Sen. Steve Peace has given us a gift in the form of the first ever genuine debate on regional government in San Diego. He has proposed, and is likely to successfully pass through the California State legislature, a radical consolidation and reform of major local government to create what he is terming "RITA," an acronym for Regional Infrastructure and Transportation Authority.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s RITA or JANE (Just Another New Entity). It’s about time. I’m not so concerned about what form the authority takes; I just want it to have clout. Once it passes, and I expect it will, it will become the model for the state. The major urban regions in California may all eventually follow suit.

That is why Peace's battle is not at the state legislative level. He is likely to pass through some version of RITA. Rather, it is the local battle involving what form RITA takes that is more important. Or whose ox is being gored. Many local leaders have weighed in, and I hope in the end a government structure will emerge that has the potential to work.

If regional government doesn’t work here, it can’t work anywhere. This is a single-county region. We have 16 cities and a single county government. It doesn’t get any easier considering the number of overlapping governments in several other regions of urban California. Our local special districts add some complexity, but that’s RITA's strong suit. It would consolidate key agencies dealing with transportation infrastructure. When the dust settles there may no longer be a San Diego Unified Port District, Metropolitan Transit Development Board, North County Transit District, San Diego Association of Governments, Air Pollution Control District or Border Area Infrastructure Financing District.

The new agency should have the muscle to control the direction of critical transportation and infrastructure development. Thus, it would control the direction of the growth of the region.

No Regional Land Use Authority

But there's a rub. Nothing in the proposed legislative language speaks to land use on a regional level. So while key infrastructure decisions would be made, the obvious land use authority may not follow. Peace prefers it this way. He wants the shape of land use authority to be molded through a local debate. Rather than be proscriptive as to how regional land use decisions would be governed, he wants locals to figure it out; to create a stew of our own making.

He's wrong, and here's why: This community has exhibited amazing ineptitude in land use decision-making. Key actions by local authorities have had the cumulative effect of creating a maze of bad results. Too often we have debated whether we should grow, rather than how we are going to accommodate growth.

We have agencies such as the San Diego Economic Development Corp. successfully bringing in new and important businesses that create jobs, which cause growth. The Convention & Visitors Bureau promotes tourism which inevitably brings permanent residents. Local universities matriculate students who want to stay once they graduate (or don’t graduate and just go straight to one of our local tech companies). San Diego’s growth-inducing engine is well oiled.

Yet the local building industry has spent decades working on behalf of its builder members, locked in battle with environmentalists, project-by-project, in endless growth debates. The battles are fought, concessions are made or projects are not built, but almost always without regional issues either debated or understood. Housing prices go up because the process creates lower densities and perennial supply and demand imbalances.

All major land use decisions have outside consequences. For example, the spillover of a major decision on a large project reverberates throughout San Diego County. And that is what is never debated.

Crash And Burn

I have been watching land use decisions in San Diego for parts of four decades. The story is one of promises not kept, of rough and tumble, and resulting disasters. The cities are too parochial. The county is principally only in charge of rural land use. And Sandag, conceptually our regional entity, has a brilliant staff producing great studies, which crash and burn at its board level.

The other obvious problem with not creating regional land use authority is that what is, after all, regional transportation and infrastructure authority, but de facto land use authority? For example, when we build new freeways, their direction and their exits create the pattern of growth. We build new freeways to relieve the congestion of the existing roads, ultimately filling those freeways with cars from the inevitable new communities.

Conversely, when we fail to build those freeways, or do not build the redundant roads in the face of local opposition, we also have made land use decisions, the cumulative effect of which shapes our urban landscape in a negative way.

My Proposal

So, if Sen. Peace is asking, here is what I propose, at least as a first cut:

• A regional land use board serving under the authority of the regional policy board.

All major projects must end up there, but not as another layer of bureaucracy. This would be like an "immediately pass go" card in a Monopoly game. Big projects must be debated relative to their regional impacts and promise, not at the local level, regardless of the community they live in. This involves local communities giving up some land use control, while the regional agency gains authority so that land use issues are debated in their proper, larger context.

• Author a regional land use plan with clout.

This would be the responsibility of the Regional Land Use Board. It should start with the growth projections, which are created by Sandag's staff and are normally close in terms of the aggregate numbers, but critically flawed in how that growth is distributed. This would be the forum to debate how to accommodate growth. Historically, we have swept the issue under the rug. Public discussion about how and where this will happen is necessary. If we want seriously to have a smart growth program in this region, we must start with asking where are people going to live.

A regional system of bonuses and incentives must be created to encourage in-fill development, probably the only way to successfully accommodate the million-plus people (mostly by local births) we will add in the next 20 years. The flip side is that all in-fill decisions, those involving projects within our existing communities, would be free of regional land use approval overlaps. This would be similar to how we treat Downtown redevelopment, only even more aggressive.

Developers go Downtown because that is where the government wants them to go. And now that the market has arrived, they are building fast and furious, to most everyone's delight. This must be repeated in places like Clairemont, North Park, the beach communities, Linda Vista and the urbanized portions of other cities throughout the region. The key is to guarantee that the infrastructure will be improved in these communities (and the dollars be made available) and, if so, local community groups cannot get in the way. Regional interests must be asserted over local parochialism.

While I would like Peace to simply create a regional land use plan requirement along with a regional board, we can accept his challenge. In the coming months local land use organizations, including the San Diego Chapters of the Urban Land Institute, Council of Design Professionals and Lambda Alpha International are together going to make an effort to create a guideline for a regional land use plan and authority.

It’s an exciting time in San Diego. And it is none too soon to get a handle on it all, as San Diego urbanizes and reshapes at a very fast pace.

Gary H. London is president of The London Group Realty Advisors Inc., providing real estate consulting and economic analysis. Check him out on the Web at www.londongroup.com