SAN DIEGO COUNCIL BACKS CONSERVATION `JEWEL' PLAN.

Byline: B. Drummond Ayres Jr. The New York Times

After squabbling and negotiating for the better part of a decade over where to build and where not to build, preservationists and developers have finally come up with a nature conservation plan for San Diego that is so revolutionary it is being called called a possible national model.

Under the plan, which received unanimous approval last week from the San Diego City Council, and is expected to win the approval of neighboring communities, specific undeveloped sections of land will be acquired and permanently set aside for protected natural habitat, while other open land will be set aside for unrestricted development.

The tradeoff sounds simple enough. It is not.

Few places anywhere are under more development pressure than this southwestern corner of the United States. Sometimes, it seems, so many people want to move here that the whole state of California might tip into the sea.

They come for the sun and the dry air and, of course, the sea. But as they settle in to their cliff-side mansions, pastel condos and tile-roofed tract houses, they grind into the arid ground, or conversely uproot, one of the richest and most diverse collections of plant and animal life found anywhere. Dozens of species are on the verge of extinction.

The hope now is that the new conservation plan will hit the right compromise between settlers and Mother Nature.

The promise of a special set-aside for a natural habitat induced preservationists to support the plan, because they saw in the future land acquisitions an opportunity to halt, in certain places, encroachment by developers. As much as possible, the land to be set aside will be contiguous.

The prospect of other land being zoned, in effect, for unrestricted development induced developers to go along.

``It's an enormous change from what we've had up until now,'' Mayor Susan Golding said of the plan, which was approved on Tuesday.

More than six years of negotiating went into writing the plan, with not only local officials, preservationists and developers taking part, but also their counterparts on the state and federal levels. All saw the plan as having the potential to balance development and preservation needs not only in the San Diego area but also elsewhere in Southern California and in the rest of the country, should it be adopted as a national model.

Among its supporters are Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, as well as Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island and Sen. Dirk Kempthorne of Idaho, Republicans who head congressional committees considering national legislation along the lines of the San Diego plan.

Babbitt hailed the plan as ``the jewel of habitat conservation plans'' and predicted that it would have ``important national implications.''

Some other Southern California communities between Mexico and Los Angeles are already talking about following San Diego's example, providing they can work out ways to finance the acquisition of land to be set aside for preservation.

No final figure was set on what the plan would cost, although officials initially estimated it might cost the city more than $60 million to acquire as many as 2,400 acres for preservation.

Officials did not offer a figure on the amount of land that could be developed free from environmental regulations. Should other communities in the region join in the plan, the officials said, the total cost could surpass $350 million for about 27,000 acres of undeveloped land.

The federal government and the state have promised major financial help in acquiring the land. Also, much of the land proposed for preservation is already owned by the federal and state governments. In addition, some developers have agreed to donate some of their land for preservation in return for the lifting of all development restrictions on other parcels they own.

When the City Council asked, before voting, for citizens' comments, Oliver Rider, a San Diego biologist, said that not only would the entire country stand to benefit from the San Diego plan's adoption but ``the whole future will benefit.''

But there was also serious opposition, particularly from people concerned about property rights.

``Property owners who want to get something out of their land will have to hold their noses and swallow the poison,'' said Linda Wall, a San Diego landowner.

The ``poison,'' Wall said, would be the city's decision on how much to offer landowners for the areas designated to remain natural. She predicted that the city would invariably offer less than true market value.

Mayor Golding responded with an angry edge in her voice, ``Property will always be assessed at fair market value.''