Arroyo Grande is now in the process of updating the Land Use Element of its General Plan, but it's going about it cautiously, starting with focus groups, town meetings, and citizen surveys.

"In this environment, where people are starting to see growth again in an area as sensitive to growth as San Luis Obispo County, you want to gauge what people are thinking," said Jim Hamilton, community development director for Arroyo Grande.

Such tiptoeing is especially important in Arroyo Grande, where anti-growth sentiments have been ignited by the City Council’s recent approval of several residential subdivisions, including the 180-home Berry Gardens project, and commercial projects, most notably the Five Cities Town Center, with its Wal-Mart store.

"Wal-Mart colors everything now," Hamilton said.

Local farmers have taken up the slow-growth banner, joining with traditional slow-growth advocates in raising questions about the city’s path and raising development as a campaign issue.

"It’s a big game we’re playing down here, and the stakes are very high," said Ella Honeycutt, an Arroyo Grande farmer and member of the South San Luis Obispo County Resource Conservation District. "They want to turn us into another Orange County."

When Honeycutt says "they" she’s talking about a group that includes Arroyo Grande Mayor Pete Dougall, who she said is pushing development of Arroyo Grande’s last remaining 800 acres of farmland.

Dougall takes issue with such characterizations, saying he doesn’t advocate the development of farmlands but supports the decision of any farmers who decide to grow houses instead of crops.

"If a farmer doesn’t want to farm any longer, he should be able to do what he wants with his property," Dougall said. "Don’t you believe in private property rights?"

Dougall doesn’t believe the politics of growth are healthy for his community, a community that he feels needs to develop a stronger economic base through the development of more clean industry.

"Growth is always an issue, and it’s unfortunate," he said. "It’s a property rights issue. When the economy is good, people want to build houses."

Yet it was the City Council’s openly aggressive approach to growth that council candidate Jim Dickens said drove him to run for the office, especially given his family’s roots as farm owners.

"We are quickly moving into an area where we are going to lose the character of Arroyo Grande itself," he said. "We need to slow down and look at where we’re at before we think about annexations or approving new projects."

While Dougall says the city should be focusing on its development proposals independent of what’s happening around the region, such as the large-scale projects planned for nearby Nipomo, Dickens said the big picture needs to be taken into account.

"We need to take a more regional approach to the growth issue," he said.

Yet such sentiments aren’t stopping Arroyo Grande's biggest development quest yet, an effort to build a 1-million-square-foot business park, a large commercial center, and 100 homes on the south side of town.

"We need a project like Arroyo Linda to help develop those revenue sources," Dougall said.

Cathy Novak, the Morro Bay mayor running against Bianchi for supervisor, earned the pro-growth label in the eyes of some when she vocally supported Hearst Ranch Resorts earlier this year, a stand she has since moderated with support for conservation easements in the project.

"I believe in moderate, planned growth, and my opponent...tends toward a no-growth policy," Novak said. "It’s important that we have some growth."

"We’re not saying there should be no growth," Bianchi said, "but that growth should be within the resource parameters that can sustain it."

She also takes issue with the "growth is good" mindset of pro-development policymakers, citing studies that have shown that most development must be offset by significant developer fees and mitigations in order not to be an economic drain on local government.

"In the wake of Prop. 13 [which limited property taxes], growth doesn’t pay for itself," Bianchi said.

Although the current growth boom has sparked pockets of protest, the unified slow-growth front of the late ’80s–led largely by then-Supervisor David Blakely–is conspicuously absent. But that could change.

"As people start to see their lives change, I think there will be a reaction," Blakely predicted. "As your lifestyle is more and more impacted by these decisions, you’ll become sensitized to the issue."

Watching the political climate since leaving office two years ago, Blakely said he fears what this county will look like if decisionmaking is driven by nothing but economics.

"Cheap ag land is being openly converted by these legislative bodies to facilitate these projects," Blakely said. "But you get what you pay for.... It’s very difficult to stop the growth, but you can encourage the kind of growth and location of growth."

Of course, voters ousted Blakely in favor of Mike Ryan, who didn’t return New Times’ phone calls to discuss the growth issue and why he has come to epitomize the "growth is good" mentality.

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