

A four-mile stretch of the southeast San Fernando Valley has emerged as one of the premier battlegrounds in the fight over urbanization that has roiled neighborhoods across Los Angeles in a manner reminiscent of the growth wars of the mid-1980s. Developers' plans for the area, which stretches from Universal City to the upper reaches of North Hollywood, include roughly 5,500 new residences and millions of square feet of commercial and office space.

Local real estate agent Sandy Croteau made a somewhat surprising pitch as she traipsed through a vacant, gravel-filled wash: She wants to spare the expanse from home developers. Trying to halt this city's growth may be a Sisyphean task, but Croteau, 60, is counting on help from some sun-worn mammoth bones. About 10,000 bison, camel and mammoth fossils have been unearthed in recent years in a nearly 13,000-acre ribbon of the Upper Las Vegas Wash just south of Desert National Wildlife Refuge.

Concerned that their suburban lifestyle is being threatened, residents in Ventura County's two largest cities are hoping to put the brakes on traffic generated by future development with two separate ballot initiatives. Oxnard activists turned in petitions last week for a proposed measure that would limit new commercial and residential development near busy intersections until existing traffic problems could be resolved.

A new city report found that developers could add 3 million square feet of commercial space to the Ventura Boulevard corridor under current zoning rules, despite concerns by residents and elected officials that the area is overdeveloped. The long-awaited report, released this week by the Los Angeles Planning Department, comes as a new building boom in the southern San Fernando Valley has some residents pushing for new growth controls.

Maybe it's not surprising that Pete Wilson's long-expected growth-management policy is getting lost in the economic shuffle. When he ran for governor in 1990, the growth question was a major campaign issue. These days, when you ask Wilson's aides what happened to the policy, their eyes roll toward heaven--they only wish that the governor had some growth to manage. The drum roll for the debut of Wilson's growth-management strategy has been postponed from January to March to . . .

The woman in the sun hat wants to crack someone in the jaw. It's been a bad day. Actually, for Kaiulani Huff, it's been a bad few decades. She has watched as her home, the island of Kauai, changed from a wild garden of secret places to -- in her eyes -- an overcrowded amusement park for rich people. "Welcome to Disneyland," she says one day while driving around the island. "See the natives. Watch us dance the hula. Clog up our roads. Buy up all the good land.

By significantly altering downtown zoning rules in a bid to spur more housing development, Los Angeles is gambling that it can ease its notorious housing crunch without causing bigger problems. In the last three months, the city has taken two dramatic steps to further accelerate downtown's boom in residential construction.