The long-awaited update of San Diego's downtown Community Plan will wait a while longer.
The Centre City Development Corp., which oversees downtown planning and advises the City Council, began conducting public meetings on the plan in early 2002. It was supposed to be adopted last summer.
But bureaucratic delays mean it may not be considered until February or later.
The plan would encourage housing in towers, near public transit and work sites in an effort to counter urban sprawl during the next 25 years. It also would enable unprecedented density downtown and create financial incentives for developers to build parks and affordable housing.
While the plan sets policy goals and objectives, it cannot dictate specific projects. But building heights, densities and other development issues are contained in documents that accompany the Community Plan.
The current plan, updated in 1992, never anticipated the redevelopment changes wrought by downtown's transformation into a residential area. The area's population is projected to balloon from 27,000 residents to 90,000 residents by 2030.
The updated plan is accompanied by changes to the city's design codes, amendments to a legal framework for downtown redevelopment and an environmental impact study. Because the four documents travel together, an alteration to one forces changes in the other documents.
Delays have caught the Anka Property Group of Australia in limbo.
The company received city approval and is in the process of building a 21-story residential building, based on the proposed Community Plan, on a site where the old height limit is 17 stories.
Anka's Alta project, at Market Street and Seventh Avenue, is nearing completion. The company has to decide whether to order additional steel and other expensive materials to complete the building as a 21-story tower, or stop at the 17th floor, CCDC officials have said.
Anka officials declined to comment.
Throughout the spring, Hal Sadler, chairman of the CCDC board, repeatedly said the plan would reach the City Council for adoption by August. Sadler made his promises even though the plan and related documents, including the environmental review, were not completed.
Crafters of the Community Plan reached their last milestone Sept. 12, when a 45-day public comment period on the environmental-impact report ended. Sadler and other officials then set their sights on a getting the plan to council by Nov. 15.
Officials crammed in a series of public meetings and workshops in late September and early October to meet that deadline.
After the years of planning, though, the intense timetable angered many – those impatient to see the plan implemented and those seeking to influence its content.
The Centre City Advisory Committee, an elected group of business owners and residents, spent weeks debating policy shifts, and even minor wording changes, to the documents. Topics included parking requirements, historical preservation and parks.
The committee wanted the CCDC board to listen to its findings, but Sadler expressed concern about the schedule.
"Look, we are on a schedule," Sadler told the audience at a Sept. 21 meeting, in answer to a question from the committee president. "And this is not just us, but City Council and others who want this on the agenda for Nov. 15."
In the end, the committee made its presentation, and the board adopted 17 of 45 recommended changes.
Councilman Jim Madaffer, who has been filling in since Councilman Michael Zucchet resigned in July, wrote in a September memo that he supported getting the plan before the City Council this fall.
That changed when the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority postponed its hearing on the plan from Nov. 7 until today. Because parts of downtown are under the Lindbergh Field flight paths, the authority must sign off on the document.
Meanwhile, San Diego planning commissioners have questions, some still unanswered, about the plan, the environmental review and the language of the design ordinances. The plan has come before the commission twice already, with a third meeting scheduled for Thursday.
Carolyn Chase, a commissioner who unsuccessfully sought the District 2 City Council seat in the Nov. 8 election, has challenged what she calls inadequate funding for public infrastructure downtown.
Chase said she sees inconsistency between the downtown plan and the city's General Plan. She also cited a citywide infrastructure deficit, which she estimated at $2 billion.
While Chase likes some elements of the updated plan, she called the environmental report "one of worst I've ever seen" because it doesn't adequately account for traffic and infrastructure needs, she said.
"Don't say you're going to wave a magic wand and grant all this development rights, and not link it to the infrastructure to support it," she said. "This is not smart growth, even though it's being marketed as smart growth."
Even though CCDC officials knew they could not secure approvals from the Planning Commission and the Airport Authority before Nov. 15, they continued to push for a Nov. 15 City Council hearing.
Deputy Mayor Toni Atkins resisted the pressure, saying in a Nov. 8 e-mail that she "was not inclined to have the Council make their action 'contingent upon' " approvals from airport and planning officials.
The next day, Peter Hall, the former president of the CCDC, urged supporters of Mayor-elect Jerry Sanders to seek his assistance in docketing the Community Plan in December.
In an e-mail to the supporters, Hall wrote that "much to our chagrin," Atkins "has decided to undocket" the Community Plan from the Nov. 15 agenda.
Further delaying the matter, Hall continued, would have "really negative impacts on builders, city revenues, community infrastructure . . . and is symptomatic of the malaise we find ourselves in at city hall."
The downtown area is in District 2. The candidates for the District 2 runoff election, Kevin Faulconer and Lorena Gonzalez, have said they want the council to wait until after the winner of the Jan. 10 special election is seated.
If that request is honored, the earliest the plan could be considered by council would be February.
Martin Stolz: (619) 542-4574; martin.stolz@uniontrib.com
