Here Are the 3 Main Methods the City of San Diego Will Use to Dismantle Local Community Planning Boards

OB Planning Board, June 6, 2018

By Frank Gormlie

[Please see my latest, “The End of San Diego’s Community Planning Boards – How We Got Here”]

Last September, the San Diego City Council enacted a series of what they called “reforms” to supposedly make local community planning boards or groups “more independent” and the development review process more “streamlined.”

In truth, as the Rag and our writers Geoff Page and Mat Wahlstrom have been warning, is that the city is actually moving to dismantle these volunteer panels, including the Ocean Beach Planning Board — which has been around since 1976, three years shy of half a century. From a review of their writings, the following is offered:

Here are the 3 main methods the City of San Diego will use to dismantle local community planning boards:

• #1  Force current planning committees  / boards to “re-apply”, to re-certify themselves as the valid community planning groups; other groups within the community can also apply to be the planning committee. Applications will be reviewed by the city council. A city official told the Peninsula Planning Board that applications will be available by April 2023.

Starting next year, any group can compete for this recognition, without having held a public election, without planning experience or even having residence or ownership qualification. The city may allow outside actors and treat them as qualified. The foremost consideration will be whether a group meets the city’s criteria for “diversity” — the definition of which has yet to be provided. Competing groups will have to make presentations on who is the best to represent the community.

This all came about because of a preposterous opinion by the city attorney that the current organization of community planning groups (CPGs) by public election is a violation of the City Charter, allegedly because advisory group members need to be appointed. Yet the new rules propose a hybrid of elected and appointed representatives. Regarding appointed representatives, they would reserve seats for “renters, businesses, and other key stakeholders.” What or who is a “key stakeholder”? 

This was such a preposterous opinion because community planning groups have been around in San Diego since the mid-1970s and now we’re all supposed to believe that they violated the City Charter all that time.

So, again, a CPG like the OB Planning Board — the very first democratically elected planning board in the history of San Diego – would have to petition the city to be considered as the valid volunteer panel.

Local democracy in action; the crowd at the OBPB meeting, Oct 5, 2016

A rough analogy is what if the San Diego Unified School District decided that the PTA at OB Elementary wasn’t diverse or representative enough and that it had to re-apply to the school board to be the PTA at OBE? At the very least, it’s a gross insult to the parents on the PTA and all the volunteer hours they’ve spent in organizing and fund-raising.

But sometime over the next year — it’s not clear when it will happen — all 42 community planning groups will have to petition the city to be recognized. A city official compared the process to applying for a grant, showing why your organization is the best to represent your community.

• #2 Force volunteer planning group members and any candidates to endure a rigorous background check; CPGs would be subject to profiling, by collecting “periodic demographic data on voting members.”

Under the new rules, CPGs will be subject to passing purity tests which could force them and their members to be less open about honest representation than playing along. And volunteers will be unable to meet quotas or do more outreach than expected of paid city staffers, thereby ensuring that only private enterprises with the necessary resources will be able to qualify.

The application process and the individual board member inquiries will mean a whole lot of work to become something that will no longer be a planning board. The required application will prevent some candidates or community members from volunteering, giving them reason enough to walk away. Already one veteran board member on the Peninsula board has resigned due to the demands that will be made of the board.

Why would any volunteer citizen want to go through all of this onerous burden? The groups that will do it will probably be groups with people who are paid to participate, like development interests or cycling advocates. The possibilities are endless.

• # 3 Not require developers to appear in front of planning committees which cuts planning boards entirely out of the formal review process.

This is the most damaging method the city will use to dismantle the planning groups. Here is the language:

“Private project applicants are not required by this policy to present their application before CPGs, although the City encourages applicants to conduct robust engagement with CPGs, the community, and project neighbors.”

Land use review was the main responsibility of planning boards, it is what they were created for. Coming before the local community planning group has always been a part of the project permitting process at least since the mid-1970s. The requirement of developers to appear in front of citizens of the community is in the permitting cycle review document. Without that, the groups lose their unique purpose for being.

Instead of planning boards being on the actual process list for permitting projects, the groups will be relegated to providing advice to the city, if they want to. Developers will no longer need to go before these groups. And the city will have even less of a reason to listen to them than they do now. The groups will not be automatically alerted to new projects or forwarded plans and documents either. Not only has the stature of planning groups been greatly diminished, the group’s effort to try and keep up with projects will be greatly hampered.

It definitely appears that the goal of the “reforms” is to severely restrict public participation.

There are so many issues intertwined with this city effort to gut CPGs, not the least being that community boards are really the closest thing that San Diegan residents have to grassroots democracy.

As Geoff Page commented after his report on the Peninsula board meeting, “This is the end of the community planning board system folks, no doubt about it.”

In future posts, we will examine how we got here, how the planning boards were created, and whether the current boards are prepared to be dismantled.

[Please see my latest, “The End of San Diego’s Community Planning Boards – How We Got Here”]