The prospects for preserving Downtown San Diego as the Central Business District look better today than in May. Then the advisory committee working on a new Centre City Community Plan seemed whimpy when it came to designating “employment lands” for office development.

The so-called “first cut” of a preferred plan from the committee now proposes a range of 14.0 million to 20.4 million square feet of new office development by 2025, while the earlier three alternative plans ranged from as little as 8.3 million and only as much as 13.9 million square feet.

Currently, the CBD only hosts 13.6 million square feet of office space, with about 15 percent of that occupied by governments, not a lot left over for private enterprises, big businesses but mostly small, especially when one ponders the astonishing addition of 56 million square feet of office and industrial space in San Diego’s suburbs in the last 10 years alone. During the last 12 years, not one square foot of new office space was built Downtown, an unprecedented period of commercial stagnation.

Of course, the spectacular rise of condominiums and apartments in this same period masked the lack of commercial activity. And yes, Downtown’s office market was glutted and the economy was hurting when One America Plaza, the last new office tower in Downtown, opened its doors in 1991. But vacancy is nil now in Class A space, and finally, Rob Lankford looks ready to break ground on Broadway 655, with only 356,000 square feet of office space, still the first office tower of the 21st century, with Cisterra Partners planning to follow next year with 300,000 square feet next to Petco Park.

What Downtown needs in the next few years is 3.56 million square feet of new office space, not 356,000.

There’s still much to be done Downtown because there’s great danger to San Diegans’ ability to move on their freeways if University City or Sorrento Mesa or Poway or Carlsbad were to emerge in the next 20 years as the true CBD. More freeways, trolley routes, buses, streets, planes and boats converge on Downtown San Diego, after all, and the region’s greatest stock of affordable housing is still south of Interstate 8.

1. The Centre City Development Corp. must hold Nat Bosa to Catellus’ plan to develop 831,872 square feet of office space at Broadway and Pacific Highway, or something like it, and not turn this commercial gateway into condominiums as he’s done on the remainder of the former railroad property.

Currently, Bosa is exploring how he might produce only 100,000 square feet on one side of Broadway and 200,000 on the other. He’s a residential hero of 92101, for sure, but he’s also profited handsomely by limiting employment lands. “Those two anchor parcels on the north and south of Broadway are probably two of the best office parcels in Downtown, and nobody has told us they won’t be office,” says CCDC President Peter Hall. Nobody should.

2. The stakeholders, meeting Oct. 14 at the Downtown Partnership offices, need to toss out their timid intentions to develop a measly $200,000 or so marketing plan for business recruitment to Downtown. Two years ago, the San Diego Metropolitan and NBC San Diego submitted a $975,000-a-year marketing proposal to the Partnership, which then advised it only was looking to spend about $100,000, which has gone mostly unexecuted. The Metro/NBC proposal, which included advertising in the Orange County Register, North County Times, Union-Tribune, Business Journal, Daily Transcript, on radio, and in state and national media, left relatively little for the proposers, frankly.

It included trained Downtown Partnership employees with new marketing material and videos in hand, routinely prospecting suburban employers and suburban trade shows — the way the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. prospects throughout California and elsewhere for relocations to San Diego County. It included timetables for performance, specific goals of square footage absorption year after year, even a pledge that Caltrans would open its new District 11 headquarters in Downtown by 2005. CCDC Director Julie Dillon says such a proposal, which she’s never read, would be “DOA” if submitted again Oct. 14 because the $975,000 is an impossible sum. We say, develop a least-expensive but very detailed ambition to get the job done — moving hundreds of square feet of office tenants into Downtown annually — and your fund raising will become logical and less daunting.

3. In a “second cut” or final draft of the Centre City community plan update that goes to the CCDC board and then to the San Diego City Council in 2004, the goal for office space on employment lands needs to be firmed up at no less than 20 million square feet of new development. The high end of residential is necessary, too, calling for 34,500 more condos and apartments than the 11,600 units already existing and the 8,600 already in the pipeline. But it’s the office space that planners were in danger of short-changing just a few months ago.

If Oceanside and Carlsbad, Poway and Rancho Bernardo, Del Mar Heights and University City, Chula Vista and Otay Mesa can throw up 56 million square feet of workspace in the last 10 years, with nothing added to the Downtown inventory in the last 12 years, San Diego’s Central Business District can and should absorb its rightful share in the coming decades. If San Diego cannot stop suburban sprawl and freeway congestion in other cities, at least it can create an environment in its bayfront inner city where workspace logically belongs.

4. As for the FAA’s 500-foot height limit over the southeastern reaches of East Village, the same height limit imposed a mile to the northwest closer to Lindbergh Field, the time is now to raise that limit. Stacking 25 stories of condos on top of 25 stories of offices makes fine sense. Better here than sprawling to Ramona.