The End of San Diego’s Community Planning Boards: How We Got Here

By Frank Gormlie

After decades of existance, the community planning boards of San Diego were delivered a devastating shock last September 13, 2022, when the City Council passed a breath-taking tsunami of so-called “reforms” that laid out a blueprint for the demolition of the city’s current 42 citizen volunteer planning panels.

In my post from yesterday, I outlined the 3 main methods the city will use to dismantle San Diego’s community planning boards – or groups as some call them (CPGs):

1. Force current planning committees  / boards to “re-apply” and compete with other groups to be officially recognized by the city as a community’s CPG;
   
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.”
3. Not require developers to appear in front of planning committees which cuts planning boards entirely out of the formal review process, and destroys their raison d’etre — their reason for being in the first place.

None of this is hyperbole. Here is the language at the city’s Planning Department website page under “Community Planning Group Reform“:

On September 13, 2022, the City Council approved changes to Council Policy 600-24 which defines the roles, responsibilities, and standard operating procedures of CPGs. These changes focused on improving transparency, records retention, broadening community representation and reflecting CPGs’ legal status as independent organizations, consistent with the City Charter.

In early 2023, the Planning Department will provide additional information and resources to assist existing and potential new groups with the application process for City Council recognition.

Starting in 2024, the Department will the present the applications to the Land Use & Housing Committee and City Council. As part of the approval process, the Department will evaluate the applications received for each community planning area for City Council consideration. Existing Community Planning Groups should continue to rely on their bylaws up until the City Council recognizes them or a new group for a community plan area under the revised Council Policy 600-24. [My emphasis.]

Note the language that the changes are for “improving transparency, records retention, broadening community representation and reflecting CPGs’ legal status as independent organizations, consistent with the City Charter.”

CPGs have never been “independent,” they have in general been more transparent than our own city council, and sure, “broadening community representation” is a wonderful and worthy goal, but it’s not the CPGs that have generally held back on this. Most have trouble getting enough volunteers from the community to fill their boards.

Compare the above language with this, also from the Planning Dept page:

Overview of Community Planning Groups

There has been long-standing citizen involvement in planning in the City of San Diego. The City Council adopted policies in the 1960s and 1970s that established and recognized community planning groups as formal mechanisms for community input in the land use decision-making processes.

Community planning groups (CPG) provide citizens with an opportunity for involvement in advising the City Council, the Planning Commission, and other decision-makers on development projects, general or community plan amendments, rezonings and public facilities. The recommendations of the planning groups are integral components of the planning process, and are highly regarded by the City Council and by staff.

Phrases such as “formal mechanisms for community input,” and that their “recommendations” “are integral components of the planning process, and are highly regarded by the City Council and by staff,” does not sound like CPGs are independent. The “reforms” and the “overview” conflict and are as different as night and day.

It’s sufficient to understand the consequences of the council’s action back last September and that it will lead to the end of community planning boards as we know them.

The Rag has been waving red flags about this for weeks and months, particularly writers Geoff Page and Mat Wahstrom, whom I paraphrase below.

How Did We Get Here

As readers of the OB Rag may know, Ocean Beach established the very first community planning group that was democratically elected back in 1976, nearly fifty years ago. This culminated five years of research, organizing, and lobbying by OB residents — all in response to commercial and business interests that had dominated the urban planning of the community. People rightly saw that developers were running amok over public input and the neighborhood was being subjected to unbridled over-development. Now, there are 42 community planning groups throughout the city.

Needless to say, the developers have never liked community planning groups and have schemed for ways to undermine if not eliminate them completely ever since.

The most current assault on the neighborhood planning panels began in 2017 and 2018, when  Republican Councilmember Scott Sherman cajoled both the city auditor and the county grand jury to investigate the claim that “CPGs tend to delay hearing certain items as a method of restricting growth in their communities.”

Neither the city auditor nor the county Grand Jury  substantiated this claim, but both blamed delays in the development review process on the city itself for not providing CPGs needed staff, education and resources.

In apparent anticipation that the city auditor and grand jury would substantiate the allegation, Circulate San Diego in February 2018 launched an initiative to gut CPGs from within by changing their bylaws shell. Titled “Democracy in Planning,” it called for the distinctly un-democratic appointment of CPG board members by councilmembers and for councilmembers to fill board vacancies.

Meanwhile, city leaders refused to implement the recommended changes, and instead called for a raft of restrictions that were approved by the city council in February 2020. With the city attorney in lockstep the council implemented nearly all of Circulate San Diego’s recommendations. None of these changes were suggested by the city auditor or grand jury.

In a November 2019 Rag report on the OB Planning Board meeting, Geoff Page warned of the coming changes. He wrote on the “Taskforce on Community Planning Group Reform Draft Findings & Recommendations,” which contained a list of 31 reforms believed necessary to enact for planning boards. The document states:

“The Taskforce on Community Planning Group Reform convened to review existing recommendations that were proposed in the City Audit, the Grand Jury report, and the Democracy in Planning report produced by Circulate San Diego.”

He stated, “A group called Circulate San Diego created something called the Democracy in Planning Group, which made 11 of the 31 recommendations.” (Over the last couple of years, the Rag has been highly critical of Circulate SD for favoring developers over residential grassroots power.) Page continued:

The Task Force was stacked.  There are eleven members.  Of the eleven, two represented small businesses, one was a current or past member of the Planning Commission, one was a current or past employee of the Department Services Department or Planning Department, one was a member of the Building Industry Association, and one is an urban infill developer. More than half of the group was involved in the development world. There was also a person from a “Mass Transit/Mobility advocacy organization,” which was Circulate San Diego.

Who represented the planning boards?  There were three.  … A person with one year of planning board experience, a planning board member that is a land use attorney, and one with experience on one of the planning boards that represents an area to the south of National City and Chula Vista.

The reforms were begun under Mayor Kevin Faulconer and accelerated by Todd Gloria, which demonstrates, as Mat Wahlstrom has written, “CPG ‘reform’ has been a wholly bipartisan effort to disenfranchise community input and remove any brakes on runaway development.”

At the city council level, it’s been District 1 Councilmember Joe LaCava, himself a former community planner, who has led the charge for the “reforms.” As Wahlstrom noted, LaCava went so far as to create a production on YouTube  with him “capering on behalf of his developer donors, to propose a complete undoing of the city council policies governing community planning groups (CPGs). But once again, the asinine is the point: it cloaks the atrocious under cover of whimsy.”

On February 28 of this year, the Community Planners Committee, composed of the chairs of the 42 CPGs and headed by OB Planning Board chair, Andrea Schlegeter, heard more details about what the latest “reforms” approved by the City Council last September will entail. After roundly criticizing the changes for introducing burdensome conditions, the chairs’ greatest concerns surrounded the need for CPGs to apply for recognition from scratch.

Starting next year, any group can compete for this recognition, without having held a public election, planning experience or even having residence or ownership qualification.