Now here's an idea worthy of debate: The County Board of Supervisors should put up for sale all county-owned land. You read it right.

Unbelievably, while we've been sleeping, government entities have come to own 59 percent of San Diego County. This is indefensible. This land should be rezoned for the highest and best use and then sold to the highest bidder. The county can then reap annual property taxes for the benefit of everyone living here.

From 1800 until 1976 it was the federal government's policy to get as much land as possible into private ownership. Why private ownership? Just compare the public toilets at the beach to those in your home. Look at the litter on our freeways or on the Mount Whitney public trail left for park rangers to pick up. When the government owns something, everyone owns it and when everyone owns it no one does, and so there's little motivation to use it efficiently.

Why do you think the U.S. Postal Service is paying the private company FedEx $7 billion to deliver its "First Class" packages? Private ownership creates incentives for wise use, conservation and innovation in order to increase future value (and profits).

Rezoning to highest and best use may seem radical, but not nearly as radical as the land use policies in Houston. Its residents have voted against any zoning three times, making Houston America's fourth most desired city based on size. Some Houston residents claimed its land use policies have enabled it to avoid the slums of Dallas, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Chicago and St. Louis. San Diego's slums in East Village could not be redeveloped until the area was up-zoned to meet long dormant free-market demand for high-density residential. Incidentally, Houston enjoys an employment rate 30 percent greater than San Diego's.

County Supervisor Ron Roberts as a planning commission chairman in 1985 said, "Things have gotten so complicated that it's impossible to know it all." He could have been talking about planning in the former Soviet Union, Red China or North Korea, but was not. Ostensibly, he was talking about San Diego and acknowledging that comprehensive planning is impossible (particularly 20 years into the future).

As the brilliant economist Ludwig von Mises has written, "Planning is the antithesis of free enterprise and private ownership ... Planning and capitalism are utterly incompatible."

The county's new General Plan, 2,370 pages long, is unfathomable to anyone except those who drafted it. This became obvious from public testimony during recent hearings. This new "Plan" reminds one of Congress's new health care bill, "We've got to pass so we'll know what's in it." When something is designed to overwhelm both elected officials and the public it's flat out undemocratic.

The county's General Plan purportedly is a compromise among thousands of property owners. A compromise that tells people where they must live but don't want to live and prevents them from living where they want to live. The "Overview" stipulates that "Compared to the existing General Plan, this update reduces housing capacity by 15 percent and shifts 20 percent of future growth from eastern backcountry to western communities," a clear redistribution of wealth from eastern landowners to western.

To regulate and rob property owners of 20 percent of their land use is economically no different than physically taking 20 percent of their land without compensation. Even worse, some parts of the plan will result in some owners losing over 80 percent of the use of their land.

For the 3,560 square miles within the county's unincorporated area the most costly aspect of this experiment using data unintentionally disclosed -- is it will result in an estimated $400 million to $2 billion loss to rural landowners depending on which county consultant's report you use. The second most costly aspect is the reduction in the county property tax base by up to $2 billion.

A record number of people testified at two recent General Plan hearings in opposition to any downzoning of their land, some of which has been in their families for over 100 years. The few who favored more restrictions and downzoning imagine "they" should dictate how their neighbor's land can be used, or more to the point, why their neighbors should not be able to use their land as presently allowed. They beseeched the county supervisors to assassinate the long held property rights of their neighbors claiming we need much more open space.

What about open space? For the record:

1. John Kenneth Galbraith has noted, "The public lands of the United States (totaling 650 million acres) exceed the combined areas of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Hungary and Albania."

2. Of these 650 million acres the U.S. Bureau of Land Management owns 258 million acres.

3. The U.S. Forest Service owns 193 million acres, more land than comprises the entire country of France with its 134 million acres.

4. U.S. Fish & Wildlife owns 87 million acres, more land than Great Britain's 60 million acres.

5. The National Park Service owns 76,571,000 acres, more than the size of Holland, Switzerland, Israel and Armenia together.6

6. In San Diego what the government owns or categorizes as open space amounts to 59 percent of the unincorporated area. How much is enough, 80 percent, 90 percent, 100 percent?

It's time for the supervisors to adopt a bold new direction -- rezone all its land for the "highest and best use" and adopt a General Plan for selling it. Next, rezone all the existing private land for the highest and best use -- determined by buyers and sellers through their decisions to buy or not buy. This would constitute a free market economic democracy where every dollar spent represents a vote cast for what their constituents are willing to pay for -- with their own money.
 

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                                Schnaubelt, president of Citizens for Private Property Rights, has been a commercial real estate broker
                         for 39 years and was a San Diego city councilman from 1977-81.  

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