By Kate Callen / Times of San Diego / May 16, 2024
If you’re wondering why Uptown Planners has become a prime target of City Hall’s war on planning groups, the battle over the unpopular Plan Hillcrest offers a case study.
When the Uptown community first questioned the city’s radical proposal to shoehorn more density into an already congested community, the planning group went to work. After seeing what looked like development overreach — 50,000 new residents, 30-story buildings – they requested public records that might elucidate how this startling proposal was conceived and crafted.
The city responded with a 600-document data dump. Undaunted, Uptown leaders sifted through the pile and zeroed in on several dozen relevant document pages.
That extensive research uncovered a cat’s cradle of highly-paid city employees who are managing highly-paid consultants to sell rampant densification to a public that isn’t buying.
Catering to a state government that rains money on overstuffed housing, the City Hall bureaucracy is spending millions of tax dollars to advance a single political goal: justify cramming as much new construction as possible into unwilling neighborhoods.
To cite one example, records indicate that over several years, 32 city employees have devoted nearly 9,000 hours — over $1 million in staff time — to working on Plan Hillcrest. Much of that staff time was spent overseeing at least a dozen consultants whose city contracts for planning services fall in the range of $10 million.
What exactly did those consultants do? According to the documents, their work included:
- Staging polished multi-media presentations that lavished praise on housing saturation.
- Engineering convoluted public surveys that skewed responses to fit policy goals.
- Developing land use planning components based on generic principles that do not address the unique needs of specific communities.
“A lot of money was spent so consultants could try to sell us a pre-ordained plan and so staff could pretend they valued our input,” said former board member Lu Rehling, who led the data mining effort.
“City policy requires this city government to work in partnership with planning groups like ours,” Rehling continued. “Responding to strong community concerns, we pushed back hard on many aspects of Plan Hillcrest that run counter to the community’s actual needs in areas like infrastructure, transportation, clean air, open space, and most critically, affordable housing.”
“We spoke up, the community spoke up, and it was all in vain. Why do city officials spend all that money on public dog-and-pony shows when they have zero interest in heeding what the public wants?”
In a just society, the due diligence of Uptown Planners in fulfilling their mandate to represent their community would win praise from elected officials.
But this is San Diego, where the only community input that counts is the complacent kind.
At this writing, the City Council seems poised to remove Uptown Planners from their elected seats and replace them with a complacent group proposed by Vibrant Uptown advocacy group. No other San Diego planning group is facing a similar ouster. The council will decide Uptown Planners’ fate on Tuesday, May 21, at 2 p.m.
But there’s a catch. Once seated, the Vibrant group would have to hold public meetings where angry constituents would scrutinize them closely and hold them accountable. And they would have to comply with state and city laws and compete in open elections.
Vibrant is off to a rocky start. One of their leaders has reportedly announced, even before taking their seats, that they’ve bought software to run future elections. Since they could not have deliberated in a public meeting before taking that action, they may have violated the Brown Act. It’s not clear where they got the money for the purchase or how they chose the vendor.
Stay tuned. This could get interesting.
Kate Callen is a former journalist and long-time community activist in North Park who ran for City Council earlier this year.
Great article 5 days ago, just like this on a day ago. See this
Why use a Mission Hills photo in a story about Hillcrest?
Photo from Times of San Diego: “Housing under construction in Hillcrest.”
Factual and well said article. Fingers crossed the City Council wakes up and pay attention to their constituents for a change. Or, they will pay the consequences if they empower a Board of people who don’t know the rules and the City Attorney will not indemnify them. They could be sued individually.
Kate’s article is extremely well researched and written, and articulates exactly what is happening in University City as well. The City is using our taxpayer dollars to make our communities unlivable. It’s not that City officials aren’t listening to the will of the people; they hear us, but are choosing to do what benefits their own political careers rather than doing what’s best for San Diego’s neighborhoods residents. It’s self-dealing at its worst.
Considering that Joe LaCava is running unopposed and that Stephen Whitburn got 52% of the District 3 vote (including 12,000 more votes than the author of this article) I think it’s incredibly clear that our elected officials ARE listening to their communities.
OB Ted- Absolute power has corrupted absolutely.
Joe LaCava is a real estate lobbyist. See: Alterra
Real life Smithers: Stephen Whitburn has proven his fealty by acting as the the unconscionable, and soulless direct conduit for Wall Street corporate landlord development money into the California Democratic Party.
Joe LaCava & Real life Smithers Stephen Whitburn have proven to San Diego constituents that they are nothing more than office oath violating , insufferable opportunists of all of the Gloria Hole sycophants. And both are completely VOID of any sense of community, nor ANY obligation to San Diegans.
The corrupted, maligned and increasingly despised Central Democratic Committee is the reason these charlatans run unopposed.
“The Party” ‘primaries’ all progressive challengers, motivated citizens, idealists that want to make a difference with impunity. Corrupted Party leadership is precisely what drives voting Democrats FROM “the Party.”
The California Democratic Party’s One Party Rule or what we now refer to as the Neo Banana Republican agenda, has but one singular goal The Politico-Corporate Monopolization of housing with no regard for empathy, and void of any sliver of morality, or decency.
Good! Hillcrest has been dying a slow death for decades. Can’t even get a bike lane in one of the densest parts of town. Change is needed.
Watch out. You might a bunch of “oh poor me my tax dollars are funding unused bike lanes” complaints.
Great article, Kate.
DeToqueville was right! As we are busy working, our city employees and elected representatives are working on agendas that do not necessarily serve the community/communities and result in more habitable neighborhoods. Replacing the Uptown Planners, who have historically been great community activists seems counterproductive. We are replacing human-scale buildings & walkable streetscapeswith super-dense concrete and steel that feels repressive. Are the LaCavas & Whitburns, and their counterparts OK’ing the million dollar consultants? We all need to become more engaged, clearly.