Carlsbad residents want more open space

A group of Carlsbad residents and environmentalists is trying to hold the city to what they say is a nearly 30-year-old promise to keep 40 percent of its land as open space.

Carlsbad is updating its General Plan, a guide for future development. As the process unfolds residents have complained the city isn’t doing enough to adhere to Proposition E, a 1986 voter-approved initiative designed to manage growth and preserve open space in Carlsbad.

City officials said during a meeting Tuesday that the 40 percent figure was never a promise.

“The 40 percent number was basically an estimate of what the city might have in open space at build-out,” said Steve Jantz, an engineer with the city’s parks and recreation department. “The 40 percent was never a requirement of the growth management plan. It didn’t even appear in the initiative itself.”

While the exact number didn’t appear in the initiative language, it was included in the argument in favor of the proposition, environmentalists say.

Moreover, the city should not only stand by that number but should look to exceed it, said Diane Nygaard, president of Preserve Calavera, a group that promotes open space in North County.

“Your park and open space plan should be ‘aspirational,’” Nygaard said. “I love that word — dream big.”

Open space, as defined by the city, includes preserved habitat, agricultural land, parks, green belts and cultural and educational areas.

Prop. E came as Carlsbad was undergoing a huge increase in development. Alarmed by the growth, city leaders and residents decided to reduce overall density and cap housing at 54,599 units.

The measure was supposed to set aside 15 percent of the city’s developable land as open space. The 15 percent together with the 25 percent of land that was already open space at the time totaled 40 percent — that’s how the estimate came about, officials said.

Today, the city has about 9,400 acres of open space or about 37.7 percent of its total area, officials said. When the city is built out, it could have about 39 percent of its land set aside as open space, said David de Cordova, the city’s principal planner.

Even at today’s 37.7 percent, Carlsbad has more open space than other North County cities, de Cordova said. According to a review of other cities’ general plans, Encinitas has 23 percent set aside as open space; Oceanside, 18 percent; San Marcos, 14 percent; and Vista, 12 percent. The Escondido number is 15.1 percent, according to that city’s planning department.

“Carlsbad is a leader in terms of open space and parks planning,” de Cordova said. “The city is meeting the standards for parks and open space and will continue to do so under the new General Plan.”

The city has 323 acres of park space and plans to add another 120 acres, officials said. The city will have 443 acres of park space when the city is built out at 131,000 residents. That means the city will surpass its standard of three acres or parks per 1,000 residents, 393 acres of park land, by about 50 acres.

But some residents, including many in northwest Carlsbad, say they feel they are being shortchanged because some of their parks include tiny spaces with nothing more than a picnic table and school yards that are only available when schools are not in session.

“All the school yards are locked and there are fences around them,” said Mary Anne Viney, a resident of the Olde Carlsbad neighborhood, who has been asking the city to explore building a park at the abandoned Buena Vista Reservoir.

City officials say about 10 percent of the city’s park space is made up of school yards, which under agreements with the school districts, are supposed to be available to the public when classes are not in session.

Mayor Matt Hall said parks are expensive to build and maintain, pointing out that the recently opened Alga Norte Park cost about $40 million to build. He said that if the city wants to build more parks it first has to figure out how to pay for them.

Hall added that whether the city is able to meet the 40 percent open space promise matters little because of the high quality of the parks the city is building.

“I see the bright side of it,” Hall said. “We’re at 37 (percent) or at the end of the day we may get 39 percent. My feeling is we are going to be so close to 40 percent and we are going to have parks that no one else has in North County, or probably in San Diego County, to be proud of.”

For more information about the General Plan update visit, www.carlsbadca.gov/envision.