Posted by: Zelda Bronstein - November 29, 2016 - 9:04am
New regional plan, adopted with little public input, pushes massive growth for San Francisco -- with no promise of money for transit or social equity.
It’s hard not to be riveted by the terrifying advance of Donald Trump’s presidency. But it would be a huge mistake to ignore less sensational exercises in autocracy, especially those occurring at home. One such operation, which has gone virtually unnoticed, is the continuing travesty of democratic governance known as Plan Bay Area.
Mandated by SB 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008, Plan Bay Area is our nine-county region’s Sustainable Community Strategy—a so-called blueprint that knits together transportation and land use plans and investments for each region in California so as to accommodate the area’s projected growth of jobs and households and at the same time meet its official greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets.
Unelected officials run the show
Plan Bay Area’s autocratic character is rooted in the un-democratic governance of the regional agencies under whose aegis it proceeds, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the Association of Bay Area Governments. Both entities are putatively overseen by unelected officials—to be precise, elected officials (mayors, city councilmembers, and county supervisors) who were not elected to serve on MTC or the ABAG Executive Board. It follows that when they run for office or re-election, their positions on Plan Bay Area and the regional agencies’ other projects never come up.
Scott Wiener sits on MTC, and Jane Kim is on the ABAG Executive Board, but during their hotly contested campaigns for state senate, nobody asked about MTC’s hostile takeover of ABAG last May (Wiener supported it—vociferously, accusing opponents of “throwing rocks at MTC”; Kim was absent for the Ex. Board’s May 19 vote on the matter) or their positions on Plan Bay Area’s gigantic growth forecasts and allocations for San Francisco and the 11th State Senate District, and its implications for displacement and housing affordability or local control of development.
Augmenting the democratic deficit, both MTC and ABAG are effectively led by staff, not their governing boards, whose members have no staff of their own, and whose obligations to their local jurisdictions in any case preclude their delving into the copious details of regional policy. Since MTC’s coup, ABAG staff report to MTC’s peremptory executive director, Steve Heminger.
After a stormy public planning process, the first edition of Plan Bay Area was approved by MTC and ABAG in July 2013. State law requires each Sustainable Community Strategy to be updated every four years. Plan Bay Area is well into its first quadrennial update. On November 17, following a perfunctory deliberation, MTC and the ABAG Executive Board approved a Final Preferred Scenario and Investment Strategy that will serve as the conceptual template for the update. The fully realized blueprint-cum-Environmental Impact Report is to be finalized next summer or fall.
A farcical public process
Plan Bay Area’s autocratic character is exacerbated by its superficial public planning process. Compared to the public process that culminated in Plan Bay Area 2013, the update proceedings have been uncontentious. That’s because most of the individuals who participated in the first round haven’t shown up for the second one—for a good reason: they’ve realized that the meetings are a time-consuming sham that exist only because SB 375 requires some form of public outreach. No meaningful input could possibly emerge out of the cursory, often infantilizing, staff-dominated activities that the regional agencies peddle online and at their workshops and open houses.
The only members of the public who’ve continued to participate are those who are paid to do so: representatives of the non-profits that weighed in on round one. This motley crew includes equity and housing advocates (Urban Habitat, Working Partnerships USA, Public Advocates, Non-profit Housing Association of Northern California, 6 Wins for Social Equity Network), environmental organizations (Greenbelt Alliance, the Sierra Club), transit promoters (TransForm), and lobbyists for big business and big property capital (SPUR, the Bay Area Council, the Building Industry Association, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group).
Their considerable political differences notwithstanding, these organizations have two things in common: they all accept Plan Bay Area’s growth-to-the-max premise; and, however righteous their missions and valuable their work, they’re all private entities that are ultimately accountable to their donors and their boards of directors, rather than to any public electorate.
The planning process is also rushed. (see Article in the Marin Post HERE )
Posted by: Zelda Bronstein - May 28, 2017 - 10:24pm
June 2nd is the final day in this session for the State Senate to pass bills that originated in that house. Berkeley’s state senator, Nancy Skinner, has supported or sponsored three dangerous bills that will be considered by next Friday. Two - SB 35 and SB 167 - have dire consequences for every city in California. The third, SB 595, enhances the power of the Bay Area's inept and unaccountable transportation planning agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission ("MTC").
SB 35 (Wiener)
SB 595, (Beall)
and Skinner’s own SB 167, the BARFer bill.
SB 35: Housing Accountability and Affordability Act (Wiener)
SB 35, the brainchild of San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener, would force cities that haven’t met all their state-mandated Regional Housing Need Allocations ("RHNA") to give by-right approval to infill market-rate housing projects with as little as 10% officially affordable housing.
SB 35 is anti-free speech and civic engagement. No public hearings, no environmental review, no negotiation over community benefits. Just “ministerial,” i.e., over-the-counter- approval.
SB 35 is pro-gentrification. As a statewide coalition of affordable housing advocacy organizations has written:
Since almost no local jurisdiction in the State of California meets 100% of its market rate RHNA goal on a sustained basis, this bill essentially ensures by-right approval for market-rate projects simply by complying with a local inclusionary requirement [for affordable housing] or by building 10% affordable units.
The practical result is that all market rate infill development in most every city in California will be eligible for by-right approval per this SB 35-proposed State law pre-emption.
And as Berkeley Housing Commissioner Thomas Lord has pointed out, the RHNA program itself is a pro-gentrification policy. It follows that the passage of SB 35 would further inflate real estate values and worsen the displacement of economically vulnerable California residents.
SB 35 is pro-traffic congestion. It would prohibit cities from requiring parking in a “streamlined development approved pursuant” to SB 35, located within a half-mile of public transit, in an architecturally and historically significant historic district, when on-street parking permits are required but not offered to the occupants of the project, and when there is a car share vehicle located within one block of the development. Other projects approved under the measure would be limited to one space per unit.
Absent the provision of ample new public transit, the prohibition of parking in new development will worsen neighborhood traffic problems. SB 35 says nothing about new transit.
The construction of on-site parking is expensive, up to $50,000 a space. A measure that exempts new development, as designated above, from including parking without requiring developers to transfer the savings to affordable housing is a giveaway to the real estate industry.
Nor does SB 35 say anything about funding the amount of infrastructure and local services—fire and police, schools, parks—that would be required by the massive amount of development it mandates.
Are local jurisdictions expected to foot the bill?
The lineup of SB 35’s supporters and opponents reveals serious splits in the state’s environmental protection and affordable housing advocates.
Supporters include Bay Area Council, the lobby shop of the Bay Area’s biggest employers; BAC’s Silicon Valley counterpart, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group; the San Francisco and LA Chambers of Commerce; the Council of Infill Builders; several nonprofit housing organizations, including the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California and BRIDGE Housing; the Natural Resources Defense Council; the California League of Conservation Voters; and a panoply of YIMBY groups, including East Bay Forward and YIMBY Action.
Opponents include the Sierra Club; the League of California Cities; the Council of Community Housing Organizations; the California Fire Chiefs Association; the Fire Districts Association of California; a handful of cities, including Hayward, Pasadena, and Santa Rosa; the Marin County Council of Mayors and Councilmembers; and many building trades organizations, including IBEW Locals 1245, 18, 465 and 551, and the Western States Council of Sheet Metal Workers.
SB 595: Metropolitan Transportation Commission: toll bridge revenues (Beall)
State Senator Jim Beall’s SB 595 would authorize MTC to place on a November 2018 ballot, a regional measure to raise tolls on all Bay Area bridge except the Golden Gate, “to be used for unspecified projects and programs” vaguely specified as “improvements in the bridge corridors.” As a fee, rather than a tax, the measure would need only a simple majority to pass.
The exact amount of the increase has not been specified. MTC has indicated it will seek a $1-3 raise. That would jack up the price of driving west on the Bay Bridge at most times of the day (5 to 10 am and 3 to 7 pm) from $6 to $9. A $3-dollar increase in bridge tolls would raise an estimated $5 billion.
How can elected officials in good conscience vote for a bill to raise bridge tolls that doesn’t specify the amount of the increase?
A bigger concern is MTC’s disastrous fiscal history. In 2011, the agency lost $120 million in bridge tolls after a bond-credit swap (think The Big Short) went bad. Its new palace on Beale Street in San Francisco had 50%—$80 million—in cost overruns. And then there’s the new Bay Bridge, a fiscal and engineering fiasco in whose “oversight” MTC played a major role.
Bay Area public transportation is in desperate need of improvement, but giving an unelected rogue agency billions of new dollars to play with, is asking for (more) big trouble. Instead, the state legislature ought to be considering how to make the governance of our region’s transportation fiscally responsible—a new state audit of MTC is long overdue—and democratically accountable.
SB 595 has one supporter, MTC, and no opposition.
SB 167: Housing Accountability Act (Skinner)
This bill, sponsored by the Bay Area Renters Federation ("BARF"), is a companion to SB 35. It would prohibit cities from disapproving a housing project containing units affordable to very low-, low- or moderate-income renters, or conditioning the approval in a manner that renders the project financially infeasible, unless, among other things, the city has met or exceeded its share of regional housing needs for the relevant income category. (As of November 2016, HUD defined a moderate-income household of four people in Alameda County as one earning under $112,300 a year.)
The bill defines a “feasible” project as one that is “capable of being accomplished in a successful manner within a reasonable period of time, taking into account economic environmental, social, and technological factors.” It does not define “successful” or “reasonable.”
If a city does disapprove such a project, it is liable to a minimum fine of $1,000 per unit of the housing development project, plus punitive damages, if a court finds that the local jurisdiction acted in bad faith.
SB 167 authorizes the project applicant, a person who would be eligible to apply for residency in the development or emergency shelter, or a housing organization, to sue the jurisdiction to enforce SB 167’s provisions. The bill defines a housing organization as
a trade of industry group whose local members are primarily engage in the construction or management of housing units or a nonprofit organization whose mission includes providing or advocating for increased access to housing for low-income households and have filed written or oral comments with the local agency prior to action on the housing development project. [Emphasis added]
The reference to "the nonprofit organization" was added to the existing Housing Accountability Act to encompass BARF’s legal arm, the California Renters Legal Advocacy and Education Fund ("CaRLA"), whose lawsuit of Lafayette recently failed. Last week CaRLA re-instituted its lawsuit of Berkeley over the city’s rejection of a project at 1310 Haskell.
SB 167 further amends the existing Housing Accountability Act to entitle successful plaintiffs to “reasonable attorney’s fees and costs.”
Predictably, the bill is supported by the Bay Area Council, the lobby shop for the region’s largest employers; the California Building Industry Association; the Terner Center at UC Berkeley; the San Francisco Housing Action Coalition; and YIMBY groups, including East Bay Forward, Abundant Housing LA, and of course CaRLA.
Opponents include the California Association of Counties and the American Planning Association.
Nancy Skinner styles herself as a progressive. Her support for SB 35, SB 595, and her sponsorship of SB 167 shows that she’s just another real estate Democrat carrying water for the building industry and its YIMBY stooges, and the profligate autocrats at MTC. Her constituents in Berkeley, Richmond, and other East Bay Cities should urge her to change course and walk her talk.
And, throughout California, voters should contact their state senators and tell them to oppose SB 35, SB 595 and SB 167.
Posted by: Mimi Willard - May 8, 2016 - 6:07pm
In an anti-establishment election year, voters should ask what our incumbent supervisors and career politicians are doing for US.
Campaign filings show our current supervisors are beholden to special interest money and the Establishment political cabal, which together can account for the majority of the money flowing to a reelection campaign.
Bad decisions result from these unfortunate allegiances.
Per Dick Spotswood, $20 million was spent on a single bike bridge over Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.
Ross Valley residents now face the prospect of an $18 million Sir Francis Drake “improvement” project, which Supervisor Rice promotes. Drake will be dug up for 2-3 years to implement changes designed to permanently slow traffic on this already-clogged, vital arterial.
Ghilotti Construction, which did much of the work for the bike bridge and will likely bid for the Drake project, has been a major contributor to Supervisors Rice, Arnold and Kinsey. Rice received $3,000 from Ghilotti so far this year.
Other big donors to incumbent supervisors are regional unions and political action committees representing construction workers, building trades, machinists, sheet metal workers, and carpenters. The construction industry is particularly keen on Rice, contributing generously and repeatedly to her “campaign” regardless of whether an election is near. Supervisor Sears also accepts construction industry money.
Is it any surprise our Supervisors greenlighted construction of four times the high density housing units mandated by regional agencies?
In approving that unpopular, bloated housing element, our Supervisors alsoviolated the Brown Act’s requirements for proper public notice and hearing process.
Unions representing Marin’s public employees, transit workers, firefighters and deputy sheriffs also contribute heavily to incumbents. Supervisors must approve any changes to public employees’ compensation, benefits, and pensions. Mushrooming compensation costs and a huge unfunded pension liability mean the county can’t maintain services and infrastructure without add-on taxes and fees that make Marin unaffordable. Yet our supervisors unanimously rejected a Grand Jury report calling for greater transparency in employee contract negotiations.
Other parties vying for contracts awarded by supervisors also help fund campaigns. These include civil engineers and consultants; refuse companies; landscape contractors; transit, ambulance, and health care companies. Many contracts are awarded or re-upped without competitive bids.
Supervisors recently bestowed Marin Sanitary, a generous contributor to several of their campaigns, a 6% rate hike payable by unincorporated area residents.
Stetson Engineers donated multiple times to Rice. The Board of Supervisors has so far awarded Stetson $650,000 in contracts for consulting services related to Ross Valley flood control planning. Despite total consultant spending of $2.5-5 million to date, the county hasn’t moved a single shovel of dirt and is not close to having an acceptable flood control plan.
In Sleepy Hollow, Rice’s neighborhood, homeowners will soon enjoy a new private clubhouse, thanks to the supervisors approving a $25,000 “grant” from their slush fund plus a $2+ million transfer of public funds toward its construction.
Roughly two dozen of the clubhouse’s financial supporters donated heavily to Rice’s campaign coffers.
It’s rare (if ever) that a supervisor recuses him or herself from votes like those above.
Rice stridently rebuffed calls to recuse herself from the Sleepy Hollow Clubhouse vote.
Constituents wonder: “Who represents US?”
Equally troubling is how our Supervisors cater to the Establishment’s crony cabal. A lot of Rice’s funds come from current, past, and wanna-be members of Marin’s political class. Some serve at the supervisors’ pleasure. Some are undoubtedly friends. And some say a contribution (and endorsement) is what it takes to ensure the county takes care of constituents’ needs. The latter is particularly disturbing.
Bad stuff also happens when political allegiance trumps the voters’ interests.
When Larkspur considered approving massive new development at Larkspur Landing (opposed by Rice’s challenger, Kevin Haroff) that would have paralyzed traffic in her district, Supervisor Rice declined to intervene, citing a tradition of deferring to local control. (Conversely, when San Anselmo’s leaders proposed turning Memorial Park into a flood detention basin, Rice vainly endorsed her allies’ unpopular project in a letter to the editor of the Marin IJ.)
When you receive the current supervisors’ campaign mailings, question whether the long list of cross-endorsements serves YOUR interests.
Much that we hold dear about Marin is at stake. Returning Marin’s career politicians to office solves nothing. We need new leadership.
The June 7 election provides a chance to vote for positive change.
