CARLSBAD -- Before Jeff Segall bought his two-story, Spanish-style home in Carlsbad's Aviara neighborhood, he took a measuring tape to the garage doors to make certain that if he ever bought a sport utility vehicle bigger than his Ford Explorer, it would fit inside.

But he miscalculated -- "I forgot about the mirrors," he said Friday.

His frustrations with squeezing an Acura MDX into his garage -- and his neighbors' bigger struggle with a Suburban -- have led Segall to push Carlsbad to require that garage doors be at least 9-feet wide. It's a topic the city's Planning Commission will consider Wednesday.

The industry standard is an 8-feet wide door for a single-car garage.

For two-car garages, the kind most prevalent in North County, developers typically install a 16-foot door that's used by both vehicles. However, Segall lives in Carlsbad's tony Aviara, where some two-car garages have an architectural detail that require separate doors, each 8-feet wide.

City officials say they've encouraged that design as a way to make garage areas more visually interesting. The trouble is, it doesn't accommodate the modern sport utility vehicle, Segall said.

Commissioners initially debated the garage door topic in January when Segall was on the panel. He has since stepped down.

The issue will make a return appearance next week so that city staff members can gain a little more direction on how to rework Carlsbad's existing building standards, the city's planning director, Don Neu, said Friday.

Among the unsettled issues is whether the requirement would apply to older homes when they are renovated, as well as to new construction, he said.

Any change would ultimately need approval by the City Council.

The garage door proposal has its opponents. The Building Industry Association of San Diego County, a lobbying group for the construction industry representing some 1,400 member companies, has said it doesn't like the idea.

Association officials couldn't be reached for comment Friday, but in a letter to the city, the group's public policy advocate, Scott Molloy, wrote that requiring wider doors would limit builders' flexibility.

Wider doors make it difficult to make a garage area visually interesting and might even cause problems for the overall design of a home, he wrote. He said builders already know garage door width can be a problem.

"Builders are already adapting to the issue of garage doors by either offering a wider door where possible or notifying buyers of the size limitations of their garage doors," he added, calling it the "most appropriate way" to handle the situation.

Carlsbad doesn't technically have a mandated width for garage doors, the city's planning director said. The city has standards for the inside of a garage -- a two-car garage must be at least 20 feet by 20 feet.

"The idea is once you get (into the garage), you have room to open the doors of the car," Neu said.

But there's no requirement on the width of a garage door. In fact, the city has encouraged the builders to put two 8-foot-wide doors on a two-car garage to improve the look of the garage area, he said.

How often developers use this style depends on the type of homes they're building -- some styles, say Spanish-influenced, may lend themselves to the two-door treatment, he said. However, the majority of new homes tend to have the single, 16-foot doors, he said.

Guy Oliver, a project manager for Corky McMillin Cos. handling part of Carlsbad's 1,112-home Robertson Ranch project along El Camino Real, said most of the homes in that development will have 16-foot-wide garage doors. Only 20 won't, he said.

He added that his company doesn't see the proposed width change as a big issue, but it is supportive of the stand that the building association has taken. It offers the company more flexibility, he said.

Meanwhile, Planning Commission Chairwoman Julie Baker said Friday that she's not sure what position she's going to take on the issue, adding that she will review the staff report this weekend.

"On the surface, it looks like a no-brainer," but there are other factors to consider, she said.

Baker said she won't support the change if it means compromising on the city's requirements to make garage areas look visually interesting. However, she's well aware that some large SUVs won't fit through an 8-foot garage door.

"My husband has a (Chevy) Tahoe and he has to fold the mirrors down to get it in," she said.

Folding the mirrors works to get a vehicle in a garage, but it makes backing out difficult, former Commissioner Segall said.

He demonstrated the difficulties Friday morning with his brother-in-law's Cadillac Escalade. The fully opened driver's side mirror touched one wall of his garage, and the partially folded-in passenger's side mirror was less than a half-inch from the other wall.

Though some folks might argue that people who buy big cars need to pay the price of their decision, Segall said he thinks the city needs to acknowledge that many of its residents have garage door troubles.

"All you have to do is go to Costco or a local school, and three-quarters of the vehicles are these larger vehicles, so it seems to me it's inherently obvious that it's a problem," he said.

Contact staff writer Barbara Henry at (760) 901-4072 or bhenry@nctimes.com.