Encinitas Mayor Blakespear Doesn’t Represent the Majority of Her Constituents
Encinitas Mayor Catherine Blakespear doesn’t believe in or practice representative democracy. She has a personal agenda that conforms with the ultra-progressive views of her party’s left wing. Presumably, she follows that agenda because she’s politically ambitious and wants to grease the wheels.
Blakespear behaves more like a dictator than an elected mayor in a democracy. She gets away with it in many people’s eyes because she has good PR. She has a smiley, outwardly pleasant demeanor. It masks what’s really a destructive agenda that doesn’t reflect the majority view.
Blakespear has an adversarial relationship with most Encinitas residents. She ignores input from residents who disagree with her. She disdains them, speaks to them in a condescending manner and even went so far as to include them as defendants in a city lawsuit.
The sequence that led to the Housing Element Update illustrates Blakespear’s disingenuous behavior. Prop A passed by a narrow margin in a special election on June 18, 2013. Asked for her position on Prop A, Blakespear’s responses varied: She didn’t vote, she couldn’t remember how she voted.
Every Encinitan who was paying attention knew that Measure T would fail the upzone vote required by Prop A. They knew the majority was against mega-development that would violate Prop A’s provisions. Blakespear and the council put Measure T on the ballot anyway. Of course, the voters defeated it.
Despite residents’ showing how the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) affordable housing figures could be met without violating Prop A, Blakespear and the council devised the excessive Measure U and put it on the ballot. It had originally included city-owned site L7, which could have provided 100 percent affordable housing units. In an underhanded move that a more alert Blakespear could have derailed, the council struck site L7 by a 3-2 vote. Blakespear voted against it but later flipped and approved it.
Voters saw Measure U as worse than Measure T and defeated it. The lawsuit against voters with an interest in Prop A — every voter for or against — followed. The purpose was to gut Prop A, which no City Council member past or present has supported. It gets in the way of councils doing whatever they want regarding land use. It puts the power to govern development in the public’s hands rather than the council’s. Since councils have consistently permitted proposed developments and haven’t sought to control heights, they haven’t liked Prop A.
A judge declared that the city’s attempts at a Housing Element were at an impasse. He suspended Prop A for only one housing cycle and let it stand for other land-use proposals. The state Housing and Community Development Department (HCD) eventually approved the Housing Element, which was the defeated Measure U with two minor updates. That and new state laws meant to facilitate and accelerate development opened the door for projects like the 283-unit, 69-foot-tall monstrosity apartment house proposed for Olivenhain. Ironically, when the city raised environmental and traffic study requirements for that project, HCD threatened to withdraw its Housing Element approval.
With one exception noted below, Blakespear has never stood up to fight for residents. For example, she hasn’t challenged the RHNA figures that excessively burden our city while other cities have much smaller numbers, absolutely and proportionally. She has voted to deny every appeal brought before the council by residents opposed to developments that negatively affected their neighborhoods. That includes density bonus projects that cram too many units in too little space. Some blatantly violated reason. One produced more and worse floods than existed before the project. Another had no sidewalks, making it inconsistent with Blakespear’s cherished walkability. Another will surely worsen floods if the lawsuit brought against it fails.
When SANDAG’s Cardiff Coastal Rail Trail was in the offing, Blakespear supported the San Elijo Avenue alignment. The uproar by Cardiff residents was so loud that politician Blakespear saw it wasn’t viable for an elected official to oppose the voters. She switched her support to the Highway 101 alignment and testified well for it. SANDAG began to revise its plan, but then the Coastal Commission mandated the San Elijo alignment. Blakespear switched back and has been celebrating that location for the rail trail since.
Nobody wants bicyclists to crash with cars or trucks. But Blakespear’s actions to grossly inhibit drivers in favor of the tiny percentage of residents who ride bikes are out of balance. To have any effect on climate change, thousands upon thousands of Encinitans would have to switch from cars to bikes for transportation every day. That hasn’t happened and won’t, so imposing on and shaming drivers makes no sense. Incentivizing driving electric cars is more rational and more likely to slow climate change.
Blakespear doesn’t know much about the monumentally stupid Leucadia 101 Streetscape project. That explains the false claims she’s made about it. The project is reliably calculated to cost $55 million. That’s not counting whatever it will cost via eminent domain to buy private property from eight owners to make room for sidewalks and roundabouts. Like other city projects, the cost is bound to rise significantly.
Early on, Streetscape was projected to cost $19 million to be paid principally by SANDAG Transnet taxes. That funding vanished and the cost tripled. The city has applied for a $30 million loan and a $20 million grant. The city can’t issue lease revenue bonds to pay for the project because there’s no revenue that would make that route legitimate. The city can’t issue general obligation bonds because they require an affirmative public vote. The city knows such a vote would fail. Blakespear, her council colleagues and their predecessors have supported and funded the project so far despite the majority of residents’ opposition. If the council didn’t know that, they would do a survey and prove it wrong.
— Doug Fiske
