To demonstrate how long advocates have been fighting for a new Ocean Beach Community Plan, a city document intended to guide growth and protect quality of life over the next 20 years, Gio Ingolia simply cast an index finger toward his bald pate.
“When this all started,” said Ingolia, who along with local businesswoman Mindy Pellissier co-chairs a committee that has shepherded the plan since 2002, “I had hair.”
Ingolia’s ability to maintain a sense of humor throughout the 13-year process belies this fact: Even as the plan is scheduled to be heard in August in San Diego by the California Coastal Commission, the entity that has final say over the plan, much uncertainty remains over what the plan will look like and when the plan will finally be approved.
The point was underscored June 3 during a presentation from Karen Bucey, associate planner for the city’s Planning Department, who introduced herself at the monthly meeting of the Ocean Beach Planning Board.
“Our goal is to get the plan approved in August,” said Bucey, the third planner the city has assigned to manage the document in the last two years. “But that’s a best-case scenario. There are still some open issues.”
For the last 11 months, most have assumed approval of the plan, which supporters say would preserve OB’s small-town, beach-community feel and guard against bulky, out-of-scale development, was imminent, and with good reason. Last July 29, with more than 80 OBceans representing eight different community groups on record in support of the plan looking on, the San Diego City Council approved the plan by a 9-0 vote.
It was an especially big victory for supporters because the council voted to include tough-talking language designed to discourage variances to Ocean Beach’s unusually strict land development code – language the San Diego Planning Commission had fought to have stricken.
That language seeks to strengthen and protect what supporters consider the community’s crowning jewel: a restriction known as the .7 FAR rule, which limits the square footage of nearly all residential housing west of Sunset Cliffs Boulevard to 70 percent of lot size, or floor-area ratio, and further requires 25 percent of that amount to be set aside for enclosed parking. Except in Point Loma, the same zoning throughout the rest of San Diego allows 120 percent of FAR.
But even before the City Council’s approval, Coastal Commission staff wrote the city asking for changes in seven areas of the plan. At the time, members of then-District 2 City Councilman Ed Harris’ staff characterized the differences as “nonserious.”
Because of personnel changes at the city’s Planning Department and other reasons, little progress has been made in the ensuing months to resolve the differences. But Bucey said she plans to knuckle down and come to an agreement with the Coastal Commission in time for the August hearing.
“I’m excited to be working on this project,” she said.
Bucey conceded if the city and Coastal Commission cannot resolve their differences before the hearing, things could get messy. The commission would likely defer to its own staff and vote to change the plan per its recommendations. The San Diego City Council would then have to vote on the plan all over again, she said.
The worst-case scenario would be if the City Council did not accept the Coastal Commission’s changes and an impasse would ensue. “We’d have to re-think it entirely,” Bucey said.
She said many of the differences can be resolved through minor changes in city code and the Coastal Commission might be persuaded to approve the plan with a promise to make those changes.
But Pellissier, the Ocean Beach Town Council’s 2014 “Citizen of the Year” for her work on the plan, was concerned. If the Coastal Commission did not accept such a deal, it could take two years to amend city code.
“In the meantime, we’re stuck with the old plan,” said Pellissier, referring to the original 1975 Ocean Beach Precise Plan, the oldest planning document in the city.
“We’d be holding back 98 percent of the plan, so all our work means nothing. That’s hard to take,” she said.
Planning Board Chairman John Ambert told Bucey the community is counting on her to work out the kinks in a transparent manner.
“You’re our knight in shining armor for this,” he said.
A community plan address all aspects of community development including housing, transportation, commercial and industrial development, public facilities and environmental issues, according to the city’s website.
Bucey said she would provide two more monthly updates before the August Coastal Commission hearing. The next OBPB meeting is July 1 at 6 p.m. at the Ocean Beach Recreation Center, 4726 Santa Monica Ave.